ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION #7: “Bad Science in Science Fiction”

Meanwhile, in the real world, the Apollo 13 crew almost died because they could't plug parts from the LEM in to parts from the capsule because they came from different manufacturers.

Yeah. This drives me nuts, though occasionally they explain it. In B5, for instance, *Everyone* usues Minbari Data Crystals - they have a monopoly on it, even the Vorlons use 'em to give info to the lesser races. They make it very clear that this is a recent development - only 8 or 9 years before the show began, Humans weren't using such things.

I think Trek is the worst offender in this regard, in that every bit of tech is instantly understandable to everyone else, regardless of race or background. It's like every race in the galaxy shops at the same K-mart, they all have warp drive, phasers or disruptors (Phaser knockoffs), transporters, blah blah blah.

Of course I suppose this is just an extension of the normal TV habbit of overlooking inconvenient details. I was watching a movie with a girl long before I was married, and the leading lady KOs some other chick and takes her clothes so she can sneak away. Quoth my date, "Oh, and of course it fits perfectly..."

A recurring bad science element: everything interfaces with everything else.

Plug an Antaran power cell into your blaster.
Connect your pocket computer to an alien starship's data banks with a couple of alligator clips.
A crystal's a crystal, right?

Joe Halderman introduced "Vibroknives" in a Star Trek novel, powered knives with a vibrating super-sharp blade. In essence, pocket-sized chainsaws. Niven has "Variable Swords" - they're a single molecule strand of metal held rigid when you need 'em, and coiled up in the handle when you don't. You can make 'em any length you like, from a couple centimeters to a few yards long, and they'll cut through anything excepting another variable sword, or something made out of sinclair molecule. These predate Light Sabres by a good six or seven years.
Didn't Isaac Asimov have a force field penknife or something? And that's considerably earlier still.
The Matt Helm movie I watched tonight ("The Ambushers" - 1967) had a belt sword. Helm takes his belt off, gets it wet, it goes rigid and it's a fully functional sword from then on.
In my own stories I have a character who uses a monomolecular-bladed sword that's virtually indestructible and rather pretty besides, and has a motto on the blade.
I also occasionally have characters using "Omnikeys" which are like automated lock-pickers.
I've also got this guy who's got a really cool suit of powered armor - OH!

Powered Combat Armor! Invented by Heinlein in Starship Troopers, and arguably perfected by Halderman in The Forever War! That's a high-tech equivalent for a very anachronisticm low tech thing!

And arguably a large part of the whole "Steampunk" ethos is using low tech solutions to high tech problems: Steam Powered Repeating Cannons and whatnot. Would that count?

I had to scroll up to actually see what the topic of this thread was. Oh, yeah, bad science. :)

Let's get back on track a bit. I think that now few people still remember how cool one particular detail of the original Star Wars really was: the totally anachronistic use of swords in the futuristic laser gun space setting. Granted, they were laser swords that could deflect gunfire, but the coolness factor is right up there science-wise. Not completely original I'm sure, since Flash Gordon and other pulp SF used swords and laser gun settings, but they were usually normal swords that had no real practical use except looking manly.

Other books I've read talk about micro-vibrating knives and mono-honed edge blades that are sharpened (from science advances) to an advanced level of dangerousness. Any other old/outdated technology that you can think of that science can bring to seemingly anachronistic use in the future? Smart-adjustible chairs I've heard of, and let's not forget the ever-usefull Hydro-spanner.

In the case of Handgun Control, Inc. and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence both wanted to ban the private ownership of guns throughout the United States. To characterize their position as "favoring more restrictions" is not accurate.

Yeah. True. You get that sort of thing in every war, however I'll be the first to agree that doesn't make it right. How many concientious objectors were sent to jail by democratic administrations in WWII, Korea, Vietnam? Bottom line is that if your country's got itself a war, they don't like anyone saying "Nay" about it, particularly when - during Vietnam - popular opinion negatively affected the war effort.

That said, I can't think of an example of Republican Thought Police during peacetime. I can think of a lot of invasive examples of Democratic Thought Police in everyday life.

