Science fiction purports to be based on science. I hate to tell you this, but a lot of SF is as close to science and math as Taco Bell is to authentic Mexican cuisine.
I revelled and still revel in mass ratios and scale heights, albedos and exhaust velocities, evolutionary biology and world history. (I’m not the only one. Big wave to my homies out there.) So…as much as I love SF, I’m constantly running head-on into settings that could just not work the way the author imagines. My SOD (suspension of disbelief) is motoring along merrily and suddenly, bang! Dead in its tracks. Perhaps you can understand now why so many of my reviews grumble about worldbuilding.
Teen me had no net, no Wikipedia. It was dead-tree books or nothing. Teen me also had his father’s library card and could access the University of Waterloo libraries. (In retrospect, I wonder that the library staff let me do this. I mean, it’s kinda odd that an obvious teenager had a tenured professor’s library privileges1. Thanks staff!)
What was I reading? Books like Stephen Dole’s Habitable Planets for Man, and Cole and Cox’s Islands in Space. Fond memories. But I’ve got to admit, the stuff that’s available online, today, free, is way, way better and bigger than the resources that seemed so wonderful forty years ago.
All of this is an extended prologue to a recommendation for a fantastic online resource for the budding spaceflight fan: Winchell Chung’s Atomic Rockets.
His site was initially inspired by the works of authors like Clarke and Heinlein, not to mention Jerry Pournelle’s “Those Pesky Belters and Their Torchships.” He wanted to supply budding SF authors (and fans) with the info they needed to keep the necessary suspension of disbelief alive. He planned a one-stop site where authors could find conveniently organized information that life (and declining public library funds) had denied them.
Chung started the site way back in the 1990s, when the internet was a collection of coal-fired VT100s connected by lengths of frayed twine. His initial efforts were rather humble. But one has to start somewhere.
Today, however…well: The site map looks like this:
Atomic Rockets is my go-to resource when I have forgotten some bit of rocket-related science, and when I need to learn more than I actually do.
Caveat emptor: actual rocket science differs from the plot-convenient SF variety with which you may be familiar. Many stock plots are impossible if you hew to the realm of actual possibility2. But (to my way of thinking at least) the effort you put into learning how things work will give your fiction a depth that using time-worn implausible tropes will not. If you have ambitions of writing hard SF and your work has rockets, consider perusing Atomic Rockets.
If you are a reader, and you crave rocket-science SF, Atomic Rockets offers a handy and convenient list. Two lists, actually: books that could have been inspired by Atomic Rockets and ones that actually were. Enjoy.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is surprisingly flammable.
[1]Perhaps I had an air of remarkable maturity for my age. Or perhaps I was not the only prof’s kid using their parent’s card. These days, I am sometimes mistaken for faculty by students. It seems almost rude of me not to reward this by booking an unused room to expound to the student body on various subjects. Apparently as long as I don’t claim to offer course credit, this doesn’t break any rules.
[2]I would cite stealth in space as the canonical “no, you can’t do that.” But as someone or other once said “It is a truth universally acknowledged that any online discussion that begins by pointing out why stealth in space is impossible will rapidly turn into a thread focusing on schemes whereby stealth in space might be achieved.” As proof I offer the comment thread to come…
“a lot of SF is as close to science and math as Taco Bell is to authentic Mexican cuisine.”
I give you, courtesy of The Washington Post, We asked ambassadors where they eat when they’re homesick. We did not expect Taco Bell and Ikea.
This is James’ horrified face.
I subscribe to Hitchcock’s “icebox scene” rule. You don’t need to suspend disbelief indefinitely, just long enough to get to the end of the story before the reader/viewer/gamer says “Waaaaait a minute….” It allows a certain level of squishiness, and is best invoked in SF by plausible sounding science (as opposed to technobabble) that you know only a small fraction of the audience will be able to see through.
Stealth in space?
Stealth in space! Atomic Rockets has my attempt at untangling that can of worms quoted as ‘Perfect and Permanent Stealth in Space’.
Back in the days of megathreads of doom on rec.arts.sf.written, I kicked one off by mocking a book on a point I thought was obvious: in one of the Polity books, someone uses the passively reflected light from a red dwarf star to ignite fusion, which is of course impossible. Imagine my surprise when it turned out this was not the intuitively obvious point I thought it was.
A presentation on some of the more common/irritating science errors in science fiction: http://larryniven.net/stone/img0.shtml (this is a powerpoint presentation translated to html):
“Stone Suspension Bridges and Dim Suns
Obvious Errors in Science Fiction (and how to avoid them)”
“Stone has essentially no tensile strength” and “we can just hollow out asteroids and then spin them up so the inner surface has one gee” play poorly together, even if a lot of asteroids didn’t seem to be rubble piles….
The bandwidth available through twine is remarkably high — as long as you keep it soaked in brine.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42338067
Some telephone lines out West started out as fence wire. At least that was a conductor under normal circumstances.
More science for hard science fiction, more fiction for fun science fiction. And much much much more of the latter please. Everybody seems to be so worried about proving how smart and respectable they are right now and trying to write “hard” science fiction at the expense of fun. Lets have more fun and adventure and less nose in the air superiority.
Working out the details is fun for me.
@9/random22: Getting the science right is fun. The thing about science is, it can lead you ideas you never would’ve thought of on your own. Laypeople assume non-science-savvy fiction is more imaginative, but it’s not, because it just rehashes the same old ideas over and over. Science introduces whole new ideas all the time. Just for one example, planetary science has led to multiple new categories of planet that are so much cooler and more interesting than the usual stuff we see in sci-fi — super-Earths, ocean planets made predominantly of water, Jovian moons in stellar habitable zones, planetary systems around brown dwarfs, rogue planets habitable from internal heating, red-dwarf systems with multiple planets in tight orbits whose “year” length is a matter of days or weeks. So many fun possibilities opened up by science, and ignored in fiction written by people who don’t know science and just keep rehashing the same old stock settings.
The reason science fiction is cool as a genre is because science is cool. Imagination is only as good as the ideas it has to build on, and science is an endless source of new ideas. Saying that science gets in the way of science fiction is contradictory — it’s like saying that detective stories would be better if they didn’t waste so much time investigating crimes, or that romance novels would be better without all that mushy stuff.
I was once sent a procedural in which the police spent the first 2/3rds of the book finding reasons not to investigate obvious crimes, only very grudgingly doing their job when someone whose death could not be swept under the rug died. Oddly, not a book where a PI stepped in to do their job for them.
I’m a retired high tech entrepreneur / inventor (over a hundred granted US patents)… and a SciFi writer. I can’t stand bad science in SciFi, in books or movies. Since I’m an expert in electronic displays, the thing that REALLY pulls me out of the story is…
https://candicebrownelliott.wordpress.com/2017/11/29/the-one-thing-hollywood-gets-wrong-in-futuristic-science-fiction/
There are a few other things as well… PhakePhysics(tm), BadBiology(tm), etc. But talk about bad world building… how many times do we read books in which the planets they visit are supposed to be different than Earth, but everything behaves the same… and its not just gravity… even if the planet can support earthlike life, atmospheric difference mean vastly different weather… and even a campfire would be different or impossible, depending upon oxygen to nitrogen ratios. The author never gives it a second thought. Grrrr…
Crunchy science gives you a framework to build up and out from the fuzzy or squishy science bits. David Weber’s squishy gravity science is given weight by his use of crunchier physics (which makes certain notable lapse notable [spoiler: it’s always a squishy gravity loophole]). It’s a readily available set of constraints that drive conflict, plot, or worldbuilding. It’s not better than another system of extrapolating but it fits the genre
@12 so you’re saying it was non-fiction? /snark
@13: Thanks for posting that link. I will confess I had no clue . . . and now you’ve ruined my suspended disbelief forever! Not that I mind. I’ve always preferred to “know better.”
14: Let’s just say there have been cases in Canada in which the police proved extremely reluctant to ask questions like “how is it so many women travel to this man’s farm while so few ever return?” Generally involving POC victims. Nothing in the book seemed unbelievable.
(but at least the cops in the procedural weren’t amusing themselves by actively killing people.)
@12: A rather well-known SF novella features an investigator who is irritated that a relative of a murder victim keeps pestering them to investigate the crime (and who became downright terrified once the relative managed to call in a higher authority). A case of “we do the right thing now, and retrospectively everyone who failed to do the right thing in the past starts to look really bad – and we’d rather not deal with that.”
If someone wants to write hard SF, like for example The Martian, then yes, I expect them to do the math and be as true to life as they can be. I’m willing to give them a couple of handwaves for the purposes of story, although making an authors note at the end acknowledging where they nudged is a nice touch.
On the other hand they can take my light speed laser equipped physics breaking fun from my cold (equationed) dead hands.
A lot of it depends on the type of story you want to tell – it’s hard to have several alien species evolved to roughly the same point in one place in order to have communication and cultural difficulties without breaking time and physics to make it happen. Some stories rely on unlimited energy, some on restricting how you can travel, some on making everything just hard enough.
Also stealth in space is totally possible – stealth doesn’t mean hiding everything, it means making sure that you aren’t emitting what they are looking for. If the normal means of propulsion is a hydrogen plasma drive, then using an ion drive is arguably stealthy, because the enemy probably aren’t looking for it, even though all the evidence is there. Like using the tide to push warships up close at night instead of sailing them or using an engine.
Unless you meant the klingon cloaking field, which is of course magical.
James, you never read Willy Ley’s Rockets, Missiles, and Various Endings series?
19: I did!
I’ve been overhearing bits of James S. Corey’s Tiamat’s Wrath as my partner has been listening to the audio book. At one point, a protagonist is setting up “running stealthy” for his ship. This involves plotting his course to use the engines only during the times when he’ll be hidden from his enemies’ most probable sensor devices by intervening planet-and-moons. His ship also has a big heat-sink system which is used to keep the outer hull cold until it’s in a location that’s safe to emit a whack of IR without detection. I’m not entirely convinced about the latter.
@18/Mayhem: You talk about real science and imaginary science as if they were mutually incompatible things. On the contrary, the best way to sell a fantasy idea is to surround it with as much reality as possible. That feeling of realism then rubs off on the fantasy idea and makes it easier to go along with. It doesn’t have to be really possible as long as the handwaves incorporate enough real science to make it sound plausible on the surface. And if you can tell that the writer knows their science, then it’s easier to accept the fanciful bits as informed poetic license rather than ignorance or error.
Even fantasy can be undermined if the author bungles mundane details with which the reader is familiar. Horses for example are not motor-bikes that are fueled with oats.
There is a KJ Parker fantasy where the author went to the trouble of personally making every bow in real life, save for the one whose creation involves a felony. The novel benefited, I think.
Poul Anderson wrote a bunch of essays on sf world building and unsurprisingly, he also wrote one on how to create verisimilitude in fantasy settings.
On Thud and Blunder
“it means making sure that you aren’t emitting what they are looking for. If the normal means of propulsion is a hydrogen plasma drive, then using an ion drive is arguably stealthy”
Sure, if your enemies are dumb enough to not also be looking for heat sources, as from your engine (ion drives need lots of power) or the fact that your ship is warm enough to support life.
And yes, you can construct scenarios where stealth is possible, even without explicit cloaking devices. Warp drives. Or two ships that dropped out of warp in an uninhabited system and are using rockets behind planets (no, wait, the exhaust cloud from the rocket probably has a good chance of getting picked up.)
But if you’re trying to write space warfare using real physics between technological equals that actually planned for war, e.g. with lots of telescopes and detectors (many of them at distance), then stealth is really really hard because *space is transparent and has no horizon*. Space warfare is not submarine warfare, it’s snipers on an open plain with almost no cover (and what cover there is you have to keep whipping around to stay at — orbits)
Or just paint it purple and put a Somebody Else’s Problem field generator on it.
@22
Agreed, underpinning your magic with genuine science often helps the story. But it works both ways – there’s plenty of hard SF stories I can think of that were based on science *as it was known at the time* which today read as hokey and flawed or are fobbed off as space fantasy because their science no longer fits.
Psionics, eugenics, computers the size of rooms, the absence of ubiquitous communication devices, biology that doesn’t work that way, fusion magical power, and extrapolating our politics directly into a future setting. The early cyberpunk is especially rife with that – Effinger’s Budayeen for example has the melting pot of cultures right, but the cyber elements haven’t aged nearly so well as the punk. Heck, the Singularity is probably going that way now, a decade or two on.
The biggest issue with Hard SF is it doesn’t predict the future, it projects the now into the future, and the now is often wrong.
