The facts are wrong
Oct. 13th, 2008 11:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
james_davis_nicollGene Ward Smith asks what looks like a reasonable question on rec.arts.sf.written
The mass-luminosity relationship for main-sequence stars was known [during] all of the Golden Age, and hence it was [known] that all of those sfnal Rigellians and Denebians were nonsensical, Was this simply being ignored as so much was ignored, or had the news not reached most sci-fi authors?
The actual answer is probably "a bit of both". Even today it is easy to find an SF author who apparently has no idea about the lifespans of high mass stars - Eric Brown comes to mind - but as someone points out, at least one TV show recommended using named stars in episodes and named stars are almost always high mass/short life stars.
One subthread rapidly turns into "Well, maybe the mass-luminousity relationship is wrong!" argument, which nicely encapsulates something in SF that I will call the SFnal Lysenkoist Tendency: when actual, tested science contradicts some detail in an SF story, attack the science.
The mass-luminosity relationship for main-sequence stars was known [during] all of the Golden Age, and hence it was [known] that all of those sfnal Rigellians and Denebians were nonsensical, Was this simply being ignored as so much was ignored, or had the news not reached most sci-fi authors?
The actual answer is probably "a bit of both". Even today it is easy to find an SF author who apparently has no idea about the lifespans of high mass stars - Eric Brown comes to mind - but as someone points out, at least one TV show recommended using named stars in episodes and named stars are almost always high mass/short life stars.
One subthread rapidly turns into "Well, maybe the mass-luminousity relationship is wrong!" argument, which nicely encapsulates something in SF that I will call the SFnal Lysenkoist Tendency: when actual, tested science contradicts some detail in an SF story, attack the science.