...as being the bugaboo of the left, lets not forget all the statements made by Republicans early in the Iraq war that basically said that people who opposed the president and his policies in any way were traitors and hippies. This died down a bit when people dug up old Jefferson and Washington quotes about how the leader himself is not the country itself, but the occasional wish for thought police is not a one-party tool. I do agree that Republicans use it less frequently, but then I don't really consider the "W" administration as "my" republicans at all. They were some mutant inbred offshoot that are not welcome at the family reunion.

Deadpan used to live in Kennesaw, Georgia, and he tells me it was a city ordinance that gun ownership was manditory. I've heard of other towns like that, too.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here: >>to say that the left wants more restrictions on guns, while the right wants fewer, sounds fair, but is actually untrue.<< Could you explain it a different way?

I can't agree with ginrummy on the proper way to frame debates. I'll take gun control as an example.

Handgun Control, Inc. and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence both wanted to ban all private ownership of guns, and made it clear that they were going to get there through incrementalism. On the other hand, there has never been a movement on the right to make gun ownership mandatory.

So to say that the left wants more restrictions on guns, while the right wants fewer, sounds fair, but is actually untrue.

Oh, totally. The Republican Party is the party of gun ownership, anti-abortionism, a huge military-industrial complex, traditional religious values, and endless NCIS marathons on the USA network. No question about it. And we're frequently just as guilty as the democrats of assuming the voters support that stuff when they vote in Republicans. They may not be. Certainly, I think much of the country was uncomfortable with the extreme religious mandate of the '04 election, but our party frequently took their victory to mean that the majority of people wanted that, when in fact they just knew Kerry was a low-grade moron and we're in the middle of a war, and that's never a good time to change horses.

So we make the same mistakes - as I said - but I *do* think that we're a bit less shrill about such things, and a bit less dictatorial about such things both because our primary appeal is law & order and greed, and who doesn't like having a nice car and not having to worry about it being vandalized at night? Also, I think we tend to be a bit more pragmatic and less theoretical than the democrats. Take for instance, Reagan: he issued many, many statements about how evil Abortion was, and even wrote a book about it. He appointed three supreme court justices, and could *easily* have overturned Roe v. Wade, given his overwhelming political majority, clout, and the number of retiring justices. He did nothing about it, though. He did, however, appoint the first female justice, which is not nearly the same thing, but it *was* an inclusive, progressive move.

The difference - at present, this is not a universal truth - is tha Republicans don't give a damn what you do inside your own home or your own head - believe and think what you want - whereas the Democrats want to engage in wholesale social engineering and make politically impertinant thoughts punishable as 'hate crimes.' This is the 'scary fundamentalism of the left' that R1 mentions.

R2: yes, you can interview Janet Jackson if you like.

Hey Gin - I would tend to agree with you completely on your assessment. I lean more to the right than I do the left, but the need to not invest in philosophical extremes makes it necessary for me to come down on the left on certain issues.

If the fundamentalist religious right is in control of the Republican party, that scares me because I prefer a secular government mainly because my particular brand of christianity (when I practice it) is one that would not be supported by the fundamentalist christians. Having said that, there is a certain scary fundamentalism of thought on the left that is just as scary. So, I find myself more libertarian than I do Republican or Democrat.

My default opinion of people is that if you vote straight party ticket then you are basically the character Ox from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure: "Everything is different, but the same... things are more moderner than before... bigger, and yet smaller... it's computers... San Dimas High School football rules!"

Anyway, my two bits...

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/vjackson/2009/07/03/president-obama-an...

She did an episode of X-Files- is that enough genre credit to chat with her?
(She also did Kamen Rider (if I'm not mistaken, it's similar to Power Rangers- a Sentai show converted for American audiences.)( No. I haven't seen it.)