So I’m very happy reading about David Weber’s royal navy sailing in space with gravity drives or Simon R Green’s space fantasy with super robot ninjas and hadenmen cyborgs and flying castles with energy shields, because the science isn’t actually important in those stories other than as a background. They just want to be fun fantasy in a futuristic setting instead of a contemporary or historical one, and handwave enough reasons why stuff works to make them possible.
@26/Mayhem: Yeah, but how many of those soft-SF stories that didn’t bother trying to predict plausible science nonetheless portrayed a future where women were still housewives or stewardesses, everyone was white and heterosexual, and smoking was rampant and harmless? A story doesn’t have to make scientific predictions in order to become dated, and there are worse sins than failing to predict the smartphone. At least the stories that make an effort with the science show that care and imagination was put into their creation, and that can still be respected even after the science becomes outdated.
@24, agreed, to a certain extent. But space is also really really big, and active sensors have to be aimed at something else you’re wasting power and revealing information.
So if you know the physics of how the passive sensors work, you can develop ways to exploit them to get closer or to deliver an attack. Until the opposition develops countermeasures, anyway. Look how often ordinary rocks get *really* close to Earth without us even noticing until the very last moments. Real stealth isn’t a be all and end all, it’s another form of camouflage in a never ending race. It’s making the sensors register it and file it as non-threatening, because it manipulates their recognition systems. Seismic anomalies instead of plant noises. CV dazzle camouflage for image recognition.
I mean, our existing stealth aircraft worked brilliantly in all the tests, and then one got shot down in the Balkans because the locals worked out a way of detecting them because they weren’t truly stealthy against all frequencies available to use. Stealth in reality and stealth in fiction are very different things, and reality very often relies on us misinterpreting what we see or hear.
@21, the “dump the heat where no one can see it” runs into a common problem that a lot of space-stealth ideas tend to overlook: if you have some sort of system meant to evade sensors, why are you assuming the sensors are lacking such systems? After all, if you think about it, it’s easier for a sensor platform to be stealthy than a ship. It doesn’t have to move anywhere, it’s probably not crewed, it can be stuck on random bits of orbital debris to camouflage it, if the sensors are passive it’s probably not needing a lot of power (and thus heat), it doesn’t care if it’s heat emissions are visible from the certain sectors, and so on, and even if it’s detected , and the ship turns to avoid it, it’s probably opening itself up to another platform the ship hasn’t detected.
@21
“a big heat-sink system which is used to keep the outer hull cold until it’s in a location that’s safe to emit a whack of IR without detection”
Why not? Heat is perfectly willing to pause its progress from warmer to colder places. Most people simply don’t ask politely enough.
More generally, re the books and very pretty SyFy series: who could resist the unprecedented realism of (1) its prequel short story of the lone inventor who made Newtonian propulsion umpty times more efficient because something something… (2) the trope-shattering novelty of combining a war between inner and outer solar system with one between soft overcrowded Earth and pioneer-tough Mars… and (3) the equally trope-shattering discovery of a stargate created by ancient aliens. Bad-tempered pedants such as James may consider that “handwaving as usual”; I couldn’t possibly comment.
Prefer the term “speculative fiction.” It’s a better discriptor of the range of stories classified as “science fiction.” There’s a place for speculative stories closely informed by scientific research, for stories of pure whimsy, and for stories of every gradient in between. (Tellingly, the perhaps greatest living science fiction short story writer, Ted Chiang, ranges all over the spectrum.)
I would not say The Martin was more imaginative than Alice In Wonderland or The Martian Chronicles or most Harlan Ellison stories. Scientific plausibility doesn’t necessarily make a story more (or less) imaginative.It doesn’t make it more (or less) emotionally true.
I do agree that research is necessary. Fantasy must be fertilized by the manure of reality, as Fritz Leiber wrote somewhere. But it need not be (or just be) scientific research. History, philosophy, mythology, religion, culture, psychology, economics, for example, are endless founts of ideas to explore in speculative fiction. So is your stock of observational knowledge of the world.
@31/Skallagrimsen: “Scientific plausibility doesn’t necessarily make a story more (or less) imaginative.”
But it does provide more material for the imagination to play with. And it often turns up possibilities that nobody had ever imagined before. With imagination, you’re starting from known information and guessing ways to extrapolate it, based largely on past experience as precedents, so it’s usually just a remix of old ideas. But with science, you can start with that known information and follow it step by step to further information that you would’ve been far less likely to land on with pure speculation. Nobody could have imagined warp drive and wormholes until Einstein calculated that spacetime was mutable. Nobody could’ve imagined quantum entanglement until the math pointed the way.
Imagination gives us vision, but science gives us a foundation to climb on so we can see farther.
When dead trees were the only effective medium for disseminating both science and fiction, the squishy middle of SFF stories involving probably-cool-but-completely-wrong science could be justified in the aggregate: authors could be given the benefit of the doubt as to whether they were using ideas that were up-to-date at the time of writing, and even the stories with invalid or outdated science at least got various ideas out there for discussion. Indeed, the latter sorta functioned as a backdoor science lesson: the bulk of real-world scientific knowledge advances less through the confirmation of what is known/expected and more through the examination of ideas that end up being wrong—and exactly why/how those ideas failed the test.
Of course, in the modern era an author no longer really has any good excuse for not knowing whether some scientific concept will work in a way that supports the story he or she wants to tell. However, I’m not so sure that means that we should be judging works by their scientific validity. (I find myself increasingly less inclined to judge fiction on its scientific accuracy, especially since I regularly get my fill of actual science from journals and enthusiast sites and the like.) Perhaps the better measure for SFF isn’t correctness or even verisimilitude, but narrative self-awareness. Where a story brushes up against the real world, I’m satisfied so long as there is internal consistency and clever handwaving or lampshading that makes it clear the author is knowingly favoring Story over Science.
@33/Ian: Yes, it’s as much about the author’s competence and effort, whether the craft of the storytelling earns our respect, as it is about the credibility of the story. I have more respect for a story that handles a fanciful subject in a way that demonstrates familiarity with the science it’s bending or breaking (like when TNG: “Yesterday’s Enterprise” had a throwaway line about its time warp being a Kerr ring in a loop of cosmic string) than one that tries to be plausible but in a way that shows a lack of understanding of the subject. (I’ve been struggling to get through Netflix’s See You Yesterday largely for this reason. The film is trying to ground its time travel tech in real physics terminology, but the terms are slapped together so clumsily that it makes me wince. It would’ve been better if they’d just let the tech be a black box with no explanation offered.)
When asked how fast B5’s Star Furries moved, JMS replied, “They travel at the speed of plot.”
That versus Stephen Baxter.
@30. Monte: I was amused by your sarcasm…
I’d say The Expanse is enjoyable for similar reasons Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire books are enjoyable. Dragons are ubiquitous in fantasy, but his use of them is limited and magic is restrained. There’s even a subplot about an agenda to keep magic out of the world.
Up until the last couple volumes, which introduce superships based on alien tech (read magic; although there’s only 3, like the dragons), Corey shows similar restraint in using some of the familiar tropes. There’s no artificial gravity, for instance.
@30: I like the Expanse but in the version I read averts the cliche’ of the soft Earthers. The Martian soldier Bobbie Draper notes:
” All that running and exercising the Martian Marines did at one full gravity was bullshit. There was no way Mars could ever beat Earth on the ground. You could drop every Martian soldier, fully armed, into just one Earth city and the citizens would overwhelm them using rocks and sticks.”
It’s not so much the deliberate introduction of magic science that are irritating – it’s the things that the authors take for granted that are untrue (rotating an asteroid to achieve 1-gee on the inside would tear it apart; the Sun is not an insignificant star when seen from the asteroid belt).
The books and the program are fun though – James gave the first book a very positive review back in 2015 https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/the-girl-in-the-seven-trillion-tonne-refrigerator
@35/AggregatVier: In fact, B5’s Starfuries were probably the most scientifically plausible space fighter design I’ve ever seen, with real physics taken into account. They actually moved like spacecraft in vacuum and free fall rather than banking like aircraft in atmosphere, and their X-shaped design took basic physics into account, the idea that having longer lever arms between the engines and the center of mass would increase maneuverability.
B5 was paradoxical, because in some ways, like spacecraft physics and space station design, it was one of the most solidly researched and plausible SFTV shows ever, but in other ways it was utterly fanciful, like its focus on psi powers and its crazy notion that lifespan and health were determined by some finite reservoir of “life energy” that could be drained like gasoline from a tank.
@36/Sunspear: I’d be happier if there were artificial gravity in The Expanse. At least artificial gravity could be based on some future physical principle we have yet to discover, so we wouldn’t know for sure that it couldn’t work as depicted. But we do know that magnetic boots wouldn’t work as depicted in the show — the magnetic fields would interfere with ship’s systems, most ships aren’t made of ferromagnetic materials anyway because they’re too heavy, and it’s an incredibly ungainly and inefficient way to move in free fall, like trying to swim by strapping weights to your ankles and walking along the bottom of the pool. So I find the show’s magnetic boots more fanciful than artificial gravity, because their depiction violates things we know to be true.
The enemy doesn’t have to be stupid not to notice your ion drive, if nobody’s used ion drives in so long that they don’t bother trying to detect them.
David Weber gets a pretty cool scene out of somebody sneaking a pistol into a blaster fight. That is, “everybody knows” that if you have a firearm, it had an internal power source, so to scan for concealed weapons they use a detector that alerts the user if there is a power pack within range. Nobody bothers frisking people or using X-rays to do a visual search for hidden firearms because if it goes bang, it obvs. has a power pack. So his character puts a reproduction .45 into a briefcase, walks into a meeting, stands still for the detector, opens the briefcase to “get some papers,” shoots, and leaves.
Ofc. that only works until enough people do it that the word gets around.
@39/Jenny: As the usual discussions on stealth in space make clear, the one big dealbreaker is heat. It’s not about your drive, it’s about the warmth of the crew’s bodies and the environment needed to keep them alive, as well as the waste heat of the ship’s equipment. That all has to be radiated into space sooner or later. And it’s the one constant no matter what drive technology is being used. All energy ends up as waste heat eventually.
@40. That is okay. The subspace energy exchanger allows us to shunt all that heat into a non-phase fold.
Problem solved.
In an earlier career (before teaching physics to largely great high school juniors and seniors and robotics to remarkably immature freshmen), I worked on observables analysis (stealth). A remarkable number of people think stealth is some kind of invisibility cloak. Bistatic and multistatic radars can defeat many kinds of stealth, but one doesn’t need active sensors, as modern IR sensors can detect temperature differences of a fraction of a kelvin.
A friend, who retired from the USN as the captain of a guided missile destroyer told me the radars used by the USN since the early-1970s could detect the F-117 with absolutely no trouble.
@32 Christopher Bennett: “But [scientific plausibility] does provide more material for the imagination to play with.”
I agree. I said as much. My point is that it’s not the only source. New ideas within all the disciplines I mentioned, and others, frequently occur. Speculative fiction provides an ideal method to explore their validity and potential ramifications. Old ideas, obscure, obsolete and forgotten, can also be a goldmine. Borges understood this as well as anyone.
“Nobody could have imagined warp drive and wormholes until Einstein calculated that spacetime was mutable.”
Questionable. In the 1890s H.G. Wells armed his invading Martians with atom-splitting weapons of incalculable destructiveness.That used to really impress me, until I learned that Jabir ibn Hayyan advanced sophisticated speculations about atomic power in the 8th century. Edgar Allan Poe seems to have predicted the Big Bang in a prose poem of 1848, over seven decades before Alexander Friedmann and Georges Lemairtre pioneered the theory in the 1920s. Olaf Stapeldon anticipated the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics with remarkable thoroughness in his novel Star Maker, well before Hugh Everett (a science fiction fan) ever proposed it in a scientific paper. (Stapeldon also hypothesized the so-called Dyson sphere before Freeman Dyson.) In a brilliant dialogue on religion, the philosopher David Hume outlined the origin of species by means of random mutation and natural selection over a generation before Darwin was born.
In short, don’t underestimate the power of the human imagination as a tool for exploring the nature of reality. Or as Einstein himself put it: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whearas imagination embraces the entire world…”
@43: The point is that it’s not a fight. It’s silly to argue over which is “better,” because they are both better together. You might as well argue over whether the heart or the lungs are the more important organ. We need them both.
@43 Skallagrimsen, I don’t think Poe’s Eureka counts as a prophecy. From your link “…although Eureka is a highly imaginative work of great creative insight, it can hardly be said to have predicted the Big Bang.”
