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.
Originally published in May 2019.
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 was a finalist for the 2019 Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, and 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…
I just got totally lost in this website for all of my lunch time- but now I want to read (and write!) some stories about rockets and space travel! Guess what I’m doing this weekend?!
Since you seem to be daring us, I guess I’ll respond.
Most of the anti-stealth-in-space arguments I’ve seen revolve around the difficulty of masking the IR emissions of a crewed or accelerating ship against a deep space background. The ship can contain its thermal emissions with an on-board heat sink, but only for a temporary time span. When people respond with schemes to use refrigerated shields to redirect heat emissions away from the viewer and obscure the ship, it’s pointed out that the unshielded hot side would still subtend a significant fraction of the sky that might include sensors, and the smaller you wanted that fraction of the sky to be, the less energy efficient the ship would be and the brighter it would shine to sensors in that sky region. And if you wanted the ship to accelerate or change direction, the hot exhaust of the rockets would be unshieldable.
These criticisms don’t necessarily work depending on the intended use of the stealth system. If you’re an Oort cloud cruiser that wants stealth to give you an advantage in close-up fights that are done in 2 minutes, it may not really matter if a sensor a light-hour away sees you. And a reaction engine just has to accelerate mass up to high velocity, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a heat engine. Electric motors can throw mass, and there’s no requirement placed on the temperature of that mass, unlike a chemical rocket. So if our Oort cruiser has enough thermal shielding to temporarily vanish from the oncoming missile’s sensors, and its electric mass drivers have enough oomph to move it slightly out of the way while the missile can’t see it, that may be worthwhile.
One could even get fancy and imagine something with a thick shuttered refrigerated shell that can quickly trickle out heat on sides of its hull directly opposing IR-bright objects like planets or the Sun. There would be spread of the heat emissions, but it might be controllable for close observers within the “tactical light cone.”
Before dismissing proposed space stealth as silly, I think it’s instructive to look at stealth systems on real life planes and submarines. These systems tend to enormously increase the expense and impracticality of regular planes and ships, eating up large fractions of defense research budgets. None of them really give you a free lunch; they all tend to try to change their emissions into a form for which it’s hoped the enemy isn’t looking. Think old radar-reflective stealth systems on planes, where it’s invisible to an oncoming radar station but would light up the sky if another station was placed at the correct orientation to it. Or a submarine propeller that is low-noise in most of the spectrum, but has to be hidden from cameras so nobody figures out the frequency bands in which it’s very audible. There are spy movies about stolen <thermal/acoustic/whatever> signatures for a reason. Real stealth is pricey sleight-of-hand, not magic invisibility cloaks.
So if our stealth spacecraft is expensive and inefficient, and needs adequate intelligence on the positions and capabilities of enemy sensors to plan successful missions, that would be par for the stealth course. If there are hostile space superpowers, each will be constantly setting up sensors in its own territory, denying its enemy access to its territory, trying to place sensors in its enemy’s territory and watching for its enemy doing the same to it, putting its own sensors in disputed or neutral zones, searching for and destroying its enemy’s sensors in those zones, conducting espionage to find out its enemy’s capabilities, and etc. Cold war stuff. They won’t hesitate to drop a fortune on something that might marginally let them get a drop on the other. And as mentioned, depending on the timescale for which stealth is required, the speed of light may interact with all this in complicated ways. These sorts of questions aren’t generally accounted for by the standard stealth-in-space criticisms.
Even if one or both sides can build a vast sensor network that spans all views of the entire solar system without it getting degraded or hacked by the other side, unless it is very cheap to run or useful for something else besides finding stealth ships, it may not fully solve the problem. Politically, governments probably won’t pay to perfectly maintain an enormous 100-year old sensor network whose only purpose is looking for stealth ships that people stopped using 95 years ago because of the sensor network. They’ll let it gradually degrade until they get bitten again; the use of stealth ships and vast ship-detecting sensor networks will fluctuate around an equilibrium set by their relative expense.
As such I’m not super convinced by the back-of-the-envelope anti-stealth arguments. They don’t tend to account for real world factors that confound simple analysis, and many of them make basic errors, like using the CMB as the space thermal background. I’m guessing the same sorts of analysis applied to Earth might confidently declare that submarines will never be used because sonobuoys are cheap, or something like that. Stealth in space might not be worth doing for future space empires, but nobody is going to prove it conclusively today and certainly not on the back of an envelope.
That website is a wonderful resource, a real labor of love.
