And while I am at it

[james_davis_nicoll]

Consider glancing through some stellar databases if you are going to set a story in a stellar system near Sol rather making up a star and plunking it down near the solar system. I'm more forgiving if this involves a red dwarf or a brown dwarf - Yes, I know it's questionable to call brown dwarf stars but I am lumping them into the set of all large bodies warm enough for us to heat ourselves by - but the cases I am thinking of involve bright stars of the kind we are unlikely to have overlooked.

Barlowe's 1990 Expedition: Being an Account in Words and Artwork of the 2358 A.D. Voyage to Darwin IV is the worst offender that comes to mind: it is set in a non-existant system six and a half light years from the Sun. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the nearer stars knows what stars are that close to the Sun and none of the four stars in question match Darwin IV's star. It's as silly as a National Geographic-funded expedition to a previously uncharted island-continent in the Grand Banks..

Comments

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

Maybe barlowe knew that in the future we would discover a new law of physics which makes it all make sense?

(Is that the one with the lighter than air cavemen that got made into that quite good CGI based astrobiology series on Discovery?)

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's the one, though I think it was just one two-hour documentary. I haven't read the book, so I don't know how faithful the documentary is; there's a lot of stuff in it that prima facie does not make a lot of sense, and my favorite parts are the real-life biologists and so forth looking at the CG footage and saying things like 'Well, I have no idea how that's happening, so the underlying cause must be really interesting'.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Actually I would read that story. The uncharted island-continent in the grand banks. I am envisioning an isolated land that can only be visited with great difficulty rather like Tír na nÓg, though perhaps uninhabited.

[kayshapero]

I could write one about the outside world discovering the place my D&D characters live.. though since it's the equivalent of the 1300s or so there I suspect the shield the Sidhe put up around the place is still going to keep people out for awhile.

[(Anonymous)]

Monty Python got there first with the expedition to lake Pahoe.

William Hyde

[avram]

Or maybe it's the SF equivalent of Ruritania.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

The TV show replicated the book pretty well. The book had its share of "that's awesome but makes no sense if you think about it too hard". (My favorite was a colossal triped, hundreds of meters long, like a mega-dinosaur with its hind legs replaced by a single ski. Barlowe depicts the thing about to raise one of its front legs from the ground. I don't think he thought about how absurd would look ten seconds later.)

Ruritania was the comparison I was thinking of, too.

[prof-brotherton.livejournal.com]

Seconded.