I don’t know about the Arab who speculated about atomic power. Do you have a link?
It’s certainly true that Darwinian evolution could have been imagined, as an alternative to special creation, long before him. What he did was collect and organize the data needed to show that it actually happened.
I think there is a case to be made that you can’t imagine a wormhole until Einstein has explained how space-time can be curved. Newtonian physics certainly doesn’t allow it.
“It’s certainly true that Darwinian evolution could have been imagined”
Some idea of randomness and differential survival goes back to some ancient Greeks; Empedocles and Lucretius come to mind, with Hume supposedly citing Lucretius. I think Darwin advanced how precisely it was stated, as well as making a far more thorough argument for it actually happening.
“For knowledge is limited, whearas imagination embraces the entire world”
Imagination embraces false worlds as well; knowledge, which is limited but advances, tells us which bits of imagination are real.
Surely there were magic doorways into strange worlds before Einstein? H G Wells’s “The Door in the Wall” is from 1911 apparently… “The Magic Shop” was 1903. And… yeah, the Victorian explorer, Alice Liddell. Her strange dreams adventures.
Star Trek is an obvious example of fiction where actual science is disregarded in order to remove constraints on storytelling. So it’s interesting that by the 21st century, the people in charge of Star Trek were bored out of their minds by the setting. Jeri Taylor compared it to writing endless interrogation scenes in cop shows. Real science wasn’t constraining the writing, but the soft-SF setting they created was played out and they were doing nothing but repeating cliches. That’s why Star Trek: Enterprise was made as a prequel, in an attempt to change the setting enough to make new stories possible.
Not quite bad science, but…the way 2001 depicted spaceflight turned out to be totally wrong in most ways. You don’t shuffle along carpet in velcro slippers, you don’t take a rocket powered puddle jumper flight to get to a remote lunar site, you don’t have a huge pressurized garage in a spacecraft, you don’t repair an antenna by depressurizing that huge pressurized garage, extending a pod sitting on a platform, flying the pod a couple hundred yards max, opening the pod’s hatch to vacuum, pushing off and floating ten yards to the structure, grabbing the structure without breaking bones, puncturing your suit, or missing and going spinning off into space, then reverse the process when you’re done…etc.
@44 Christopher Bennett, Agreed. Neither is better. Both are essential. Do I appear to be claiming otherwise? Let me be clear. Good science as well as good speculative fiction require a rigorous interplay between knowledge and imagination. My point is simply that scientific plausibility, in itself, is far from the measure of a speculative story’s worth.
@45 David Evans, Prophecy is too strong a word. Poe wasn’t correct, to the best of our current understanding, as to the specific details, but his description does seem startlingly presient leap of intuition, given the limits of cosmology in his lifetime.
I read about Jabir ibn Hayyan’s atomic speculations where I don’t recall. Wasn’t able to confirm it with a quick search. I’ll have to dig into that some more.
Not disparaging Darwin by any means! All honor is due to him for the evidence he amassed to support the theory. My point was simply that the essence of the theory had already been articulated. Nor am I claiming that he derived it from Hume. It may well have been completely independent. I’m aware, of course, that various sorts of evolutionary speculations go back at least to the pre-Socratics. I believe it was Anaximander who taught that all life is related and originated in the sea. Lucilio Vanini (immolated 1619) held that man had once been a quadruped.
I’m not convinced no-one could have imagined a wormhole before Einstein explained it. Many things not allowed by Newtonian physics might yet be imaginable.
@43: “For knowledge is limited, whearas imagination embraces the entire world”
I disagree with this — knowledge is not limited, because it’s always being added to, and it’s potentially as large as the universe. The advantage of reality is that you can follow it to new places that are already there waiting to be found. Imagination is usually just a remix of ideas that are already in our heads. Science can lead us step by step to whole new ideas, which gives imagination more to work with. It is self-defeating and contradictory to denigrate real knowledge and learning in an attempt to elevate imagination. That is not how it works. Knowledge helps imagination. It’s the ingredients for imagination. And it never stops expanding, because every answer sparks new questions that lead to new answers. Imagination adds to knowledge and knowledge adds to imagination. It’s a partnership, not a pissing contest.
@48/Gareth: “Star Trek is an obvious example of fiction where actual science is disregarded in order to remove constraints on storytelling.”
Not when it started. When it started, it was just about the only work of science fiction on TV that paid even slight attention to real science. Gene Roddenberry consulted with scientists and engineers and researchers to try to make the worldbuilding plausible, and when he made concessions, it was as conscious dramatic license rather than the total ignorance that characterized everything else on SFTV in the ’60s-’80s. And its relative scientific literacy made it better. It made it feel more real and grounded, and that sense of realism was part of why it was so much more popular and compelling to audiences than something like Lost in Space or Space: 1999 or Buck Rogers.
For me, it was discovering Star Trek as a child that made me fall in love with space and science, and it was the only haven of intelligence and scientific literacy in all of SFTV. Its intelligence was what made it special. So it’s sad to me that people today cite it as the go-to example for bad science in SF, when there are so many others that were far, far worse. I mean, it’s good that so many modern shows have built on the foundations Trek laid and gone further, but it’s a shame how far its reputation has fallen as a result.
@50: “My point is simply that scientific plausibility, in itself, is far from the measure of a speculative story’s worth.”
That’s too pat a generalization. It depends on the approach and style of the specific kind of story. I mean, are love scenes a measure of a story’s worth? That depends on whether it’s a romance story or, say, a police procedural. What’s unnecessary in one flavor of storytelling can be utterly essential in another.
Used to be said that travel broadened one’s horizons, a metaphor for experiencing different ways of thinking/ feeling/ being. In fact though in the United States you can travel from one end to the other just to arrive at another Taco Bell, another 7 eleven or QuikieMart, another Holiday Inn.
True, you can still experience other ways of being if you really look for it. But to me that has really been the defining quality of Science Fiction, not Science, and why we make common cause with Fantasy: for what we really seek is another reality, another context, another situation, another set of paradigms, whether it is in the future, a recreated past, a parallel world, or a world that took on its own reality as a tale in it was told.
I do think though that if more people understood science, mainstream fiction would be a lot more interesting. It’s as if mainstream fiction depicts a reality from which science has been excised.
I think it’s important to think about the vast amount of stuff we don’t yet know, before we judge anything in SF to be impossible. I’m of the firm belief that 99.9% of what can be imagined is, in fact, possible by some method. There is no upward limit on what we can accomplish, in my view, so there is almost nothing which is impossible.
In fact, I argue that we are capable of saying that the “science” on display in science fiction or speculative fiction stories is only incorrect, or correct, “as far as we know.” I’d go farther and say that as far as we know isn’t very far.
@53. Ben: My chances of dating Eva Green are likely 99.9% impossible, no matter how well I imagine it.
@Mr. Nicoll: Thanks for the link, but that website needs a redesign. It is far too dominated by the Patreon stuff, which should be a sidebar or a second page. The main menu at the bottom is treating it as footnotes.
Regarding Poe, he also postulated the expansion of the universe. And:
“Black holes? Poe envisioned something like those, too. And he was the first person on record to solve the Olbers Paradox, which had dogged astronomers since Kepler: the mystery of why the sky is dark at night. If the universe was infinite, as 19th-century astronomers believed, there should be an infinite number of stars as well, plenty, in other words, to illuminate the sky at all times. Poe understood why this in fact was not the case: the universe is finite in time and space (and light from some stars has not yet reached the Milky Way).”
Poe’s cosmology
placeholder because i think i misunderstood something but cannot delete comments.
@51 Whatever crimes against science Star Trek has committed, it’s always been enthusiastic about scientific research in general. Even characters who are mostly military leaders will claim to be scientists. One SF writer said he liked it because it was the only TV show where humans chose to explore space, all the others had the characters coerced into space travel in some way.
@56 I was going to say the Atomic Rockets articles are very useful, but the overall website is horribly organised. Glad to hear it’s being redesigned.
Wow, it is great to see all this activity in a post for science in fiction!
I would just add a few relevant titles: A Kepler’s Dozen – a collection of stories based on the Kepler space telescope discoveries, essentlaylly all novels that Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley wrote. From behind the Iron Curtain: Arc 47 Librae, by an astrophysisist Boris E. Stern, some of the writings of Stanislaw Lem. I also recall a great novella from the late 1950s describing a living ocean planet like those that are now being discussed in research literature.
BTW, in the last years the publisher Springer started a line of hard-SF books. I am not sure if they actually say it, but it seem the line is aimed at educators, because each book or a story comes with an essay describing in popular terms the science used in the novel/story.
@38 Bennett: I do really love this thread. It was Tor that turned me on to Baxter and the Xeelee. And The Expanse is a relief from the usual handwavium (I see echoes of the Xeelee vs the Photino Birds in the later books).
Getting back in character, the Star Furies were correctly maneuverable but it’s the A to B that JMS was referring to. Even with Epstein Drive Holden said, “Space is too big.” It took 72 days to get from the gate/portal to Ilus in Cibola Burn. Meanwhile, the Star Furies traveled across the sysrem in minutes on ordinary chemical thrusters with no crushing G forces. Hence JMS’s wise comment.
BTW I love Taco Bell (afterall they did win the restaurant wars).
BTW thank you to everyone who suggests other authors, titles, series, or publishers to look into.
@@@@@ Christopher Bennett, Yes, not a fight. I keep saying that very thing. Do you think I think it’s a pissing contest? If so, why? Honest questions, I might be misunderstanding you.
Neither Einstein nor I were deriding knowledge. Me, I love knowledge. A good 85% of my 1,500+ books are non-fiction. But of course knowledge is limited. The very fact that it can be added to attests to it. Could knowledge be limitless? In theory, yes, and perhaps in eventuality too. Who’s to say what the world will look like 500 or 5000 years from now?
But for the moment, knowledge is limited and likely to remain so for a long time.Then there’s the problem of knowledge. It seems certain that some bedrock certainties of current science will be called into question and overthrown in the future as evidence is analyzed and discovered. The very history of science suggests it. Science is a self correcting mechanism, never settled, always open to revision, and therein lies its beauty and utility. But scientists are human, which is to say prone to dogmatism, corruption and error. Some of our current certitudes will look naive in hindsight.
About scientific plausibility not being the measure of a story’s worth, I’m not sure I understand your rebuttal. I wouldn’t call what I said a “generalization,” pat or otherwise. I’d call it an opinion about literary aesthetics. And I’d say aesthetic satisfaction is the measure of any story’s worth.
@@@@@ Sunspear, Thanks for that link!
Has anyone read any books by James Cambias and what’d you think? Apparently the site runner has high regard for him:
“You may have noticed I’ve used quite a few quotes from him in various parts of this website. It is really hard to find a person more qualified to write a novel with a “Atomic Rocket” levels of science-hardness than a person who is one of the experts used as a source for the Atomic Rocket website.” This in reference to the novel Corsair.
@61: “But for the moment, knowledge is limited and likely to remain so for a long time.”
But my point is that it’s constantly expanding. Writers who don’t pay attention to science (e.g. most writers of film and TV sci-fi) often just end up rehashing the things they’ve seen in earlier stories, while writers who do pay attention to science get an ongoing supply of new ideas to inspire them. The whole point of science is that it’s not fixed or limited — its entire purpose is to expand, to extrapolate, to generate new answers that raise new questions that lead to new answers in an endless progression. Yes, knowledge is limited, but that’s why science is so invaluable — because it’s constantly pushing those limits further outward.
Also, I don’t think this article was ever saying that scientific plausibility was “a measure of a story’s worth.” Not everything is a moral judgment. I think James was just saying that scientific plausibility is useful for storytellers as a good way to generate ideas and improve verisimilitude. Recommending something as a useful tool is not the same as condemning things that don’t use it. It’s just offering a helpful suggestion.
One thing I’ve always considered sci fi to be, is not so much how grounded in hard science it is, but more about what would the social implications of a society changing scientific advance.
Take Greg Egan, hard sf, certainly no worn tropes, but plausible concepts with no science behind them.
Permutation City is my favourite, we’ve learnt how to digitise brains and run them on computers. Only the mega rich can run in real-time.
Then, if a self aware mind can be represented by a sequence of numbers, do we really need to run them on a computer when those numbers all exists somewhere? Can a mind assemble itself from the dust?
No science, just speculation, but that particular concept will never leave me.
Because you look around and realise you wouldn’t even know.