Neil Stephenson’s Anathem had an ad hoc temporary stealth approach to an orbiting spacecraft. It took a lot of minute-by-minute expediencies, though, and probably couldn’t be used twice or anywhere but in low planetary orbit.
Still, it was ingenious, I thought.
Being somebody who has worked on stealth…
Quite a few people (including people who should know better) think that stealth is some sort of Hogwarts Invisibility Cloak. It’s not; it makes a vehicle harder to detect and target and it makes it easier for countermeasures to fool enemy sensor systems.
What space stealth — or terrestrial stealth absolutely will not do is make something completely undetectable. What it will do is increase the effectiveness of your ECM and reduce the amount of time the other guy’s sensors can effectively target your assets.
Actual scientist here, and I’ve given up.
I love hard SF, but it has really disintegrated since the likes of Hal Clement. When I tried to read Cixin Liu, I threw the damn books against a wall. He didn’t even try. I mean, the Hubble Telescope is a big lens? Is it really so hard to get that right? And it went downhill from there.
I’ve gotten to the point where I prefer things that don’t even try to be scientifically accurate, so long as they depict worlds other than the one we live in.
The one author who at least tries to get it right and mostly succeeds, at least in his current incarnation, is Ian MacDonald. And it completely baffles me how the Three Body bullshit can win an award when Luna does not.
OK, so I took a look at that and zeroed in on how FTL implies time travel since that is in my professional specialty, relativity theory.
No no no no no! The argument is OK up to the point when he draws a conclusion. Then it is completely wrong. FTL does not imply time travel. It implies acausality, a violation of cause and effect. The point about a spacelike hypersurface is that there is no unique time ordering whereas there is on a timelike hypersurface.
How would a machine that violates cause and effect not be a time machine?
That website is an excellent resource on astrodynamics, rocket engineering, life support, and many other topics relevant to SF. Just don’t use it as a resource on website design. Yeesh. Anyway, the website even mentions the biggest problem with all hard-SF space travel settings: automation. The machine you’re reading this on requires no food, water, oxygen, or gravity, masses a tiny fraction of a human body mass, and can perform nearly all the tasks that human characters perform in science fiction, from piloting spacecraft to mining to combat. Even if it needs human judgement, Earth is never more than a few hours away by radio. So it’s very difficult to justify sending human beings into space instead of machines. The author of the website acknowledges this, but says that simple machines travelling through space make for poor stories, and advises writers to ignore the problem and just use human astronauts instead.
Autonomous robots are actually pretty terrible in comparison to humans when it comes to anything but very simple tasks. We use them for scientific exploration of the solar system because they’re cheap, but they’re probably not better than human astronauts (or really humans + robots) in terms of money spent per amount and quality of information gained.
Humans require launching a lot more support mass than robots, which means more launch costs, but SpaceX’s rate of progress is showing that there is actually a lot of potential to greatly decrease launch costs without requiring any particularly crazy new technologies. We’ll probably be able to launch a crew of astronauts to Mars (with all the required supplies and life support equipment) for an attainable price a lot sooner than we’ll be able to build robots with the intelligence and dexterity to match the capabilities of that crew. It seems to be a lot easier to build a cheaper rocket than an artificial human. So justifying sending humans to explore the Moon and Mars doesn’t seem difficult to me.
The difficulty is when you start talking about colonizing the Moon and Mars, which means you need your town of scrappy Mars colonists to be hundreds or thousands of times more economically productive than similarly sized towns on Earth. Which basically requires the science fiction robots after all.
Watching The Expanse, I did wonder what all those people in the Asteroid Belt actually did for a living. Do they go into more detail in the books?
Maybe the reason Belters are so poor is that when you get down to it, there’s no justifiable economic reason for a Belter civilization? In the later books there is anxiety on Mars and the Belt that (um, this may a spoiler for the tv show. Let me see how far they’ve got) what’s beyond the Ring may doom their communities by offering more easily accessible resources.
I think they mine for metals. Tycho Station is considered the Belt and they do shipbuilding.
I think the authors said that overpopulation on Earth came back and that is the reason why people colonized space. But in interviews they’re pretty up front that it’s an excuse and not everything in the setting makes sense.
Which raises the question of why the Terries are not themselves using robots. There is a certain set of SF works where one has to assume the Earth is surrounded by a mysterious field that precludes the use of high technology.
(Charles Sheffield had an interesting counter example in his Proteus books. Spacers were technologically conservative because they wanted to be very sure the machines on which their lives depended would actually work in space. Reliability trumped shiny.
@2: All of what I have tried to articulate, but done so much better than I could.
