Why

[james_davis_nicoll]

Do SF authors make up new elements? The elements don't seem to be in Seaborg's island of stability, either.

Actually, what I really mean is why would the sort of person who can't be bothered to look at a table of elements or think about the general decline in half-lives as atomic mass increases past a certain point bother with SF? What's the attraction for them?

Comments

[poeticalpanther.livejournal.com]

Science doesn't know everything! That's why everything they do is all theories!

Elitist.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

They like spaceships and stuff.

[andrewducker]

Exactly. They want cool explosions and ridiculous technology, and if that means inventing Cheddite then by Klono's brazen hoofs and diamond-tipped horns they'll do so!

[the-flea-king.livejournal.com]

They have some kind of artificial stigma associated with writing fantasy?

Okay, maybe not artificial.

[blpurdom.livejournal.com]

Is it someone who usually writes Fantasy but also can't be bothered to research vampire and/or werewolf lore?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

See, there you can get into Our Vampires are Different territory, like the author whose vampires are mindless monster piloted by necromancers and the book I just read where vampires have an excess of soul and are vulnerable to the power-draining abilities of humans who were born with no souls at all.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

well it's more the sort of person who writes a pern yaoi story, but replaces the dragons with wolves, and then bases their depiction of the psychic wolf packs on the behaviour of poorly socialised domesticated scotty dogs.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Fsck if I know. They like shiny but can't be bothered to learn why shiny.

Also, three, two, one... "Oh, I must support those masterful people who keep on getting it wrong! how the haters pile on them! I will defend them to the last ounce of my bean burrito!"

bothering w/ SF

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

Presumably, the same sort of SF author who can't be bothered with celestial mechanics (or any other sort of Newtonian motion), what we know about nearby stars (and what it implies for planets and life around them), or any of the other things that sort frequently screws up.

[abidemi.livejournal.com]

They're attracted to science fiction as a style rather than a set of ideas?

I can't make fun--in my heart of hearts, I know that's how I got into it as a wee little one.

Whoosh! Spaceships! Pew pew pew!

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Shiny is a metaphor. Or something like that.

(I'm convinced this is the explanation for Adam Roberts.)

[naitsirk.livejournal.com]

Why, in fact, *should* science fiction be rooted in hard science?

[naitsirk.livejournal.com]

Any more than any other fiction, that is.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

Because the border between soft SF and "future fantasy" is incredibly blurred anyway, many SFnal tropes are now mainstream so you get more SF written by non-experts/non-enthusiasts in scientific fields, modern sciences advance much more quickly than Joe Layman can readily keep up given the generally crappy job education systems do teaching science, Google-fu has replaced research skills and interview skills, and the public keeps buying the stuff by the bushel.

-- Steve's probably missed some points, plus there's still a kitchen sink he hasn't thrown in somewhere around here.

[seawasp]

"What's the attraction"?

Frickin' lasers, exploding spaceships, and hawt alien wimmen. Duh.

[thesaucernews.livejournal.com]

Science is hard, and physics is restrictive.

On the other hand, unobtanium is quick and terribly convenient.

Though what bothers me more than new elements is the trope of indescribably alien colors, particularly as seen through normal human eyes. It's a symptom of the same problem, I guess.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Though what bothers me more than new elements is the trope of indescribably alien colors, particularly as seen through normal human eyes.

Was Burroughs the first to pull that trick?

Who else has done it?

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

When I was a child, new elements were announced as having been created pretty frequently. It became, I think, a STFNAL trope among people who lived through that period. New element with interesting properties! Let's get the adventure moving!

[jamoche]

I think there's a lot of that. Doc Smith could get away with fuelling the Skylark with Element X because it was 1930; people who came after him do it because he did. And old-school style space opera, intentionally written using those tropes, could be interesting if done well. I saw something in a bookstore recently that had '50s style art, title, blurb - looked like fun. But then I saw the publisher, and, well, Baen. :(

[martinl-00.livejournal.com]

Getting the science right pleases what percentage of the intended audience, roughly? I suspect the effort to reward ratio is very poor.