But if you define one side (Democrats) as having certain party planks, then you can't just ignore the fact the standard Republican planks are pretty much the opposite. So for the "gay marriage, socialized medicine, utterly shrill atheism, free abortions on demand for everbody, no more death penalty, an end to the existence of the US Military, and the villanization of WASPs throughout their revisionist version of history." You then have to give a reciprocal Anti-gay, no health care for the poor, fanatical religion, no abortions ever, easy death penalty used often, a bigger military than the rest of the world combined, and keeping everyone who isn't a WASP from immigrating to this country. You forgot the 'No Guns/Guns for All' one, though. :)

Most people are not gonna agree that those are the things they stand for, but then that's true of the majority of people in both parties. I'm registered Rep, but I'm moderate in quite a few of my "planks" in varying ways. Mostly I'm in the place where I think most things should be legal but controlled and that all-out banning something is rarely good.

The test is stating the opposite of something, as we saw above. The opposite stance of the people who think guns should be illegal is of course 'mandatory guns for all.' This is not the case obviously, as the currently used middle ground is 'Guns if you want and can prove that you are not a nutjob.' One view is an extreme, the other moderate. On abortion, one side is 'None Ever' and the other is 'All Pregnancies must be aborted.' Since the one extreme is insane, we have the present middle ground of 'abortions avaialble if needed but discouraged.' This stance also works for drugs, immigration, etc. with moderate ground beliefs much more coherent (in my opinion) than the extreme ones of using Never, None, Nobody, and Always. Those beliefs are almost always about the forced improvement Other people and not yourself.

All joking aside, that is a common mistake Democrats make, and a one Republicans make somewhat less, but are still guilty of. Democrats assume that when their candidate wins, it's because everybody wants gay marriage, socialized medicine, utterly shrill atheism, free abortions on demand for everbody, no more death penalty, an end to the existence of the US Military, and the villanization of WASPs throughout their revisionist version of history. In fact, however, that's not the case. In pretty much every election since Vietnam, they've only won becuase our own party has pissed off the moderate voters, who then vote for the other side in protest: Carter won because of Nixon, Clinton won because of George Bush the First, Obama won because of George Bush the Second. Annoyance at the bus driver doesn't mean you're suddenly going to completely change all your basic opinions on life, it just means you're going to take a cab until you can get the guy fired.

For the last sixty years or so, Republicans have occasionally mistaken this, too, but I think we're a little less prone to do so because our root assumption is "Everbody wants as much money as they can get," and after that, things are more negotiable.

So - and I realized I'm waaaaaaaaaaaay off topic here - the general course of things is that Republicans tend to appeal to people's greed and hence we tend to run stuff until we piss people off, and then they switch to Democrats not because they like 'em, but becuase they're pissed at us. But once we've been appropriately chastized, everybody decides they like money again, and the Democrats are out. Clinton recognized this, and used it to his advantage, and really I think that's why we hated him so darn much...

Well, if they don't agree, they can just un-tacit themselves!

Democrat? REALLY?

Silence does not indicate acceptance. It can merely be polite refusal to comment on your sadly defective world view.

if I like the Road Warrior or not. I'll take the silence as tacit agreement!

Well, you have to have some way to manipulate your environment, right? So becoming 'just a brain' or 'just a brain with a stomach' is pretty unlikely. My favorite sensible example of this in SF is undoubtedly the Thrint from Niven's Known Space, which were not all that bright (80-90 IQ), but were amazingly telepathic, and could make other sentient beings or animals do their bidding.. They lived about 1.5 billion years ago. Their 'modern day' desendants are a sentient species called "The Grog" who are sessile, and attached to a rock in the desert their whole lives. They use their telepathic powers to just make food animals jump in to their mouths.

The only down side of using a gun in space - as the russians found out in the same experiment you're citing - was that the recoil can be a bitch if you're not expecting it. Spaceman Spiff pulls a gun on Cosmonaut Carl, and pulls the trigger. He misses, and the recoil causes Spiff to cartwheel his butt all over space. While he's fighitng to correct that, Cosmonaut Carl stabs him to death with a pointy stick.

R3 wrote: "then that begs the question of why you're using a high energy high tech weapon when a bullet is so much simpler, easier, and just as deadly."

This is a great point. I just did a google search about guns firing in a vacuum and found that modern gunpowder is self-oxidizing, meaning that guns will fire just fine in the absence of oxygen in space. In fact it has even been tested once, by the Russians of course. So if you were in a space suit in a vacuum going up against someone equipped like you, would you rather have some kind of weird laser firing one narrow beam, or a shotgun firing a cloud of pellets (that don't lose momentum) of which only one small piece breaching a space suit would be deadly. Hm?

