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

[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. :(

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

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.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

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.)