#39, @Jenny Islander: they forgot that knives exist, as well as explosive, poison dart guns, etc.? That’s way less plausible than artificial gravity. (I keep thinking you’re Jenny Everywhere, living up to her name.)
jots down idea for essay on influential but obscure sf line.
@65/RoboJ1M: I don’t know what you mean — Greg Egan’s fiction is very, very much rooted in science, as much as any author I can think of. I think I’ve gained a greater understanding of quantum physics from Egan’s fiction than I did from taking a quantum mechanics class in college (because that was just calculus equations while Egan actually depicted what the math meant). Egan even has a website where he goes into extensive mathematical detail about the hard science behind his fiction.
The science underlying a story’s concepts doesn’t have to be explicitly expounded on the page for the readers to see — unless it’s in an appendix or supplementary website. The point is that it’s useful for writers to use as a worldbuilding tool. Worldbuilding doesn’t all have to go on the page, but the more detailed a writer’s understanding of the workings of their world, the more verisimilitude they can put in the telling, even if it’s background detail that the audience doesn’t see. That’s true of any worldbuilding, whether it’s physics and engineering in a space opera or realistic swordfighting techniques in a historical fantasy or accurate geographic and local cultural detail in a globetrotting spy thriller. When I wrote a Spider-Man novel some years ago, I overcame my fear of heights to go up to the top of the Empire State Building and take photos of the Manhattan skyline so I could plot out Spidey’s web-swinging accurately. When I wrote an X-Men novel, I set a scene at my local university and literally wrote it on location, moving from site to site as I wrote to follow the action so I could describe the details accurately. For a scene in the London sewers in the same novel, I found extensive online photo reference of historical tours of the sewer system and Underground. Most readers wouldn’t know the specific areas well enough to know what I got right or wrong, but the fact that I had the knowledge let me write those scenes with more detail and texture that I otherwise could have, and that’s something the readers would notice, even subliminally. And that small percentage of readers who did have direct knowledge of what I was depicting would appreciate that I took the care to get it right rather than assuming they’d be too ignorant to notice. Taking care to get the facts right is a gesture of respect for your audience’s intelligence and perception.
I compliment you on your courage, CLB, personally I would have settled for online pictures of the skyline.
@58:
Back in the day, Asimov published an anthology of stories called “Where Do We Go From Here?” – and followed each story with an essay about the science in the preceding story. Great stuff.
@61 Knowledge drives imagination: If you don’t know anything, you can’t imagine anything. If you don’t know there is a planet Mars, you can’t imagine Martians. If you know that it is smaller the Earth, and thought to be older, and you are H.G. Wells, you write War of the Worlds.
If it later turns out that Mars is not that habitable, and maybe not older than the Earth, the story still got written. Every story dates eventually. A story based on ignorance would probably be driven by fashion, and date even faster.
I would suggest that we need a new term for early science fiction science. That being “speculative science”. Mainly because a lot of what they were writing about was literally speculative because hard science hadn’t caught up to the collective imagination to prove, disprove, or limbo it. I also think this has been suggested somewhere before and I just can’t recall where I read about it.
And a lot of this reminds me of ringworld (which amazingly enough no one has mentioned yet). Where after he released the book there was a segment in the scientific community going you can’t do that or do you know what the strength of the material required to do that would be.
And one other thing that I read/hear many many years ago, “you can use 1 and only ONE gimmick item in sci-fi the rest has to be based in fact or theory.” I am probably butchering how I heard it but that’s the gist of it.
@64 Christopher Bennett You keep replying to my posts, but ignoring my questions. Do you think I think it’s a pissing contest? If so, why?
And I didn’t say moral judgement. I said aesthetic.
@71 “Knowledge drives imagination: If you don’t know anything, you can’t imagine anything.” How many times must I concede this very point? I don’t know how to state it any more clearly.
I don’t think War of the Worlds is dated at all. It’s inconsistent with our present understanding of Mars, but not a whit less powerful for that.
@72/David R: Ringworld is a terrific example of the value of science as a story generator, because when people pointed out to him that the Ringworld as described would be unstable, that gave him the idea for the sequel The Ringworld Engineers, where that instability and the means for counteracting it drove the entire plot. Science and fiction are both about imagining solutions for problems, which is why they work so well together.
It would be odd for Hume to have invented Natural Selection and nobody to have reacted at the time. It would be doubly odd for Hume not to have cleared his throat and said “guys did you not notice where I just explained evolution by natural selection?”
It’s easy, and attractive for some, to strain to find messages in old writing that aren’t actually there, not even in the estimation of the original author himself. The literary equivalent of chariots of the gods.
@CLB: “Most readers wouldn’t know the specific areas well enough to know what I got right or wrong”
Readers may pick up whether the writer is sloppy, the writing is careless, or internally inconsistent, even in a wholly invented environment. Readers have a “spidey” sense about that. At least, equally careful readers would. Some readers don’t care about attention to detail.
On the other hand, some readers, especially of the academic variety, make more of it than the author intended. One of my favorite memories from university is of an English Lit professor with a very pronounced Irish accent. We were discussing Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and got to the part where Stephen decides to leave Ireland for Europe. He exits a covered walkway and turns left. Some interpreters said this indicated a leftward turn toward liberal ideals, leaving a benighted Ireland for a more progressive Europe.
The professor paused for effect and said,” Well, I taught at that university. I walked those grounds. He couldn’t have turned to his right… because there’s a frickin’ partition wall there!.”
“Questionable. In the 1890s H.G. Wells armed his invading Martians with atom-splitting weapons of incalculable destructiveness.”
I don’t think he did, actually. They had Heat-Rays and the Black Smoke and that was it. You may be getting confused with other Wells (The World Set Free perhaps, though that didn’t have Martians).
The words “atomic” and “atom” appear nowhere in “The War of the Worlds”.
“the philosopher David Hume outlined the origin of species by means of random mutation and natural selection over a generation before Darwin was born”
Not really, no. He was influential on Darwin but didn’t pre empt him.
@Ajay & Del “The 18th Century Philosopher David Hume had his fictional skeptic Philo put forward a bold and innovative alternative to theistic design. Matter is eternal, says Philo. Matter is always in motion. In an eternity of time, this matter, by sheer chance, must be thrown together in every possible arrangement, including the material arrangement that is the grizzly bear, the venus flytrap, even man. When matter is thrown together in a form that cannot sustain itself, it perishes. When it can sustain itself (and can reproduce) it continues to exist. According to Philo, this explains the apparent design found in living things. Here we have all the components of natural selection: there is variation (matter is thrown into all kinds of different forms) differential survival (some forms perish, others reproduce and continue their lineage through the ages) and the necessary result is the orderly world we see today (only plants and animals good enough to survive). (See Section 8, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion).”
As to why the idea wasn’t publicized, it was a bit of speculation buried in a wide-ranging dialogue in an obscure book that wasn’t published in Hume’s lifetime (due to its irreligious nature). Contemporary readers probably would have taken the passage as a pure flight of fancy in service of a rhetorical point. It wasn’t until after Darwin articulated his theory rigorously, and provided empirical data to back it up, that anyone could see how prescient Hume had been.
Don’t know whether Darwin was influenced by Hume or ever so much as read him.
Regarding atomic weapons in War of the Worlds, I am relying on very old memories. Perhaps I was mistaken. I’ll look into it.
swampyankee @@@@@ 42
At what range, though? The point of (radar) stealth is not to render the airplane invisible, since that’s impossible, but to reduce its radar cross-section so that it’s harder to detect at a given distance than an equivalent non-stealth airplane. Radars don’t have infinite range, and if you can reduce the effective cross-section, you reduce the amount of back-scattered radiation, and so you reduce the signal detected by the radar.
The F-117 allegedly had a radar cross-section of ~ 0.003 square meters for cm-wave radar, compared to 1 square meter for the F-18 and 5-25 square meters for the F-15 and F-16. So you could detect an F-117 if it were close enough, sure — but you could detect non-stealth aircraft much further away.
You’re just quoting someone doing what I said: coming with modern knowledge to old writing, and interpreting it with the benefit of hindsight.
@81/PeterErwin: That reminds me of the difference between belief and reality about how “silencers” (more properly called suppressors) work on guns. The fiction is that a gun with a silencer just makes a faint “pew” sound that can’t be heard even in the next room, but I gather that the reality is that it just makes a gunshot moderately less loud (about equal to a jackhammer or ambulance siren) so that the noise is less likely to cause hearing damage to the shooter, or to make it harder for enemies in a noisy environment to pinpoint the shooter’s location.
@42, @81: Stealth technology for spacecraft is clearly part of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation product portfolio, as the sense of achievement one gets from thinking through the physical (im)plausibilities blinds one to the essential uselessness of the feature.
One doesn’t need a deep understanding of rocket science to see why, merely a sense of scale and an appreciation that the speed of light is more than 18,000 times faster than the fastest human-made object (to date). Even two ships in orbit of the same world are far enough apart that the witty banter between me and the other ship’s captain will be impacted by noticeable round-trip latencies…meaning that any physical objects are gonna require at least several hours to cover the distance (days, weeks, or months if we’re talking interplanetary distances). So I really don’t need to particularly concerned that the other ship might have an accurate fix on my ship’s position and velocity (as of a moment ago): at best her captain can decide to lob a scimitar missile at where she projects me to be in a few hours, but it will be trivial for me not to be at that location, at that moment, so long as my ship has some thruster fuel remaining and a pilot who values his life enough to be somewhere else.
Stealth IN SPACE is mostly pointless, my big concern should be that the other ship will radio ahead to possible ports to thwart my attempts at resupply. As many military leaders have pointed out over the centuries, the true key to victory isn’t tactics or technology, but logistics. With respect to interplanetary rocketry, the logistical concerns make almost any other concern insignificant, especially if one expects to make a round trip.
(Wait, what’s that you say? FTL? Subspace comms and sensors? Well, yeah, yada yada, but in that case I direct you up to comment #41 for a solution. ;-)
ChristopherLBennett @@@@@ 83:
Yes, that’s my impression, too. Some quick googling turns up this video, in which a guy fires the same gun without and then with a suppressor. The suppressed gunfire is definitely quieter; it sounds like the same noise heard rather farther away (and not “pew” or “phut” or however you want to describe the standard Hollywood/TV noise).
I wonder what the Hollywood “silencer” sound effect actually is, then. Probably some kind of airgun.
I, too, grew up with my father’s university library card, haunting the Lehigh University library system and computer halls starting as a preteen in the ’70’s. Good times! Librarians must be trained in nonchalance, or perhaps are accustomed to being surrogate parents.
@CLB
According to foley it’s a kick drum and bird chirp.
Although this video has a mic sitting downrange of a silenced gun and it sounds pretty similar to the classic Hollywood one, so plausible that originally they recorded the sound of one from the other end and later foley then matched it.
Nowadays it’s the coconut effect – Hollywood silencers sound like that because that’s what we expect them to sound like.
@88/Mayhem: The one filmic sound-editing mystery I’ll never understand is why they always have thunder sound simultaneously with lightning. I mean, practically everyone on the planet has firsthand experience of actual thunderstorms, so there’s no excuse for not knowing there’s a time lag there. Maybe it’s just that sound editors are so conditioned to avoid letting the picture and sound be out of sync that they reflexively apply it even when they shouldn’t. (There’s actually a Young Indiana Jones Chronicles episode where the WWI-era characters need to calculate the distance of a huge artillery piece based on the time lag in the sound when they see it fire, and yet even though the delay is actually a key story point, the sound editors still have the boom happen simultaneously with the cannon’s firing!!!)
@81,
He said no significant reduction in detection range. Radar cross section is very sensitive to wave!ength, and the wave!engths used by the USN’s shipboard radars were long enough so that the stealth features of the F-117 were largely ineffective . I suspect the same applies to the B-2 and Australia ‘s Jindavik radar and other over-the-horizon radars.
Back to space: it’s a cold environment with predictable, well-mapped features. Since a crewed spacecraft will radiate, it will be detectable. Right now, one can go out and buy off-the-shelf IR equipment that can image temperature differences of less than a tenth of a kelvin.
@90/swampyankee: Hmm… In musing about possible ways for a ship to conceal or dissipate its waste heat, I wonder about some kind of wide mesh of superconducting fibers/nanotubes, a sort of diffuse heat-radiator sail spread out extremely thinly. How large a surface area would you need to diffuse the heat from a ship at c. 300 K to make it blend in with the local thermal background? Probably a lot less within a star system than in deep interstellar space.
