Rubber science explanations are fictional but convincing enough to avoid upsetting the suspension of disbelief.
[1] Rubber science was Spinrad's term for "pseudo-science ... made up by the writer with literary care that it not be discontinuous with the reader's realm of the possible.
Bill Ransom associates rubber science with science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s, an era marked by "lots of cool gadgets," before "the genre became more character driven" under the influence of writers such as Frank Herbert and Samuel Delany, focusing on humans rather than technology solving dilemmas.
[12] Lucius Shepard, responding to a negative review by George Turner, decried the suggestion that he "haul a gob of rubber science out of the vat in order to justify and explain [his] physics".
[15] Reviewers have used the term to praise deft or plausible scientific explanations,[16][17] and to criticise underdeveloped or distracting worldbuilding;[18] for instance, a Washington Post review criticized Orson Scott Card's novel Xenocide for its "chapter long dialogues about rubber science".