james_davis_nicoll

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

Elitist.

They like spaceships and stuff.

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!

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

Okay, maybe not artificial.

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

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.

Now, the first one just sounds like zombies, but the second one sounds kind of interesting... And none of them are sparkling in the sun, I take it? ;) Fantasy is definitely a looser area in which to write than SF (which is why I'm wondering if this person crossed over from Fantasy) but if, in Fantasy, you're going to depart from established lore, it should at least a) be interesting, and b) acknowledge the differences in established lore (as Darren Shan did with his Cirque due Freak series). Our Vampires are Different is fine if you at least give a nod to what the difference IS.

Or have the vampire bitch about how humans like to write about vampires but not only can't bothered to research them [1] but can't even get the details of their lies consistant.

1: I'm picturing a TV show somewhere between Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and The Crocodile Hunter.

Or that series whose title I forget just now where the vampires sparkle in the sunlight.

Twilight. Heather was obsessed for about a month with it, just before Christmas. Then she got over it.

You're kidding.

Maybe I have to read one of these. Just to gawk.

Oh no, all the 13 year olds (or thereabouts) just went nuts over that series. I promised her I'd read the first book, and I tried, but it was so much fluff to me.

Gawk away, at least you'll get a good laugh.

Only read it if you can stomach being dragged through the relentlessly first-person perspective of a Teenage Girl In Love For The First Time.

I realize this comment is two weeks late but hey. The series where the vampires are mindless and piloted by necromancers is Ilona Andrews' "Magic s" series, #3 of which just came out and which I ate yesterday.

Twilight I have never read, or seen the movie, and now never need to, thanks to
http://community.livejournal.com/m15m/19551.html
(movie-in-fifteen-minutes review by Cleolinda)
and her reviews of all five books, linked in at the top of the movie review and at
http://cleoland.pbworks.com/Twilight#Bookdiscussionentries
(note that Midnight Sun is the fifth-and-last book, but covers the same events as the first from Edward's point of view, so she put them together on the wiki).

Extremely worth reading for the sustained snark level.

--Dave

There are some vampire legends that are not much used. Being unable to cross running water isn't seen much - Saberhagen used it as an example of an incorrect belief about Vampires that got a villain killed. My personal favorite is the "Vampires must count dropped mustard seeds" compulsion. That could be fun. Even dramatic. A protagonist is trapped by a Vampire in a kitchen, smashes a bottle of mustard seeds across the floor. As the vampire helplessly begins to count them, the protag either runs like a rabbit or franticaly tears the place apart for something that can be improvised into an effective weapon.

They used the mustard seed thing (more generic, actually) on an episode of X-FILES.

The advantages of a sunflower seed addiction!

The X Files used the poppy seed thing once.

My personal favorite is the "Vampires must count dropped mustard seeds" compulsion.

ONE! ah ha ha ha ha... TWO! ah ha ha ha ha ha... *thunder*

I am learning all kinds of things from the comments on this posting.

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.

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!"

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.

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!

Shiny is a metaphor. Or something like that.

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

Devil's advocate: given the lack of scientific realism in SF, can you blame him? On the other hand, he doesn't get that attempts at scientific realism drove written SF for decades. As far as I can tell, he thinks getting the science right is something for continuity anoraks.

Your devil's advocacy is sound.

AIUI he's an SF lover but he followed the literary career track, PhD and all, to the exclusion of the science side. So he teaches SF, and writes the stuff, but makes glaringly obvious errors -- not even sophomoric: more the kind that suggest he slept through science classes in secondary school -- and suffers from a bad dose of Dunning-Kruger effect insofar as he doesn't even grasp the extent of his own deficiency.

But how important are these errors?

I mean, I've done my time in space physics research, and I enjoy books (including your own) that play cleverly on real science, but there's a lot more to SF than that. Just looking at my bookshelf right now, I see stacks of Dick, Ballard, Ellison, Moorcock, all genuinely brilliant SF authors, none terribly bothered by scientific rigour.

Take The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch: even when it was published, any scientifically literate person could have driven a coach and horses through its depiction of Mars, and much of the rest of the novel's background. So what? It's still one of the best SF novels ever written.

Imaginative expansion on rigorous science is one way in which SF can be good, but it is not the only way.

(NB: I have never read anything by Adam Roberts)

Roberts had orbital colonies using hoses to pump air from Earth's atmosphere in his "hard" SF novel. During subsequent conversations, Roberts revealed that he didn't understand why a pipe linking the depths of the ocean to the surface wouldn't result in a fountain from the pressure difference. "Some people don't like their science playful."

