I have a personal rule for how I view SF movies and shows and it is this: They get to break one fundamental rule of science. Stretching doesn't count, it has to be shattering a rule.
By that yardstick, generally the most often broken rule is faster-than-light travel, whether jumping to "hyperspace" or "warp drive" or just jumping from one place to another. Unless the action takes place wholly within a star system (Firefly/Serenity), then if the flick or show is a space opera, it has to travel to the stars.
One I'll pretty much spot everyone, for cost reasons, is artificial gravity. It is probably prohibitively expensive for most films to shoot an entire movie aboard a vomit comet. It doesn't have to be that way, Babylon 5 had rotating portions on both the space station and the Earth ships to generate gravity, though I don't recall them ever showing that objects would not drop exactly straight down.
I'm less willing to grant leeway for instantaneous communication over vast distances. EM comms can't go faster than the speed of light.
The more they add on, the less I care for it. Matter transporters are a device that set me off: The idea of dematerializing someone, shooting the information across thousands or millions of miles and then putting the transportee back together with such accuracy that every neuron is exactly duplicated and there is no damage whatsoever seems, well, fantastic beyond belief. Additionally, they have to displace every molecule of everything in the volume where the transportee is rematerialized. That's just all a bit much. Beyond that, since what is being sent is information ("build this thing over there"), what's to stop it from building duplicates or thousands of duplicates?
Noises in space: In space, nobody can hear you scream. They also can't hear you shoot guns, blow shit up or zoom by.
The more they add on, the more it diverges from science fiction to fantasy. By my yardstick, Star Wars was fantasy. "The Force" tipped that over the edge. Hell the Lord of the Ring Trilogy probably came closer to following the laws of science than did Star Wars.
Maybe the single best SF film made, at least as far as the science was concerned, was The Andromeda Strain.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
9 comments:
If you have FTL travel, you by definition have FTL communication, even if you have to do it by tossing letters onto the FTL version of the Pony Express. Instantaneous strains credulity, but it's like what one of the original Star Trek script writers said about the transporter... "we didn't have the transporter in the original scripts, and people were always getting on and off those stupid shuttles and slowing the action down. We invented the transporter out of self-defense to keep the action moving without all those pauses to hop in and out of shuttles." So given that watching someone wait for a response for his message for the 25 minutes it takes for a signal to go from Earth to Mars and the response to come back would slow the action down to a crawl, I can spot them instantaneous communications for the same reason I can spot them the transporter. (Firefly didn't need a transporter 'cause they just landed the whole friggin' ship when they wanted to go somewhere, but that ship was basically an overglorified shuttle in the first place, real spacecraft designed for zero-G hauling of mass cargo or massive amounts of people would not be able to land like that due to the cube-square law).
In other words, I'm willing to spot them some handwaving necessary to keep plots from dying from boredom, even though I know it's not science. But if they do things that completely violate fundamental physical laws for absolutely no necessary reason -- like take a fly and expand it up to human size (said fly would crumble in on itself like a husk and turn into a large and messy splat on the floor, chitin doesn't have the strength to deal with the weight created by the cube-square law of scaling a fly up that large), I'm ready to toss corn cobs at the screen just like you.
- Badtux the Scifi-readin' Penguin
To be fair B5 did show the not-falling-straight-down thing once, but it was a huge plot point rather than just part of the setting: when the assassin blew up the monorail thing Sheridan was in but he jumped to avoid explosive death, which left him "falling" (thanks to the rotation of the station), and Kosh left his encounter suit to catch Sheridan.
For a one-rule violation, "The Final Countdown" is undoubtedly the best time travel story ever.
Noises in space: Many years ago, NPR broadcast a version of Star Wars. As Luke is being stuffed into the ball turret on the Millennium Falcon, Solo tells him that there are audio synthesizers that make "whoosh" noises, so his ears will tell him when there's a threat behind him.
So that's why you can hear spacecraft -- you're not out there in space yourself, you're in a place with air and other yummy life-support things.
I think matter transport of people is troubling because are you moving the person or creating a copy?
If you are copying, that means the person at the 'from' station is killed, but a copy materializes elsewhere...
"Think like a dinosaur" James Patrick Kelly
As to Starwars, mind numbingly good entertainment, science not so much.
That's ok, sometimes.
I'm old and Science fiction to me is Bradbury, Asimov and Clarke. Often the gadgets are the story but more often the really story is more how people an gadgets deal with it. However the best stories are those where the gadgets are just why people are dealing with people and the setting changes. Even then classics like Foundation merge and warp the science and magic into something that
is both. But people are at the center of it.
In the end its about people in situations maybe very unusual and scientifically improbable situations.
Oh, faster than light communications
is not implicit. There were a few movies/TV where the actual delays are important to the plot as in we can ask for help but we may be dead when the answer arrives so we have to figure it out. Anyone that has been remote from a safe position be it on a boat, plane, or spaceship understands what a voice far away is and can't do.
So what if.
Eck!
Dear Miss Fit:
FTL communication is actually quite simple, in concept, so long as you have an adequate supply of thiotimoline.
Regards,
Frank
Or cat poop (inside Avsig joke).
I still like 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Post a Comment