[dagbrown.livejournal.com]

I dunno, but quite a lot of people were exceedingly pleased that Jo Rowling wrote villains in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows that apparently had read the Evil Overlord list of Things Not To Do.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

The thing that bugs me in various stories is the discovery of new elements that can't be analyzed, or quote, "completely unknown element". Star Trek is most guilty of this, but I've seen lazy writers do it for ages. One of the better ones was the guy who gave a fractional atomic weight.

[thesaucernews.livejournal.com]

Substances which have traveled backwards in time carbon dating to somehow a negative value, because of course radioactivity works that way. Particularly fun when the object in question is completely inorganic to begin with.

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

Because science fiction is a literary genre, not a branch of scientific study! The conventions of the genre allow writers to introduce magical elements into their stories as long as the magic is described in a science-y sort of way.

[(Anonymous)]

Samuel Delaney used the island of stability when he needed new elements for a story, and he's far more at the literary end of the genre than the blueprint-for-a-spaceship end.

But then Delaney did have an interest in science, even if that wasn't central to the stories he wanted to tell.


William Hyde

Actually

[(Anonymous)]

The existence of the "Island of Stability" remains an open question. Physicists have been trying to reach it for almost forty years now, without success. There's a heated debate as to whether this is because the theory is wrong (apparently it's very sensitive, so maybe) or whether our technology's just not there -- either because we haven't figured out the right sequence of slamming nuclei together, or because we just don't have enough energy.

(There has also been an interesting secondary effort devoted to looking for superheavies in nature -- after all, if they're really stable, any created by natural processes would stick around. But nobody has found any.)


Doug M.

Re: Actually

[rwpikul.livejournal.com]

Well, not having been able to get any has more to do with not having found a reaction which will produce the potentially stable isotopes in the first place. Thus far there has only been a dozen or so atoms of ununquadium produced, (all in the 286-289 mass range, not the possibly stable 298), there have been claims of 2 atoms of unbinulium, (again too light to be stable), and no unbihexium has been produced.

For natural production, remember that most natural production of heavy elements is by neutron bombardment and that getting to the island means running a gauntlet of mili and microsecond half lives. It might not be possible to get there even with the r-process.

[wdstarr.livejournal.com]

Do SF authors make up new elements?

(1)Because they can.
(2)Because Plotzmium-489 sounds real cool.
(3)Do you really need any more reasons than that?

Seriously, Richard Wadholm somehow made it work in "Green Tea" (Asimov's Oct-Nov 1999, Dozios' Year's Best 17, Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13th).

(By the way, did you notice that your graph is made of Legos?)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I actually thought that story was pretty silly. Loads and loads of Geordi LaForge-worthy technobabble just to prop up a twist ending.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

Sturgeon's Law. (And Sullivan's Corollary: "Sturgeon was an optimist.")

Hey, people write historical novels without doing a lick of research and include howling anachronisms on the second page. And reputable publishing houses publish said books.

Also, Krakatoa: East of Java. Basically, lazy artists get shit wrong because they can't be arsed to look it up. This is why editors drink.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

Oh, sorry, my link to anachronism-riddled historical novel didn't work.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Alexander Jablokov's unobtaniums in Carve the Sky actually were specified as being Island of Stability elements, for what it's worth.

I think this is just another case of an SF trope being frozen in amber way back when the science of the time didn't render it too implausible. Nowadays people throw fictional elements around everywhere because they know from reading other science fiction (or watching Star Trek shows) that it's OK.

[derekl1963.livejournal.com]

Not to mention that if we abandoned many of those frozen-in-amber tropes, SF as a field would get pretty boring pretty quickly.

This is a joke!

[liddle-oldman.livejournal.com]

You have a problem with Upsidasium?