...with the Devolution stuff, latching onto the theories that humans have so much leftover junk DNA from earlier times and therefore some outside influence somehow extracts only those old fish parts and we become a big fish again or a monkey-type or whatever. But I don't think we have the makings of complete species stuff in there for picking and choosing. And you're certainly right that any odd animals outside our direct branch are totally out.

As for evolving into brains, I can see humans growing atrophied from lack of physical effort as technology advances, even up to needing only a brain and minimum life support for it if we come to spend all our lives in some VR world, but to EVOLVE that way will take much longer than a few hundred years. And the sudden step into "luminous beings" is quite a leap above that.

Yeah, that's a good one, Gin - how lots of times the people animating these things clearly had no idea what a bullet in flight looks like. And, not that you can really duck a bullet in real life once it's coming at you, but it drives me nuts when Riker sees a phaser beam coming at him in the episode "Conspiracy" and then dodges it by going down on one knees.

While we're on the subject, what's the deal with coherent beams of light, anyway? I know they're pretty, but of course you don't actually *See* laser beams unless there's something in the way, like dust or smoke. I'm not sure if you can see "Plasma Beams" or not, but I strongly suspect you can't. Of course Trek doesn't use lasers, they use doubletalk "Phasers," so the properties are different, but then that begs the question of why you're using a high energy high tech weapon when a bullet is so much simpler, easier, and just as deadly.

And though it's not a weapon, another thing that bugs me is when people "De-volve" in to animals that are not at all related to our ancestry. "Mister Barkley has devolved in to a spider." Really? How did that happen? Spiders are not even remotely related to humans. There was no "Spider phase" in our evolution. "Commander Koenig has devolved in to a neanderthal!" Really? Intersting, since Neanderthalls are a paralell species to humans, and not our ancestors...

In fact, come to think of it, evoltuion pretty much always is done wrong in TV and Movie SF - "They evolved past the need for physical bodies" - what? How does that make sense? "They evolved until they were just brains" - again, what?

I know that the look and sound of someone racking the action of a pump shotgun is really cool and threatening, but sometimes they can take it a bit far. There is a movie I saw a while back (Alien 4, I think) where someone grabs a shotgun and rachets it menecingly with "Let's go!" and then later dies, someone else picks it up, does the same thing, someone later takes it away from them, racks it again, and then just before fighting a bunch of aliens, they get ready by once more cycling that pump action. By my count, by the time they actually need to fire the damn thing there is at BEST only maybe one shot left in it, the rest of the ammo being uselessly ejected onto the floor along the way for dramatic effect. This is what detail people call a continuity error, not really a science error, but still it bugged me.

My big beef is not with wild new science, but with common everyday things gotten totally wrong. Like guns and bullets. Especially in cartoons you often see things like pump-action double-barrel shotguns (which workings are mutually exclusive of each other) and bullets shooting through the air with the SHELL casing still attached! Like, are there that many people that don't know the physics of exploding powder and how it is used to propell a projectile?

On more science-type weapons, and laser beams are made of light, so they travel at the SPEED of LIGHT, meaning you CAN'T dodge them. And as R3 touched on in another article, explosions in space (missles, bombs) are totally harmless unless they actually impact the hull of a ship, because there is no air to transmitt any shock wave or heat damage past their relatively small initial radius.

And the terms "Black holes" and "worm holes" are not the same things. Taking your ship into a Black hole will not transport you anywhere except to certain death. A black hole is an overly dense SUN, with no exit. If you want to have some kind of magic tunnel, please refer to it in one of the techno-jabber acceptible ways like Wormhole, Hyperspace tunnel, Warp fold, etc.

Yeah, that drives me nuts: using "Galaxy" and "Solar system" interchangeably, or "Universe" and "Dimention" interchangeably, or saying "Intergalactic" ("Between galaxies") when they mean "Intragalactics" ("Within a galaxy") or "Interstellar" ("Between stars.") That last one really burns me up - "A thrilling tale of intergalactic adventure on the planet mars" - what's even remotely "Intergalactic" about that?