OK, that's funny.

It was actually a little painful. You could watch the idea not get through, and then when it did get through, you could watch his defenses reject the idea it mattered.

Still, somewhat better than the SF writer who couldn't understand how lift didn't require power (after editing an anthology on the theme).

One of the perennial aphorisms of the writing biz is that you have to know the rules before you can break them.

This is usually applied to the basics of spelling, grammar, and then higher-level literary structure.

But in SF, it applies equally well to the science, if you're writing that variety of SF where the science is meant to be internally consistent, as opposed to that variety where it's basically window-dressing for a metaphor about the human condition.

Adam Roberts doesn't seem to understand the difference between the two formats -- or rather, to appreciate that when a rocket ship is just a rocket ship, stuff like its mass ratio and the specific impulse delivered by its fuel matters. He seems to be of that caste who relate to video recorders and toasters as magic boxes with runes on the front that cause it to Do Things when you perform the correct ritual, rather than as a collection of subsystems which are amenable to rational investigation.

Dick, in contrast, wrote The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch while stoned out of his box on LSD and amphetamines in a single mad 72-hour rush, and he wasn't trying to describe a plausible future: he was trying to commit a vision of pure hallucinatory evil to paper before the ice weasels ate his fingers. Or something like that.

Edited 2009-04-28 11:02 (UTC)

I think it's a little more complicated than that. I think Roberts has made the conceptual error that since he can parody something effectively, he understands it.

It's a little like a figure painter who can get the flesh tones right, but has no knowledge of anatomy.

I also get the vibe that there's some weird class-based willed ignorance going on, where actually caring about the correctness of scientific details is Not Done. That would really put him in a dying caste. (Who can afford to think like that these days? To rephrase Trotsky, you may not be interested in science, but science is interested in you.)

That's classic British two-cultures stuff you're describing, and it's still with us. It's not the same as American know-nothingism, but it's just as pernicious.

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

Any more than any other fiction, that is.

This kind of thing drives me up the wall in mysteries, too. Life would be a better show if the writers bothered to have Crews pursue cases in a way that had a chance of obtaining a conviction and not a gigantic lawsuit against the LAPD.

The Mentalist is worse, but at least there they lampshaded what a headache Jane creates for prosecutors due to his antics.

(Note to crime investigators: tricking a suspect into giving up the location of evidence and confessing to the crime by pretending to be mentally deranged and threatening them with a firearm after apparently just having cold-bloodedly shot a good friend in front of said suspect may result in a judge deciding to have a little chat with you regarding your tactical choices.)

Edited 2009-04-27 18:29 (UTC)

The question is, why should it pretend to be rooted in hard science if it's not?

If you're doing a mystery novel and not interested in the science, you'll handwave it: your detective will turn a sample over to the forensics lab, and the lab will come back with results that fit the plot, without explaining how they got there, just "this matches your suspect" or "well, we can tell it's a woman" or "we don't have a match for this."

I think in some ways the interesting argument would be that science fiction, as a rule, is less rooted in hard science than other fiction.

That is, it is less bound by the current state of science, and (by definition, at least arguably) intentionally devises new effects that cannot be created with the technology we have today. If a romance novel had a character take off in her anti-grav module, the technology of anti-gravity not heretofore being mentioned in the book, it would be ridiculous and bizarre, because by default other genres are bound to the physical laws of the world we live in. But a sci-fi novel not only can reasonably encompass gravity manipulation, many of them can easily encompass gravity manipulation with no explanation, simply because they have already established that this is a fantastical world that runs counter to our knowledge of how own our world works.

I don't necessarily mean that all sci-fi is a form of fantasy, but it does all make its own rules, to one degree or another. I think it's just fine to not even pretend your world works like ours does, focusing on your central What If aspects;* if using made up elements gets people to stop thinking "but Berkelium do doesn't do that!" and go along with your rules as you've defined them, go ahead. Some people prefer a fantastical world that could with some stretching of plausibility exist within the current confines of what we know about our physical world, but that's not the only kind of world that's worth writing about, I think.

*(I also think big pulpy space operas that damn the physics and go full speed ahead can be pleasant, but one might say that they are really some other genre with sci-fi trappings.)

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.

"What's the attraction"?

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

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.

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?

Marion Zimmer Bradley's "The Colors of Space," I believe and Lovecraft (The Colour Out Of Space), I can't remember other specifics but I know they're out there. I'd also toss in Niven's "blind spot" hyperspace as being the opposite side of the same coin.

