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

[thesaucernews.livejournal.com]

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.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

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...

[thesaucernews.livejournal.com]

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.

[srogerscat.livejournal.com]

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.

[thesaucernews.livejournal.com]

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.