And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

—FROM “THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD,” THE FIRST SECTION OF T. S. ELIOT’S THE WASTE LAND

There is an old storytelling trope (which was originally voiced by noted author and visionary Arthur C. Clarke) often used in certain kinds of fantastical fiction, that says science, if sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic. This is usually invoked for one of two reasons: 1) the writer is just being imprecise, lazy, or sloppy, and doesn’t want to go to the effort of mapping out the mechanics of whatever wondrous device/event/theory it is that is integral to the plot but still unimportant enough to fully work out; or 2) the writer realizes from the onset that the functional underpinning of the device/event/theory isn’t in and of itself all that important—but the metaphoric bridge it provides is.

The only problem with this is that readers of such stories (or rather, critics and/or academics) often mistake the latter case for the former, and then immediately proceed to chop the metaphor into smaller and smaller digestible, logical, rational chunks, the better to explain, prove, or disprove what they think the author meant while completely overlooking the actual impression the metaphor was intended to convey.

Invented worlds and events need enough detail to look, feel, and taste real, so  …