The funny thing is that there are people who actually can have an "alien color" experience, such as colorblind synaesthetes. But it doesn't happen in the usual science-fictional way...

Now that I think about it, blindsight (if it exists) might be another real example, and some brain injuries (to the corpus callosum, I think) can leave some perceptual effects which seem pretty alien when described.

If memory serves, "The Colour Out of Space" was a result of direct stimulation of the optic nerves in a way said nerves were not designed to handle. The "BLind Spot" was input the optic nerves were unable to process.

sure... but no matter what you do to the input, you can affect perception but you can't create colors which don't already appear within the spectrum or the RGB color palette.

In the case of Colour out of Space, you might get synaesthesia, or just aurorae and flares of color, but those colors must be recognizable. Broadcast color is a band of the electromagnetic spectrum and, being an additive color process, exists within the domain of the RGB palette. The rods and cones of the retina use RGB, and even subtractive color systems such as CMYK, end up being received by the eye as an RGB signal. We know what exists outside this domain (infrared, ultraviolet, x-rays, gamma rays) and within... there are no alien colors to see. Play around with the color sliders in any image program and you'll quickly get my point.

The "blind spot" is just that -- dead pixels the brain can interpolate over because the area is so small -- all that remaining peripheral visual data around that spot is what makes the illusion possible. Expand the blind spot and you just get blindness.

I have read about cases (Charles Bonnet syndrome for instance) where because the brain wants to see but the eyes, for whatever reason, no longer can, blind spots are filled with hallucinated data. Again, this falls into the realm of perception as opposed to actual optice, but even so, the color of whatever isn't there has to be plausible.

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!

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. :(

The video game Mass Effect had fun with that; the introduced "Element Zero" that did wonky things to how mass and inertia tie together; this "mass effect" can be manipulated by electromagnetism. Charge it up enough and you remove inertia from matter; *poof* there's your FTL.

Then a hazmat accident* released Element Zero into Earth's atmosphere and children born with sufficient concentrations of E0 in their CNS got the ability to play with gravity; voila, a fig-leaf placed on psi-powers.

-- Steve enjoyed the game as a nice tribute to SFnal classics** without particularly worrying whether the physics was internally consistant. Think of it as a modern Flash Gordon, but not quite so campy and some interesting ethical questions hidden within.

* that in-game conspiracy theorists propose wasn't an accident and was instead a deliberate experiment on the population

** others thieved were artifacts of ancient cultures (Charon, for instance, was a mass effect relay station (think jumpgate) abandoned long enough to accrete an icy debris shell) and the Ancient Menace (the Reapers) come to return.

Or maybe it's simpler, maybe we can blame it all on Cavorite.

Baen is exactly where I'd look for good space opera with some awareness of the history of the genre. Who reissued Schmitz? Who publishes Bujold's SF?

(Element X just catalyzed the release of the atomic energy of copper, it wasn't consumed itself in the process. Skylark was published in 1928, but was written 10-15 years earlier depending on your source.)

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

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.

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.

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.

If Charles Harness gave a fractional atomic weight, I know that he knew enough -- more than enough -- to know what that implied. If Ham Sandwich did, that's a strike down.

(My favorite example is bromine, which has an atomic weight of 79.90. It's almost exactly 50/50 79-Br and 81-Br.)

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.

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

Yeah, for a person not particularly interested in writing hard SF, Delany is actually scientifically literate. There's a description of the role of genes in development in Triton that's better than what you find in most supposedly hard SF dealing with the subject.

There's a description of the role of genes in development in Triton that's better than what you find in most supposedly hard SF dealing with the subject.

Oh like that's difficult; hard sf is strangely soft and floppy when it comes to issues relating to the biosciences.

How do you find Peter Watts?

I look in the SF section, under "W".

I find it in the "Are You Feeling Too Optimistic? Have a Hankering For a Dose of Soul-Destroying Hopelessness?" section myself.

Peter Watts? The Rifters guy? Depressing (http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_RepeatingThePast.pdf)?

I'll believe it when he starts writing comedies.

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.

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.

I thought that was what I said? The technology's not there yet. (And perhaps never will be.) Not enough neutrons, and no easy way to get them in there.

Natural production, sure, very very very unlikely. But that hasn't stopped people from looking. After all, finding some would put you on the short list for a free trip to Stockholm.

IMS there's one guy -- an Israeli? -- who has claimed success a couple of times now. But nobody's ever been able to duplicate his results.

Doug M.

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?)

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

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.

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

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.

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

You have a problem with Upsidasium?

Why

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bothering w/ SF

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Actually

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This is a joke!