Alternatively, some fictional spaceship designs have large ablative shields of ice up front as meteoroid shields. Since it’s ice, it’d have to be relatively cold. So would it conceal the ship’s heat if if were coming head-on at the detector? Would it maybe be registered as a possible comet?
@89. Thunderstorms can go right over head, so be close enough to be indistinguishable. I’ve had that happen. Fricking scary. Not as scary as when the thunder precedes the lightning though, assuming you know your folklore. You don’t want to be around when that happens.
@92/random22: Yes, of course that can happen –as I said, basically everyone in the world has experienced thunderstorms, so we all should know how they work. The point is that in movies and TV, the thunder is always simultaneous with the lightning, no matter how far away it is.
@12: that sounds rather like Lynne Truss’s A Shot in the Dark, which is supposed to be funny. (The dustjacket says the radio series the book is based on ran four seasons, so somebody must have liked it….)
@49: what 2001 was wrong about is not how spaceflight happens in our 2019 but how soon it would get the way it is in the movie; we aren’t at the stage where Delta (Pan-Am being long dead) is running scheduled service to LEO. Or, to take a point you didn’t mention, space stations don’t spin to provide gravity because (roughly) they aren’t big enough yet. As for “puddle-jumpers”: authors ever since Tsiolkovsky had been pointing out that spaceflight would be much easier if separated into gravity-to-orbit and inter-orbit stages; Heinlein had a colorful simile for the awkwardness of the all-in-one model.
I listened to a scifi story podcast this week where global warming had decimated the planet, rain hadn’t happened in a long time. The atmosphere was so polluted that the sun doesn’t show for years and yet there was this place by LA that had these horrific fire storms…let’s see. Firestorms require trees, trees require both rain and sun. So how are there firestorms? Just some common sense thinking would have eliminated that from the story since it was a side vignette. It was a total stop sign for me.
A movie I remember was the planet is flooded and there is this ship like an ark and the ship is among icebergs. And yet, at the end, there are these people swimming around for like 10 minutes in the icy water trying to get on the ship. I guess hypothermia hadn’t been invented yet…
87: Are you Bezalel’s kid?
For stealth in space, I’d wrap some ice in black plastic, fire it off some icy planetoid with a rail gun, and call it a day. It’ll still be a bit above ambient temperature, and there’s no post-launch targeting, but that’s as good as you’ll get.
@95, there is usually daylight even if the clouds (of pollution) obscure the disc of the sun. Of course there should be minimal vegetation in Mordor. Rain… well, would a little humidity be enough for trees to survive? You could have rain that doesn’t quite reach the ground… Otherwise, you could have a really bad forest fire, but only once.
Or maybe people still go to the devastated forest for recreation and the view and they leave behind lots of single-use plastics and glass bottles, and that’s what burns?
Maybe the clouds of pollution contain some sort of flammable gas, and it is the air itself catching fire. And you have some sort of quick growing low level woody plant that grows, seeds, and dies quickly whenever there is any rain or sun. You could get piles of brush like tumbleweeds which can act as tinder and contribute to the pollution when the air catches fire.
People seem to think of stealth or camouflage in terms of making in harder for the other side to shoot you. From that point of view, better stealth is only useful if weapons range is greater than sensor range. Sensor range might be expected to be great in space, but the same is also true for weapons range. It is not as if the bullets are going to fall to earth, or be brought to a halt by friction. So an enemy would not be able to sneak up on you and board, but they might be able to sneak up to within a hundred thousand kilometres, and fire away.
The other point is that stealth might also be useful against the enemy surveillance network, if sensor range is much smaller than the theatre of operations. It might allow you to concentrate your forces against some point without the enemy being aware of it, or leave the enemy unable to guess where your own defences are strongest. Just because perfect stealth is impossible, does not mean imperfect stealth must be useless.
Having said all that, if you think about series like The Expanse, why does anyone have many warships in the first place? The point of warships is the bring weapons and sensors within range of the enemy, and Earth and Mars are already within missile range anyway. They could nuke each other to glory without building a single manned warship, so why bother?
By the second book it’s pretty clear actual war in space between groups completely dependent on life support is a really really bad idea. A strike on a habitable world kills billions but leaves survivors. A minor exchange on Ganymede sends it spiraling into dooooooooooooom. Does not seem to deter people, though.
Here is a link to the Springer SF series mentioned above: https://www.springer.com/series/11657 Springer is a German publisher of scientific books.
@82 Del
I like to think I’m the first guy to admit that I might be mistaken about anything. Maybe I deceive myself about that. If I did, how would I know? The argument that David Hume prefigured Darwin’s theory of evolution did seem pretty solid to me. Maybe I am just straining to find messages in old writings that aren’t really there, because it’s, you know, easy and attractive.
Now, I don’t think I do that. But that’s what I would think, wouldn’t I?
So I decided to reexamine the evidence.
I went back to Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. What I took for Hume’s evolutionary speculations occur in the context of a debate between Cleanthes and Philo about the Argument From Design. Cleanthes defends the Argument:
Look round the world: Contemplate the whole and every part of it: You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy which ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles, exactly, though it exceeds, the productions of human contrivance—of human design, though wisdom and intelligence. Since therefore the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble, and that the Author of nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man, though possessed of much larger faculties, proportioned to the grandeur of which he has executed. By this argument a posteriori, and by this argument alone do we prove at once the existence of a Deity and his similarity to human mind and intelligence.
Philo (Hume’s own alter ego) at first supports Cleanthes’s position with additional arguments and evidence. Then, having fortified his opponent, he proceeds to demolish him with a sustained, scintillating series of attacks against the Argument From Design. It’s some of the greatest literature in the history of ideas, as worth reading for pleasure as for edification (whether you agree with Hume or not). But I’ll restrict myself here to quoting and paraphrasing the passages most directly relevant to my position, which is that Hume prefigured the theory of evolution by natural selection and random mutation.
To Philo, the Design of the world implied a defective Deity:
One would imagine that this grand production has not received the last hand of the maker, so little finished is every part, and so coarse are the strokes with which it is executed. Thus the winds…assist men in navigation, but how oft, rising up to tempests and hurricanes, do they become pernicious! Rains are necessary to nourish all the plants and animals of the earth; but how often are they defective! How often excessive! …There is nothing so advantageous in the universe but what frequently becomes pernicious by its excess or defeat; nor has nature guarded with requisite accuracy against all disorders and confusion.
A perpetual war is kindled amongst all living creatures. Necessity, hunger, want, stimulate the strong and courageous; fear anxiety, terror agitate the weak and infirm. The first entrance to life gives anguish to the newborn infant and to its wretched parent; weakness, impotence, distress attend every stage of life, and it is at last finished in agony and horror. …Observe, too…the curious artifices of nature, in order to embitter the life of every being. … Consider that innumerable race of insects, which incessantly seek his misery and destruction… Man is the greatest enemy of man. Oppression, injustice, contempt, contumely, violence, sedition, war, calumny, treachery, fraud; by these they mutually torment each other…
Look around this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organized, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences…How hostile and destructive to each other! …The whole presents nothing but blind nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children.
Having so described the world, Philo proposes several outlandish hypotheses that fit appearance of design in nature at least as well as its creation by an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent Designer. From the evidence of the world, Philo says, God might likely be an infant, who afterwards abandoned his creation, “ashamed of his lame performance.” Or a senile deity, who’d forgotten about his creation, and allowed it to fall into ruin.
Should it surprise us, asks Philo, on the evidence of the world, to find that God was
a stupid mechanic, who imitated others, and copied an art, which through a long succession of ages, after multiple trials, mistakes, corrections, deliberations, and controversies, has gradually been improving?
Philo proposes several godless alternatives for the appearance of design in nature. One of them is evolution:
Instead of supposing matter infinite, as Epicurus did, let us suppose it finite. A finite number of particles is only susceptible to finite transpositions. And it might happen, in an eternal duration, that every possible order or position must be tried an infinite number of times…Is there a system, an order, an economy of things, by which matter can preserve that perpetual agitation, which seems essential to it, and yet maintain a constancy in the forms, which it produces? There certainly is such an economy; For this is actually the case with the present world. The continual motion of matter, therefore, in less than infinite transpositions, must produce this economy or order; and by its very nature, that order when once established, supports itself for many ages, if not to eternity. But wherever matter is so poised, arranged, and adjusted as to continue perpetual motion, and yet preserve a constancy in its forms, its situation must, of necessity, have all the same appearance of art and contrivance which we observe at present. … A defect in any of these particulars destroys the form; and in the matter, of which it is composed, is again set loose, and is thrown into irregular motions and fermentations, til it unite itself to some other regular form.
Suppose…that matter were thrown into any position, by a blind, unguided force; it is evident that this first position must in all probability be the most confuses and most disorderly imaginable; without any resemblance to those works of human contrivance, which, along with a symmetry of parts, discover an adjustment of means to ends and a tendency to self-preservation…Suppose the actuating force, whatever it may be, still continues in matter…Thus the universe goes on for many ages in a continued succession of chaos and disorder. But is it not possible that it may settle at last…? May we not hope for such a position, or rather be assured of it, from the eternal revolutions of unguided matter, and may not this account for all the appearing wisdom and contrivance which is in the universe?
I find my mind unchanged on this issue, Del. If Hume is not describing how complex forms, including by implication complex life, might arise and evolve according to natural variation and selective pressure, then I have no idea what he’s talking about. The author of the post I quoted earlier still seems justified in writing that in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion “we have all the components of natural selection: there is variation (matter thrown into all kinds of different forms) differential survival (some forms perish, others reproduce and continue their lineage through the ages) and the necessary result is the orderly world we see today (only plants and animals good enough to survive).” And Daniel Dennett still seems right to credit Hume with “a breathtaking anticipation of Darwin’s insight.”
Dennett also credits Denis Diderot with having foreshadowed Darwin: “I can maintain to you…that monsters annihilated one another in succession; that all the defective combinations of matter have disappeared, and that there have only survived those in which the organization did not involve any important contradiction, and which could subsist by themselves and perpetuate themselves.” The Durants suggest natural selection goes back to Lucretius.
Still, Darwin deserves the most credit, if anyone does, according to Dennett. Hume conjures natural selection “as a debating foil to Cleanthes’ vision of an all-wise Artificer.” He apparently didn’t think through the full implications of his idea. “Cute ideas about evolution had been floating around for millennia, but, like most philosophical ideas, although they did seem to offer a solution of sorts to the problem at hand, they didn’t promise to go any farther, to open up new investigations or generate surprising predictions that could be tested, or explain any facts they weren’t expressly designed to explain. The evolution revolution had to wait until Charles Darwin saw how to weave an evolutionary hypothesis into an explanatory fabric composed of literally thousands of hard-won and often surprising facts about nature. Darwin neither invented the wonderful idea out of whole cloth all by himself, nor understood it in its entirety even when he had formulated it. But he did such a monumental job of clarifying the idea, and tying it down so it would never again float away…”
I adapted the preceding from Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, (28-33) by Daniel Dennett, and The Age of Voltaire (150-153) by Will & Ariel Durant, authors responsible for piquing my interest in David Hume. They all impress me as brilliant and erudite.
Which is not to say they might not be wrong. Anyone can be. Including you, Del.
In any event, the proposition that someone anticipated natural selection in a book published 80 years before On the Origin of Species doesn’t seem quite so farfetched as, say, space aliens building the Pyramids.
@89/Bennett: As Starfurries travel at the speed of plot, thunder and lightning happen in the time frame of budget.
@104: Huh? What does budget have to do with whether the sound editor puts the thunder sound at the moment of the flash or several seconds later?
@Skallagrimsen: Philosophers are great synthesizers. Although there are specialties within philosophy (ex: ethics), they tend to be what we would call generalists: “Generalists often find their path late, and they juggle many interests rather than focusing on one. They’re also more creative, more agile, and able to make connections their more specialized peers can’t see.” -David Epstein
There’s a lot that could be said about natural philosophers as precursors to scientists. They conducted observations, but not in a structured or systematic way. Some of them consumed perhaps close to the entirety of knowledge available at the time on a particular topic. The gaps were so huge that an imaginative/creative person like Poe could make a leap and connect something a more rational/literal person would miss.
I haven’t read philosophy in ages (though still remember some of my Kierkegaard). One of the funniest bits attending faculty parties was if a prof from the Phil Dept showed up. Invariably, any assertion would be met with, “Define your terms!” Philosophers are wordsmiths and they argue at the level of the word. You could say they spin fictions that sometimes turn out to be right.
