VONNEGUT
There has to be. Because you can lose a reader in a blink of an eye. If a person is an engineer or chemist or an anthropologist or whatever, you spoil the whole book for that person if there’s obviously ignorance here. What’s wrong with so much science fiction is that the science is so lousy that it isn’t worth paying attention to. My brother was a distinguished scientist and I hung out more with scientists than I did with writers, so the one thing I’ve always tried to do was to get it right, make it plausible. Scientifically. How long it takes to get somewhere through space and what you ‘re likely to find there, and you have to figure whether it’s going to be plausible or not. So, yeah, I did a book called Galapagos which was about evolution and it’s used in courses now.

https://www.robertcaro.org/post/an-interview-with-robert-caro-and-kurt-vonnegut