Improbable Press Blog — Crunchy facts for your fiction

Want a crunchy fact for your sci-fi novel? A little something that gives a sense of place, science, or culture? How about this: your extraterrestrials always give birth to twins. In humans twin births are rare, happening about 4 times to 1,000 births, but get this: Clawed New World monkeys (Callitrichidae) — tiny wee creatures between 4 to 21 ounces – rarely have one baby, instead they nearly always have fraternal twins (or triplets when in captivity) and they can do so with greater ease than humans in part because they develop their placenta a lot longer than we do...

I read all kinds of interesting stuff. How moths drink the tears of sleeping birds. That flour is explosive. That Marie Curie's belongings will be radioactive for 500 years. And there are probably at least 500 billion galaxies. These are little facts that are a delight just for knowing, or for knowing so you can add them to a story and give it a wee bit of crunch. Crunch? Crunchy facts are those chewy, spikey, textural bits of minutiae that give your story complexity. So says novelist and songwriter Narrelle M Harris, who made up this tasty term. Crunchy facts...