@105/Bennett: Because the longer a scene takes costs more and detracts from the drama (less drama equals less interest equals fewer viewers equals less ROI). Hence budget. I suppose you could still say it’s equivalent to Starfurries getting from A to B at the speed of plot.
@107: Huh? A difference of 2-5 seconds’ delay in a sound effect during a scene is hardly going to lengthen the scene as a whole. It’s not like the characters are going to stop everything and wait around for the thunder before they resume talking or moving; most of the time it’s just going to be a background element with no effect on the duration of the action or dialogue.
@Aggregat: “Starfurries”? Is that a new fandom?
This is what happens when we get past all the paraphrases and see the original: it turns out to have no resemblance to Darwin’s or Wallace’s theory. It’s particularly missing the vital ingredient of Descent with Modification. Without that concept, the idea of spontaneous evolution becomes the absurd image of the whirlwind in the junkyard that accidentally assembles a 747. It can’t work, and you can see why it was never identified in its own time as a relevant contribution to the debate, unlike say Lamarck who while wrong was at least pertinent to biological evolution. Only long after, and through a sort of pareidolia, does someone come after and say “hey, that’s like (my misunderstanding of) the famous theory of evolution! Guess those Darwin and Wallace guys weren’t so original.”
I have no doubt the same would be true of the 8th century Persian Atom Bomb, if we found the original text.
@Sunspear
“There’s a lot that could be said about natural philosophers as precursors to scientists. They conducted observations, but not in a structured or systematic way. Some of them consumed perhaps close to the entirety of knowledge available at the time on a particular topic. The gaps were so huge that an imaginative/creative person like Poe could make a leap and connect something a more rational/literal person would miss.”
Indeed, agree with you completely.
“Philosophers are wordsmiths and they argue at the level of the word. You could say they spin fictions that sometimes turn out to be right.”
Yes, they may propose valid hypotheses.
To be clear, I haven’t been arguing for the truth (or falsity) of Darwin’s theory. Only that Hume anticipated its essentials.
Never could get into Kierkegaard, but found some of the interpretive literature on him fascinating. Thanks for the David Epstein quote. I may look him up.
Kierkegaard is a special case in that half of his authorship, the one written under pseudonyms, is the significant part. The other half, earnest arguments for religious faith, aren’t worth general interest, unless of course, you are interested in confirmation of your faith.
His work on irony and silence set up quite a bit of ground for the existentialists.
Jlm @@@@@ 95:
I listened to a scifi story podcast this week where global warming had decimated the planet, rain hadn’t happened in a long time.
Yeah, that would have lost me right there. Global warming means more evaporation, which means more rain. (Of course, the location of rain may shift around, so certain areas could indeed get less. But overall, more rain.)
Also, if pollution is blocking sunlight from reaching the ground, that’s going to tend to mean cooling. (Increased air pollution in the mid-20th Century is what caused global warming to pause for a few decades.) If it was pollution in the form dark particulate matter, then that could absorb the sunlight and heat the air, but that part still sounds a bit dubious.
Jlm @@@@@ 95:
A movie I remember was the planet is flooded and there is this ship like an ark and the ship is among icebergs. And yet, at the end, there are these people swimming around for like 10 minutes in the icy water trying to get on the ship. I guess hypothermia hadn’t been invented yet…
Well, this page suggests that when the water is only a degree or two above freezing, it typically takes 15-30 minutes before you’re too exhausted to swim any more (or you lose consciouness); as long as you don’t drown, dying from hypothermia takes something more like 30-90 minutes.
Re simultaneous lightning and thunder in film and TV:
It’s possible this is a deliberate choice (or habit) driven by dramatic considerations. I.e., if you have simultaneous lightning and thunder, that’s a single event, which can be positioned in time so it doesn’t interfere with the scene except in the way the director wants it to. But if you have lightning followed some time later by thunder, you have two events and an uncertain time in between, which means the audience may end up being distracted by the delay (some wondering what happened to the thunder, others waiting for the thunder, possibly doing the “count the seconds to estimate the distance” thing while they do so). The uncertain delay thus introduces an additional, dramatically unnecessary form of tension into a scene.
(There’s also the fact that the real time delay between seeing lightning and hearing the thunder could be longer than a typical cut, which means you’d see the lightning in one cut but hear it in a different cut, which would probably be distracting.)
I honestly don’t care much about the science. I enjoy science tiction as fantasy (“space opera”) that provides a fun setting for stories, and I enjoy it as speculative fiction that examines how various sci-fi or science-related phenomena would affect culture. The departures from science have to be pretty egregious to bother me (and ones that are necessary for the plot – like FTL travel – don’t bother me at all). Though, having a biology background, biology errors bother me more than physics ones.
Deliberately hard-science-focused science fiction tends to bore me by focusing so heavily on the science that it neglects having engaging characters or an interesting plot. I dropped Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves partway through when (in addition to other issues) it became less a story and more “applied problems in engineering”.
@115/PeterErwin: Well, that wouldn’t explain the Young Indiana Jones episode where there was explicitly supposed to be a time lag, it was the whole point of the sequence, and the sound editors still got it wrong. Sometimes there isn’t an explanation for a thing beyond unthinking habit or carelessness.
If you all want to real a *genuinely* prophetic work, I would suggest The Machine Stops, from 1909.
@114, well I recall back at university swimming in a glacial lake which averages below 4c, and of our group of friends most went aarggh cold and got out immediately, one got out after 9 min with severe hypothermia, one after 19 min with mild hypothermia, and one did laps for at least 45 min before we got bored treating the others and made him get out. He was a bit chilly.
People are highly variable in their cold tolerances.
I mean, practically everyone on the planet has firsthand experience of actual thunderstorms, so there’s no excuse for not knowing there’s a time lag there.
I suspect a large fraction of the population doesn’t know there’s a time lag, or simply forgets about it when they’re not in the middle of a thunderstorm. (And there’s confusion induced by the fact that you can hear thunder from lightning you didn’t see, because it was hidden in the clouds.) People can be surprisingly ignorant and forgetful about things they experience, especially if they’re not actually interested in it; thus, there are people who think you can’t see the Moon during the day, even though they’ve undoubtedly seen the Moon during the day many times.
@120/PeterErwin: I acknowledge that there are a lot of people who are egregiously ignorant of things right in front of their faces. My position, though, is that it’s not okay to cater to that egregious ignorance and let it shape how fiction does things. That’s aiming for the lowest common denominator, and that’s not an approach I respect.
Mr Nicoll,
Could you add some parallel essays, like Better SFF through actual economics, …political science, …history, and …human behavior?
As someone who has a suppressor, a Sig-Sauer SRD76 QD (.30 cal.) I can speak to their “silencing” capabilities: I wouldn’t fire my 300 Blackout suppressed without wearing some level of hearing protection, at least on an indoor range. And that’s a fairly big and heavy can. The tiny hollywood ones wouldn’t silence a pop-gun.
To truly “silence” a shot the round has to be subsonic (otherwise you get the sonic boom)and you need a sealed breech (otherwise sound comes out the back-end), so the best weapon to “silence” is something like a bolt-action .22. A .22 pistol could be silenced, but you’d need a silencer the size of the .30 cal one I have. At that, the sound is changed as much as suppressed, and some of it gets converted to heat.
I personally never really understood how books qualifiy to be “Hard Science Fiction”. For example “Three Body Problem” is supposed to be Hard SF but a lot of the things happening there are barely plausible to downright impossible. I can even find mentions of Asimov’s “Foundation” (how is “Psychohistory” any sort of science at all?), Heinlein’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” (Farming on the Moon??? Basic Laser physics?) or even Bank’s “Consider Plebas” (basically everything in this book is nonsense) as “Hard SF”.
For me the science level of the Expanse books is about right. There is relatively little obvious nonsense and the story is very good.
@124/Kah-thurak: It’s not an exact science, pardon the expression. The goal is of hard SF is just to tell a story that feels credible and that gets the known science right (except where dramatic license demands otherwise), even if it extrapolates beyond it into conjectural sciences. After all, the most unrealistic thing of all would be to assume that people in the future would know nothing more about science than we know today.
And there’s no sharp dividing line either. Every writer chooses their own standard of how “hard” they wish to be, so there’s a whole spectrum (Mohs scale?) of hardness levels. Something like, say, Banks’s Culture may be less “hard” than Robert Forward or David Brin, but still a lot more “hard” than, say, Ursula LeGuin or Ray Bradbury.
After all, this is not a value judgment or a competition. Scientific hardness is a stylistic choice, that’s all. Genre labels are not meant to be used for shaming or gatekeeping.
I think I have done a couple of history ones and I know I’ve ranted about inanity of lunar helium three, which would be economics. Although human behavior is not my forte (just ask a certain local theatre group) I can definitely see a specific essay on it I could write, except Arkady Martine (whose debut novel I expect to see nominated for a Hugo), beat me to it.
Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish stories had some good fictional theoretical physics.
@122/swampyankee: “Could you add some parallel essays, like Better SFF through actual economics, …political science, …history, and …human behavior?“
The headline is “Better Science Fiction Through Actual Science.” It doesn’t specify the ‘hard” sciences exclusively. So I’d say the point is already covered — good science/research can enhance any work of fiction, whether it’s physical sciences, social sciences, military science, culinary science, or whatever area of knowledge is useful for the particular story you have to tell.
How about “Better Science Fiction thru the Humanities.” That wouldn’t necessarily get you better interpretation of human behavior, but it would get some readers out of the confines of only reading a narrow range of fiction, like say D&D, Star Trek, or Star wars novels. And I’d admit that literary fiction can also eat its own tail. If we judge by covers alone (I know, I know), much of it looks the same.
@129/Sunspear: Like I keep saying, it’s petty to try to turn this into some kind of fight between different disciplines. The principle is universal: drawing on knowledge benefits fiction. It’s not about one kind of knowledge being better than another. Celebrating one field of knowledge is not an attack on other fields.
> Scientific hardness is a stylistic choice, that’s all. Genre labels are not meant to be used for shaming or gatekeeping
Yes. Very much this. I think also you were thinking of the Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness.
SF encompasses everything from physics-is-everything to rule-of-funny-trumps-all.
@CLB: No one said it was, unless you choose to see it as such. The point I was making, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, is that genres can become insular. Sub-genres even more so. I enjoy Star Trek for example, but I wouldn’t only read that. I just finished one ST novel and that’ll hold me for quite awhile. I needed a palate cleanser, so currently reading Jared Diamond’s Upheaval.
To be clear, I’m not talking targeted research. It’s reading to broaden your general knowledge, akin to what Jo Walton has posted recently about her reading.
@128
But can you think of any examples of writers using political science to strengthen their secondary worlds and plots, rather than, say history? I have seen it pointed out that democracy has been around long enough to start doing statistics, and apparently parliamentary regimes tend to outperform presidential ones. (Mostly because it is easier to make yourself President for Life if you are President already, with unhappy results if someone tries it, or is suspected of trying to. Prime Ministers are too easily dismissed if they act up for that to be a worry.) So the general advice these days is to set up a Parliamentary system.
It seems to me we have a lot of fictional futures ruled by hereditary monarchies, and not many ruled by Parliaments elected by Single Transferable Vote, which seems to suggest that many authors are assuming that the distant future will be politically like the distant past. To be sure, there are others where the author seems to have made something up, but that is not the same thing as “seems to have been inspired by political science”.
@133/ad: I’ve found that my BA in History has been more useful in my science fiction than my BS in Physics, because I chose to focus on world history, non-Western societies, and cross-cultural interaction, which were valuable in developing stories about contacts and clashes between human and alien cultures with very different worldviews.
That Atomic Rockets site is wonderful! I like fiction that at least has a veneer of plausibility to it. You can play with science, but should do it in a way that is internally consistent.
And I enjoy reading books that pay as much attention to sociology, political science and economics as to the hard sciences. Some thinking regarding how the protagonists could afford their cool spaceship is just as important as the length of time it takes them to reach their destination.
The two, appallingly common, sf tropes I find most jarring are societies that are simultaneously libertarian and imperialistic and societies which have both egalitarian and have no government services.
Neither has ever happened
136: 19th century Britain ran an empire while pushing free trade and various classical liberal aka libertarian ideas.
Forager societies tend to be highly egalitarian while not having any formal government services, or government apart from band or tribe consensus.
@125 ChristopherLBennett
What I need in most stories is a certain level of consistency. Terry Pratchett could get away with a lot of things in a book that just would not work in most others because they are consistent with the world he was writing in.
