In Defense of Handwavium
Don't dismiss it out of hand.
Handwavium is a, usually derisive, literary term used in science fiction. Or rather, in the literary criticism of science fiction. Handwavium is a cobbled-together word, evoking an old magician’s technique of distracting the audience from the sleight-of-hand by waving the other hand to draw eyes away from the real action. Affixing the label of handwavium to a story taints it with a vaguely illegitimate aroma, right off the bat.
And, to be honest, if hands are being waved, there’s often something which probably won’t bear close scrutiny. In the case of science fiction, that means that the author is playing fast and loose with the laws of physics. The most obvious example is faster-than-light travel. Space is big, bigger than our monkey brains can really grasp. It takes light hours to cross our neighborhood, the solar system, and years to reach the next nearest star, Alpha Centauri, more than four light years (26 trillion miles) distant. And, at this point in time, we can only dream of revving a spacecraft up to even a few percent of the speed of light. So, rigorous adherence to the rules, as we currently understand them, makes for some pretty long-term plot lines.
As a result, it is generally understood within the science fiction genre that it’s acceptable to utilize a faster-than-light drive of some sort, just to make things more interesting. That could be a warp drive, or a hyperdrive, or a wormhole, or some other flavor of handwavium. This makes stories of interstellar scope not just possible, but politically and economically practical. Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Dune, the Foundation series, and a host of other works just wouldn’t be possible without it.
Handwavium isn’t confined to transportation. Time travel, besides unlocking a pandora’s box of paradoxes, is built upon shaky scientific ground, to say the least. I mean, we all travel through time every minute of our lives. But, as far as we know, time is a one-way street, with a strictly enforced speed limit. We can’t even pull over to smell the temporal roses, so to speak. That didn’t dissuade H.G. Wells from writing The Time Machine, or Irwin Allen from producing The Time Tunnel. Critical comparison of the two is best left for another time.
A notable example of handwavium comes from the movie The Core, where an expedition to the Earth’s interior must be mounted to restart the core’s rotation. What makes this possible is a craft constructed of “unobtanium,” a material which grows stronger as more pressure is applied, and generates electricity to boot. The name unobtanium is a clear nod to the fact that this material doesn’t exist. And, The Core isn’t a bad flick, if you can whistle your way past the indestructible, laser-armed, ship that burrows through molten rock at highway speeds.
And then there are the aliens. Frankly, aliens, whenever and wherever we eventually run in to them (if we ever do), are more than likely going to be very, very different from us. We may not even realize they’re actually intelligent beings, until after we’ve accidentally massacred a bunch of them. Or they might consider us too primitive to bother with. Look up the Horta, from Star Trek, or the Zoo Hypothesis. What’s more, how do you talk with aliens, who may communicate in sound frequencies beyond our audible range, or light wavelengths beyond our visible spectrum? Or in ways we can’t even conceive?
The real reason that the aliens on the Star Trek show looked, and acted, a lot like us, was that make-up is expensive. If you can just slap some pointy ears or forehead ridges on an actor and call them an alien, that did the job. In the days before CGI, this was state-of-the-art special effects. And, story lines do more easily appeal to an audience if the aliens aren’t too different from us. Most people just won’t invest the effort it takes to puzzle through what motivates other sentient species. It’s like layering a mystery onto your plot. Which can be interesting, but takes a lot more work.
The original writers of Star Trek explained the prevalence of human-adjacent aliens by parallel evolution. Granted, a later-series story-line attributed this situation to an ancient, highly-advanced species who seeded the galaxy with the same or very similar DNA, which eventually evolved into similar races. Parallel evolution is a real thing. The saber-tooth tiger evolved several times from different types of animals in widely-separated locations (Machairodontinae, and a marsupial model Thylacosmilus) right here on Earth. Although, humans and Vulcans being compatible enough to mate and produce Spock is, I must admit, a bit of a stretch.
Handwavium works best when it sticks as closely as possible to the ragged edge of what we think might be possible. In 1994, a Mexican physicist, Alcubierre, showed that an genuine warp drive cannot be theoretically ruled out. This device warps space, rather than actually breaking the light-speed limit. Wormholes may truly exist, although I wouldn’t recommend a trip through one. Recent stronomical observations have detected the chemical building blocks of life on comets and orbiting other stars. Is a way to slow, speed, or even reverse the arrow of time such and outlandish possibility? Resulting mangled causality and grandfather paradoxes set aside for the time being.
Maybe strict adherence to science is required in your view. If you want an excellent novel exploring the effects of slower-than-light interstellar travel on societies, and individuals, paired with the supreme difficulties of establishing communications with some truly alien aliens, Poul Anderson’s Starfarers will fill that bill admirably. Ditto for Robert Heinlein’s Time for the Stars (except for the bit about long-distance mind reading).
But Anderson and Heinlein were science-fiction-writing gods who walked the Earth. Very few of us can live up to that standard. Most writers must resort to at least a bit of judiciously-applied handwavium. I suppose that puts us closer to witch doctors than gods. In fact, Anderson, and Heinlein both indulged in faster-than-light and time travel, when such devices conjured up a better story. Nothing prevented them from doing so. Just as nothing prevents the rest of us from cleaving to hard science fiction, if we can tell an entertaining tale in the process. The whole point of science fiction is to entertain, and to open the mind to the possibilities as well. Even when those possibilities are just a step beyond what we think is kosher...at the moment.