I know of a fanfic that makes beautiful use of stealth as exploitation of the enemy’s expectations. It’s set in a universe in which humans colonized a lot of planets that had no sentient inhabitants. The people of Planet A have benefited from their ancestors’ excellent planning and luck. Everything on Planet A is super duper hyperspatial crystal memory wi-fi technobabble. The colonists of Planet B were much less lucky and also less well equipped. Their descendants endured infrastructure collapse and intense privation; they had just barely achieved the goal of re-creating the infrastructure of the original colonists when starfarers from Planet A et al. made contact.
But that meant that there were people on Planet B who were comfortable using technology that was so far in the past for Planet A that they didn’t have names for it anymore. And so, the folks on Planet A didn’t, for example, have any defense against somebody figuring out how to plant a tiny, quiet audio-video tape recorder in a private office and come back for it later. Their bug-sweeping technology was simply not calibrated for small analog electrical devices, because they were in the business of manipulating technobabble energy fields.
Of course, when the resulting recordings were used as evidence in a court martial, the explanation had to be entered into the record and the advantage of secrecy was lost. But for a while, video cameras were the ultimate in stealth technology.
I’m an engineer and postgrad who has just published a paper on robotic exploration strategies for the lunar surface. So I consider myself reasonably well-read in peer reviewed space science and tech. I have to say, what passes for sci-fi today is mostly fantasy. Hard-SF is increasingly difficult to find. I think the reason for that is it requires a certain discipline which has gotten progressively more difficult over the past few decades. As science and engineering gets more complicated, delivering more possiblities, and the general reader is more educated and exposed to these, the onus is on the writer to get more educated themselves. If the domain of knowledge they need in order to do this expands, their own research requirements and time increases. Thus as time goes one (during a phase of technological progress) being ‘up to date’ is going to get harder and harder.
So when I find a good hard SF writer, I rejoice. When I find a good AND entertaining hard SF writer, I buy a lottery ticket. Unfortunately the Venn diagram there doesn’t have a large area of intersection…
Isaac Asimov described John Campbell rejecting a story with a drawing of the molecular structure of skunk spray. Asimov replied that the next one would be [molecular structure of the sweet scent of new-mown hay]. I don’t think many authors and editors could assume the same common knowledge to communicate like that today. On the other hand, now they have emojis.
I do get an extra kick when the science is plausible, which most of the time it isn’t. I’m one of those spoil sports who thinks that Special Relativity prevents even journeys where you arrive at your destination faster than light could have. That means no wormholes. Yet I still enjoy books and media with FTL travel and consider it to be SF, rather than fantasy. The difference is that the writer feels the need for an explanation. It might be the most utter hogwash handwavium, but the universe of the story is one where things have to be explained. In most fantasy, magic or creatures like dragons just are. Tolkien did devote some energy elsewhere in his legendarium to explaining dragons, but he’s an exception. Most writers of dragons don’t invest anywhere near the thought that, say, Peter Watts did in creating his thoroughly science fictional vampires for Blindsight. In reading SF, you should at least wonder how things are working. This is not to denigrate fantasy. Fantasy has different purposes, that’s all. In horror, explanations can actually lessen the horrific effect. Explanations of what was going on in Hill House, in either in the Robert Wise movie or the Shirley Jackson movie, would have lessened the horror.
BillReynolds @@@@@ 18:
Special Relativity prevents even journeys where you arrive at your destination faster than light could have. That means no wormholes.
I think the logic is: the wormhole creates a spacetime shortcut. When you travel through the wormhole, you’re not traveling faster than light travels through the wormhole itself. So Special Relativity is not violated.
PeterErwin @@@@@ 19
I think it all still messes with causality, though.
@20 Not causality, just Euclidean geometry.
Wormholes don’t violate special relativity; they’re permitted by general relativity.
In any case, I think the idea that “[perceived] causality precludes FTL” is not a logically equivalent to “if there is FTL, then there will be cases where causality is [perceived] to be violated” is false. If FTL (that doesn’t involve wormholes) exists, we’ll have to figure out how to deal with cases where causality seems to be violated.
@@@@@ 22, swampyankee
In any case, I think the idea that “[perceived] causality precludes FTL” is not a logically equivalent to “if there is FTL, then there will be cases where causality is [perceived] to be violated” is false. If FTL (that doesn’t involve wormholes) exists, we’ll have to figure out how to deal with cases where causality seems to be violated.
That’s how it happened in Time for the Stars. Research on the FTL nature of twin-telepathy lead to an understanding of physical FTL space travel.