The intersting thing here, and that is where my first post came from is this: Ian Banks is supposed to be relatively “Hard SF” while Ursula LeGuin is not. Now I only read one SF novel by LeGuin (Lathe of Heaven) and only one Novel by Banks (Consider Plebas) and while LeGuin included little physics in her story everything made sense in the context of the premise of the book, while with Consider Plebas I had the feeling that I was watching a Michael Bay movie – nothing made sense at all, but there sure were lots of explosions. And I observe similar things in other books that should, by their reputation, be “Hard SF” – I am a little curious how they got labeled that way.
That has the sound of universal truth ;-)
@136/swampyankee: “Neither has ever happened”
Isn’t that what science fiction is for? To depict things that haven’t happened yet? Besides:
@137/Damien: “Forager societies tend to be highly egalitarian while not having any formal government services, or government apart from band or tribe consensus.”
You beat me to it.
@138/Kah-thurak: I wonder what you would make of Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. As I already mentioned in comment #127, she underpinned her FTL communication technology with some quite convincing-sounding fictional physics. I wonder if she isn’t considered “soft SF” mostly because she also does anthropology well, or perhaps because of her predilection for small-scale stories.
@139,
Neither has ever happened for different reasons, but the first case — imperial libertarians –requires a powerful military, which requires high taxes and armed forces are the least libertarian institutions imaginabIe. I would also argue that imperialism is intrinsically contradictory to the basic philosophy of libertarianism, in that conquest is just taking property by force. For the second, do remember that quite a lot of antipathy to social spending by governments has been dictated by people who want to prevent social mobility; if access to education, capital, and income is restricted, it’s easy to keep people in their place.
@140/swampyankee: I guess egalitarianism without government services makes the most sense as egalitarianism without government. Which describes both the hunter-gatherer societies Damien mentioned and the political theory of (left-wing) anarchism.
As for the first one, I must admit that I don’t have a very clear idea of what “libertarianism” is, in the modern (US) sense of the word. But I have the impression that many people who want to be left alone by the government and are adverse to social spending are much less adverse to spending a lot of money on the military. So it seems to me that it’s entirely possible to have libertarianism on the inside and imperialism on the outside. It may be philosophically contradictory, but no more so than other types of successful societies people have come up with during the centuries. Perhaps you could even make sense of it philosophically, insofar as both seem to be characterised by a distrust of other people and the idea that one has to fend for oneself.
Edited: On further thought, that’s a psychological connection rather than a philosophical one. So I guess I’m saying libertarianism + imperialism may be philosophically unsound, but is psychologically plausible.
JanaJansen @@@@@ 139:
she underpinned her FTL communication technology with some quite convincing-sounding fictional physics.
Well… no. Reading The Dispossessed for the first time last year, I was struck by the delicate balancing job she did, providing just enough vague description to sound sort of plausible, while not providing enough details to make it clear what was going on, and thus leaving it open to clear inconsistencies with actual physics. It works as a description of how an isolated, independent physicist might do their work, but there isn’t really any plausible connection to the physics we know.
(Admittedly, my standard for “convincing-sounding fictional physics” is probably set by Greg Egan’s Schild’s Ladder — or his Orthogonal series, which is deliberately fictional but mathematically rigorous physics.)
Now, her biology is sometimes pretty wonky. E.g., the whole idea that just about everyone in the Ekumen, including human beings and the inhabitants of Gethen, are descended from colonists from a particular planet (which is not Earth).
It seems to me we have a lot of fictional futures ruled by hereditary monarchies, and not many ruled by Parliaments elected by Single Transferable Vote, which seems to suggest that many authors are assuming that the distant future will be politically like the distant past.
Or that the distant future will be politically like the near future. Hereditary monarchy is on the up – even if they don’t call themselves kings, there are more countries now than there used to be where the person in charge directly succeeded a parent.
@@@@@ swampyankee:
Damien is right: the 19th Century British Empire — and, one could add, the late 19th/early 20th Century US — were “libertarian” in many ways while simultaneously building and running empires.
One point to keep in mind is that if you are a rich society intent on conquering poorer societies, then — depending on the costs of technology — you don’t necessarily need a large military to do so, and you don’t necessarily need high taxes to pay for it. The US managed to conquer large parts of North America, parts of the Caribbean, Hawaii, and the Philippines prior to the introduction of income taxes. (And if you can figure out how to extract enough wealth and personnel from the places you conquer, so much the better — the British Army in India was largely made up of Indians, for example.)
Of course, the simpler solution is to declare that no societies of any kind have ever been “libertarian”. Then you can consistently object to both imperialistic and non-imperialistic libertarian societies in SF.
(And JanaJansen is perfectly correct: just because X and Y are philosophically inconsistent is no barrier to actual human societies promoting or practicing both at once. )
@110 Del
“hey, that’s like (my misunderstanding of) the famous theory of evolution! Guess those Darwin and Wallace guys weren’t so original.” Nothing I quoted and nothing I said was, like, “So shut up about that Darwin guy already! It was David Hume what dunnit!”
Evolution is one of my favorite ideas. I esteem Darwin as one of the greatest thinkers in history. I thought I made my admiration clear. Unless I did not, your comment seems informed by an uncharitable reading of my post.
That said, neither Darwin nor Wallace ever made grandiose claims of their own utter originality, that I know of. I thought, for example, that both Darwin and Wallace, in independently formulating their theories of natural selection, acknowledged a strong debt to Thomas Malthus. No idea emerges from a vacuum, and even the brightest of us build on each other’s knowledge. Will Durant was right to call modern thought a chamber of echoes
“Spontaneous evolution,” (an idea best associated with William Paley, but preempted by Hume: he was good at that) isn’t really evolution but (to the extent anyone believes in it) a species of Creationism. Early in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Philo addresses this idea specifically:
Throw several pieces of steel together, without shape or form; they will never arrange themselves so as to compose a watch… Stone and mortar, and wood, without an architect, never erect a house. But the ideas in a human mind, we see, by an unknown, inexplicable economy, arrange themselves as to form the plan of a watch of house. Experience, therefore, proves that there is an original principle of order in mind, not matter.
Note that Philo distinguishes “Spontaneous Evolution,” in advance, from his own position.
I understood Darwinian evolution to be the theory that living forms change, acquire complexity, and speciate in response to natural variation and selective pressure. Complex self-replicating organisms evolved from simpler forms over long periods of time. Living beings owe their forms—their “design”—to evolution.
Philo proposes that life might have evolved from simpler forms. Nothing surprising about that: evolutionary speculations go back at least to the pre-Socratics.
But does Philo suggest the Darwinian mechanism whereby evolution occurs?
First it must be said that in the most relevant passages, Philo discusses the evolution of all matter, not just living matter. But the discussion doesn’t exclude living matter either. Indeed, since Philo’s entire ambition is to dismantle the teleological argument (the Argument From Design), and since Creationists always point to life’s intricate symmetries as the foremost proof of the Great Artificer, it seems reasonable to say that Philo is especially concerned, if anything, with living matter.
How might ordered matter, including the ordered matter called life, in all its “prodigious variety,” arise out of disorder? Philo suggests a finite number of particles in unguided motion, over an infinite span of time, might produce, by chance, an ordered arrangement which would, once established, by its very nature, tend to perpetuate itself “for many ages, if not eternity.” Hence the apparently orderly structure of matter.
But what of that matter “so poised, arranged and adjusted” that we call it life? How does it “preserve constancy in its forms?” How do organic forms perpetuate themselves unto eternity? Philo can’t mean organisms are immortal. Clearly they die. What can he mean but procreation? Life extends its forms, however imperfectly, into the future, if at all, by reproduction. In the case of the higher lifeforms, selecting mates. All lifeforms replicate.
But whence then those special characteristics of living matter? Whence its forms, traits and adaptations? Those “appearance(s) of art and contrivance?” That tendency towards “self-preservation?” Were these specially created? Or did they come about all at once, by sheer chance, as in Hume’s Paley’s famous example?
Neither, suggests Philo. Rather these forms and traits, adaptations and contrivances, came about incrementally. Only “through a long succession of ages, after multiple trials, mistakes, corrections, deliberations, and controversies,” has life ever improved.
But what mechanism modifies descent? Some organisms die, some live. Which ones die? Those that are defective. The living pass their essence of form, a resemblance of themselves, comingled with that of a mate in higher animals, to their descendents. The dead go extinct. Natural selection.
Granted the point might have been clearer. Philo might better have said that life “progresses” rather than “improves” as it develops. But improvement still implies change. It might have more accurate to add “or misfortune” to his “defect of the particulars that destroys an organism,” and then also added, “before it reproduces and thus extends itself into the future.” He might have emphasized that deficiency isn’t an intrinsic quality of a thing, but a circumstance ever shifting according to contingency.
Granted too, Philo doesn’t clearly suggest that lifeforms diverged from one another, as illustrated by the phylogenetic tree. From a prima facie reading one might conclude that he meant that each species of life, no matter how similar, acquired its design by its own unique evolutionary path. But he might not have dwelled on the interrelatedness of life, as regards to his hypothesis, because he saw no need to. The idea that earlier, simpler forms progenerated later, more complex ones, and that lifeforms are related as distant cousins are related, had been firmly within the purview of evolutionary speculations since the Ancient Greeks. In fact, the idea long predates the pre-Socratics in the mythologies of many disparate peoples across the world. It would have been within the intellectual framework of that small, highly-educated segment of Hume’s contemporaries who might ever read a book like Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. He could assume they’d know what he was driving at.
Given the above, and the fact that Hume situated all these remarks alongside such a vivid description of that struggle for life which drives evolutionary change—a description worthy of Hobbes or Darwin himself—, and given the inescapable resemblance between Hume’s “stupid mechanic god” and the “blind watchmaker” of the Grand Mufti of the Church of Neo-Darwinism himself, I just can’t see how it’s reaching to claim that Hume anticipated Darwin.
But suppose I am reaching, Del. How much then? Is it really true that Hume’s evolutionary speculations bear “no resemblance” to Darwin’s great theory? None whatsoever? Hume wrote in the language Darwin would speak. Hume’s legacy was part of the intellectual milieu in which Darwin would develop. Hume ventured the most sustained, mostly tightly and thoroughly reasoned, the most artfully incandescent critique of Darwinism’s philosophical archrival, Intelligent Design, yet known to the history of ideas. He did it in a book published just 30 years before Darwin’s birth. Are Hume’s evolutionary speculations really just as far from the Darwinian narrative as any other origin story to be found in the whole world’s reservoir of philosophies, mythologies and scriptures?
As to why Hume’s speculations weren’t identified as relevant contributions to the evolutionary debate, there’s a better explanation than because they had none. Hume wasn’t formulating a testable scientific hypothesis to explain the origin of species. He was giving free reign to a brilliant imagination, conjuring thought experiments to illuminate points in a philosophical argument about how different conjectures might explain the same fact. Evolution was but one of several hypotheses that Hume offered, giving no indication that he was particularly swayed by any off them; and in the end professes agnosticism on the deep truth of the issue under discussion.
But Hume need not believe his own hypothesis, or thought it very plausible, or even taken it that seriously, for it yet to have anticipated the essentials of Darwinian theory. The reason it didn’t have much impact was more likely that Hume’s readers didn’t consider the full implications of the idea—as Hume himself apparently also did not. But he didn’t need to think it all the way through in order for it to have been so prescient.
The synthesis of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution that is modern biology might have theoretically occurred well within the 19th century. Instead it had to wait until the 1930s. Why? Because Gregor Mendel was ignored and forgotten. And Mendel’s contribution wasn’t a deliriously inspired flight of fancy buried, among many others, in an old philosophical dialogue. It was a formal, rigorously-reasoned scientific theory supported by a vast body of painstakingly acquired empirical data. Profundity is no proof against obscurity. A similar tale is told of Alfred Wegener, who was laughed out of the academy for his ridiculous theory of continental drift, which the years would vindicate and turn into scientific orthodoxy. There are many examples of great ideas hiding in plain sight.
Lastly, Del, I didn’t say 8th century Persian atom bomb. I said that Jabir ibn Hayyan had speculated about the possibility of atomic power. He was one of several examples I advanced to support another point. When I wasn’t able to confirm it with a goggle search I immediately and publically retracted it, barring further investigation. Had I been writing for publication, and not on a comment thread, I would have verified it first, rather than relying on an old and perhaps inaccurate memory. If I may say so, my point holds up just fine without him. But I will be more careful in the future.
Thank you for adding “pareidolia” to my vocabulary. And for motivating me to revisit one of my favorite books.