I can also feel my bloodpressure surge a bit whenever someone uses the word "Quadrant" as a measure of distance. (Added to which, about half the time they say "Quadrant" in something like its real meaning, what they obviously intend to say is "Octant.")

It's not like this is hard, people! It's not 1940, you don't need to just make this stuff up as you go along! Just freakin' look it up on Wikipedia!

Well, in the early days they honestly didn't care. "Comets don't give off heat? Oh well. I'm not gonna' change it, it's just for the kids anyway" or "Bones can't support the weight of a fifty-foot-tall gorilla? Eh. Not worth fixing it..."

I think in general, the standard has gotten a bit higher, but they still screw up an awful lot, like having a city built atop "A layer of neutronium" in THE CRUST (!) of a planet in "Stargate: Atlantis" or the whole 'hollow planet with water-filled tunnels running through the core' thing in Star Wars Ep 1.

So where may we find your book?

Dr. Who is my favorite SF show, but the galaxy/universe confusion NativeTexan brings up is continual. They also don't know what constellation means and confuse it with "solar system."

Many examples of evolution and mutation affecting people immediately. Many examples of problems of scaling----creatures getting much larger or smaller without any structural problems.

I'm sure there's plenty of others, but I try not to think too much when I'm watching it.

This is a great roundtable discussion. Yes, there is a considerable amount of bad science in science fiction. And there are some writers who have in the past, or present do not understand the difference between galaxy and universe. Seems like that would be the first lesson of learning to write science fiction. The exact line between science fiction and fantasy is almost non-existent. Perhaps my first novel crosses the line between science fiction and fantasy, but you be the judge. Check out my first and recently released novel, Long Journey to Rneadal. This exciting tale is a romantic action adventure in space and is more about the characters than the technology. While writing this tale I tried not to break the laws of science, but my brother is the rocket scientist (aerospace engineer), not me - lol!

Fantasy and SF are similar in that they're both fictional and they play by a set of rules that have to be internaly consistent, but which are *NOT* the same as the real world plays by. They're also generall (but not always) similar in that they have a highly complicated fictional world they take place in (Oz, The Federation, Middle Earth, Known Space). And a lot of the early SF writers were strongly motivated by the fantasy they read as kids - Heinlein loved Oz, for instance, the Narn from Babylon 5 took their name from the Chronicles of Narnia - so there's some cross-polinization going on there at times. They're different in pretty much every other way, however.

Me, I'm solidly an SF guy. Never had any interest in Fantasy, it just doesn't appeal to me. Spent half my life avoiding reading "The Chronicles of Narnia" in Christian schools in my youth, enjoyed the "Lord of the Rings" movies in the theaters, but can't plow through the books. Pretty much when I *do* like fantasy, it's because it's got some novel hook that no one else has thought of. For instance, in Larry Niven's "Warlock" series, Magic is a nonrenewable resource: Every time you use some, there's less around for everyone else to use, and most of the stories revolve around the magical equivalent of the early-1970s gas crunch. That's cool, I like that, but I couldn't care less about mad king whoosis, third lord of the sphincters, who came from the land beyond the wobbles, sly sword in hand, and declared war on the brass brassiere-wearing women of the mystic land of Attractive Lipstick-Lesbiona.

Just not my bag, man. If it ain't got rayguns, I am entirely too shallow a person to be interested.

And thank you, Burt, for reminding me why I was so unsatisfied with "Timeline." I only remembered saying, "Oh, for God's sake!" at some point towards the end of the book and couldn't remember why.

There's no reason for it, at least for me. You can write allegory in a lot of different genres---fantasy is particularly conducive to it. I like fantasy a lot, but I like my science fiction to be of the "hard" variety.

People often say that fantasy and science fiction do the same thing in different ways: one with magic and the other with science. I think that's true when you're talking about science fiction like "Star Wars," but to me, science fiction should be about exploring the world of ideas. Taking a piece of technology or a scientific theory and playing around with it, extrapolating its effects into the future, seeing how it would operate under other conditions.

Otherwise, I'm really not interested.