@142/PeterErwin: “Reading The Dispossessed for the first time last year, I was struck by the delicate balancing job she did, providing just enough vague description to sound sort of plausible, while not providing enough details to make it clear what was going on, and thus leaving it open to clear inconsistencies with actual physics. […] there isn’t really any plausible connection to the physics we know.”
No, there isn’t. But she had to come up with a justification for FTL communication, which probably isn’t possible, so the physics had to be both different and vague. Or so I assumed – I haven’t read Greg Egan yet. At least she made it sound like physics, or perhaps mathematics: Sequency Theory, Simultaneity Theory, and the way each of them describes only part of reality. Compared to “we just convert spaceships to tachyons”, that’s pretty good.
“Now, her biology is sometimes pretty wonky. E.g., the whole idea that just about everyone in the Ekumen, including human beings and the inhabitants of Gethen, are descended from colonists from a particular planet (which is not Earth).”
Yes and no. That was pretty much the standard explanation for humanoid aliens back in the day, and at least she tackles the inherent flaw: “But now that there is evidence to indicate that the Terran Colony was an experiment, the planting of one Hainish Normal group on a world with its own proto-hominid autochthones […]” (The Left Hand of Darkness). Six years earlier, Pierre Boulle simply put humans and apes on an alien planet in La planète des singes and didn’t explain that at all.
So perhaps Le Guin isn’t on the “hard” end of the SF spectrum, but I’d say she isn’t on the “soft” end either.
@143/ajay: “[…] there are more countries now than there used to be where the person in charge directly succeeded a parent.”
Could you give some examples? Because the first example of a ruler succeeding a parent I could think of is the Gandhi-Nehru family, which used to rule India, but no longer does so.
@146
In the US we had Bush the Younger succeeding Bush the Elder after the Clinton Interregnum.
JanaJansen @@@@@ 146:
At least she made it sound like physics, or perhaps mathematics
Well, yes, that was kind of my point: she made it sound like physics, which is not quite the same thing as basing it on real physics.
That was pretty much the standard explanation for humanoid aliens back in the day
That doesn’t mean it was good biology! (It’s not like we knew humanoid aliens existed and scientists were trying to explain it.) The fact that humans are descended from ancestral apes, and are thus close cousins of chimpanzees, etc. — and more distant cousins to all other life on earth — was well-established by the mid-20th Century.
Le Guin’s “humanoid aliens are mostly descended from Hainish colonies” was about as scientifically plausible as Niven’s scenario in Protector (“humans are descended from a fallen colony of the Pak”).
JanaJansen @@@@@ 146:
@@@@@143/ajay: “[…] there are more countries now than there used to be where the person in charge directly succeeded a parent.”
Could you give some examples?
Leaving aside the traditional monarchies that have been around since at least the early 20th Century (Morocco, Bhutan, etc.),[*] we could count:
Azerbaijan — Ilham Aliyev succeeded his father Heydar Aliyev in 2003.
North Korea — the Kim dynasty, now in its third generation (first father-son succession in 1994).
Syria — Bashar al-Assad, succeeded his father Hafez al-Assad in 2000.
Gabon — Ali Bongo Ondimba succeeded his father Omar Bongo (after a disputed election, so not quite automatic) in 2009.
Of course, we’ve also had a traditional monarchy come to an end in Nepal (2008), and Joseph Kabila, who suceeded his father Laurent-Désiré Kabila in 2001, stepped down earlier this year, so perhaps Congo no longer counts.
I’m not sure there’s really been a statistically significant increase in monarchies lately, although it seems clear that the rapid decrease in monarchies that was part of the early and mid-20th Century has sputtered out.
[*] To avoid confusion, I’m assuming that what ajay meant by “the person in charge” is the person with political authority, so constitutional hereditary monarchies don’t count. (Not that there have been any new examples of those that I’m aware of…)
Wiredog @@@@@ 147:
In the US we had Bush the Younger succeeding Bush the Elder after the Clinton Interregnum.
No, that doesn’t count — ajay’s claim was about cases where “the person in charge directly succeeded a parent”. That means that George H.W. and George W. Bush don’t count, and neither do John and John Quincey Adams. (Nor do the examples of the Pitts and Grenvilles as father-and-son British Prime Ministers, or the Trudeaus in Canada, or …)
@148/PeterErwin: Le Guin obviously knew that humans were descended from ancestral apes, or she wouldn’t have written the line I quoted.
No, it wasn’t good biology. But if you want to have aliens as stand-ins for humans, it doesn’t get much better than that. It’s like FTL travel, you start with an implausible world and try to make it appear plausible.
@149/PeterErwin: Thanks!
At least LeGuin’s premise of all humanoids sharing a common origin makes more sense than the version in Banks’s Culture, where the “humans” are several unrelated alien species that just coincidentally evolved into forms nearly identical to humans.
@68/@65: Thanks Christopher for saying that before I had to. Saying “Take Greg Egan, hard sf, certainly no worn tropes, but plausible concepts with no science behind them” is contradictory. There can’t be “hard sf” without science behind it! Egan is the diamond of hard SF. Schild’s Ladder is absolutely impossible—in our universe—but the science is brilliant. Incandescence almost convinced me that I could work out celestial mechanics from first principles.
> Something like, say, Banks’s Culture may be less “hard” than Robert Forward or David Brin, but still a lot more “hard” than, say, Ursula LeGuin or Ray Bradbury.
Wait, what? The Culture books are fun but they’re about as ‘hard’ as brie in a Dubai summer. They do simplify the Star Trek transporter intoi a local wormhole thing, so at least that cuts out transporter plots. Brin’s written a bunch of things but the Uplift books are even softer than the Culture, with probability manipulation and I think psychic powers and vast cultural stasis.
LeGuin is way harder. She handwaved human ‘aliens’ (while at least trying to accommodate biology better than Niven) and the ansible and the NAFAL drive (which respects relativity if not plausible energy budgets), and I think that’s it. It’s a much harder universe — physically and psychologically — than anything on your list other than Forward.
@153/Damien: I’ll admit that my familiarity with LeGuin is less than it should be so I probably mischaracterized her. I guess I expect her SF to be soft because I know her mainly from her fantasy work (I read the Earthsea Trilogy as a kid).
As for Brin, yes, the Uplift universe is fairly loose with the science, but Brin has done plenty of other things that are much stricter with the science and futurism, like Earth and Existence, and it was those that I was referring to. After all, Brin is an actual astrophysicist. Even when he explores fanciful science, it’s still with a scientifically savvy mindset — as in The Practice Effect, an early Brin novel set in an alternate reality where entropy worked differently so things got better with use rather than wearing out. It was definitely semi-fantasy, but riffing on real science.
That’s my standard for hard SF. It’s not about whether the science is exactly the same as in our world, because that’s not the point of science fiction. It’s about the degree of scientific awareness evident in the story, even when that means acknowledging how much the story’s imaginary or fanciful science diverges from normal science as we know it. The Practice Effect revolved around a fantasy alternative to entropy, but the very concept make us think about entropy and conveyed the idea of how entropy works through its fictitious opposite. So it was scientifically literate even without being scientifically rigorous. And that’s what matters to me. Because science fiction is about exploring ideas, not just passing a test or getting things “right.” A story can explore scientific ideas, or explore fanciful ideas through a scientific mindset, without being completely grounded in reality.
All the humanoid aliens are just convergent evolution.
The Practice Effect sounds like Sheldrake‘s morphogenectic fields, so it’s real pseudoscience.
@155/birgit: I’ve never bought convergent evolution as an explanation for humanoids. Yes, convergent evolution produced wings multiple different times, but nobody would ever confuse a bird wing, a bat wing, a pterosaur wing, and an insect wing. Convergence produces broad similarities, not exact duplications. I can believe there are some other aliens out there with bipedal, erect stances and binocular vision, but I can’t believe they could dress in off-the-rack human clothes or be able to put on a hat and walk around unnoticed on an Earth street.
And no, The Practice Effect was about a parallel universe where thermodynamics worked differently.
@Sunspear
Kierkegaard has influenced me indirectly, through a strong influence on Camus, Kafka, Jacques Ellul, and, one of the loves of my literary life, Jorge Luis Borges. And no doubt many others. The whole worlds of art and thought feel Kierkegaard’s gravity. What I read about him, and excerpted from him, fascinated me. But I’ll never read him comprehensively unless I retire.
@157:
I’m pretty sure that the ending of The Practice Effect implied that something other than a parallel universe was going on (no spoilers).
Now Nourse’s The Universe Between did have a brief mention of a parallel universe where entropy worked backwards.
@134
I feel sure that a lot of authors have paid more attention to history than physics while worldbuilding and plotting! But it seems to me the difference between history and social science, is the difference between natural history and biology. If you are trying to find interesting facts about what is and has happened, that is a form of history (such as natural history). If you are trying to identify patterns which you can use to make predictions about the world, that is a form of science (such as biology).
Of course, social science seems to have found few such patterns reliably (look at the replication crisis) but I wonder if there are any that could provide inspiration.
Put another way: stories have been written that dramatize perturbation theory or human evolution. Have any been written that dramatize any social science result?
@159/ad: History is one of the social sciences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_science It’s not just about documenting facts, it’s about examining the causes and processes behind historical events, the how and why as well as the what.
ad @@@@@ 159:
Of course, social science seems to have found few such patterns reliably (look at the replication crisis) but I wonder if there are any that could provide inspiration.
Mmm…. I’m not sure there’s much of a replication crisis in the social sciences at large, because they don’t generally deal with things that can potentially be replicated. Psychology, sure — that’s one of the loci classici of the crisis (biomedical research is another) — but that’s about performing repeatable laboratory experiments with human behavior, which isn’t really something you can do with history, for example.
Damien @@@@@ 153:
LeGuin is way harder. She handwaved human ‘aliens’ (while at least trying to accommodate biology better than Niven) and the ansible and the NAFAL drive (which respects relativity if not plausible energy budgets), and I think that’s it.
I think the reality is that she started off with a fair amount of dubious stuff, including both telepathy and FTL, and later dropped some of it. Here’s a quote from Charlie Jane Anders’ appreciation of the Hainish Cycle:
and a bit later:
I was reading the stories in The Birthday of the World recently, and the final story — “Paradises Lost” — has some very dubious handwaving about a “gravity sink” mysteriously and unexpectedly accelerating the generation ship very rapidly to 0.8 of lightspeed, without anyone on board noticing. Which is a bit hard to believe. (It’s a great story otherwise.)
How does she accommodate biology better than Niven?
@159:
Sure. One example is “Snowball Effect” by Katherine MacLean (available here legally for free) https://www.gutenberg.org/files/50766/50766-h/50766-h.htm
@162/PeterErwin: “I think the reality is that she started off with a fair amount of dubious stuff, including both telepathy and FTL, and later dropped some of it.”
I remember her saying that she dropped mindspeech because she “no longer believed in it”. I’d say she started off with a fairly standard space opera universe: Her 1966 novel Rocannon’s World featured FTL, telepathy, a primitive planet with beautiful women, interstellar war, and a spaceman on a revenge trip who was called “starlord” by the natives and had a planet named after him. And then she changed it, book by book, into something more realistic and unique.
#145, @Skallagrimsen:
He published in an obscure, regional, specialist’s journal. It was, I believe, his only scientific publication. Nobody beyond a few gardeners was even aware of it, or him (except as an abbot).
Also, it was fraudulent, but that wasn’t known until much later.
@165/Carl: That’s superficially true, but it doesn’t do him justice. He experimented extensively and meticulously over years, observed his results and came to profound conclusions. That’s why he’s called the father of genetics.
I love stories that teach me something. Science can be difficult when presented in a dry, nothing-but-the-facts kind of way. I am a scientist, a teacher, and a science fiction writer. My books tend to have lots of science. Want a bit of planetology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, biochemistry of life, and physics with your narrative? Check out “Harvest” — this is my latest story about first contact. I use narrative to sneak in a quite a bit of science… I also include a long list of references and bibliography — you never know, someone might actually want to look at the source materials. Tricky, I know… (here’s the first few chapters: https://interfaces.com/blog/my-books/harvest/)
@72 As I understand it, before Gernsback came up with the term “scientifiction,” then modified to “science fiction,” the most common term for works by such as Wells, Verne, Serviss, et al. was “scientific romance.” The concept was taking the older definition of “romance”–a “heroic adventure”–and integrating some “scientific” aspect based in extrapolating from the knowledge of the times, such as advanced mechanisms, life on other planets, etc.
No mention of Forward?