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Ask the Space Command Team About All Things Sci-Fi
Marc Zicree, Doug Drexler, David Raiklen, and Neil Johnson are the guys behind the fastest funded film project ever on Kickstarter, Space Command. The project will feature a number of Star Trek vets behind the camera and a number of Trek actors are also involved, including Armin Shimerman, George Takei, Ethan Phillips and Robert Picardo. The team has graciously agreed to take some time from trying to make a crowd-funded movie, building spaceships, and exploring alien worlds to answer your questions. Ask as many as you like but please confine your questions to one per post.
To each of you, what is your opinion on the current state of science fiction in today's films? Obviously, there's been an increase in all film categories with more movies coming out but what do you like and dislike about films in this era? Care to comment the remake of Total Recall? Or 3D in blockbusters like Avatar?
My work here is dung.
Comment on how "hollywood accounting" and "kickstarter accounting" interact with each other, if at all.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
What is your sustainable funding and distribution model, and do you see any potential interaction with commercial spaceflight endeavors?
It's based on the principle of a lever. To maneuver in space, to turn a craft on its axis, it is easier to place smaller engines far away from the center of mass. Consider the Babylon 5 Star Fury, or the X-Wing fighter, or even the nose thrusters on the vipers in the recent Battlestar Galactica. Now, if you have a craft that is going to be doing "interface operations", ie working both in space and in the atmosphere, then having wings makes sense. While in atmo, the wings act like wings. While in space, they act like pontoons to hold the maneuvering thrusters.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
"If there's anything in the story that's beyond current physics, then it's not "hard sci-fi", and that includes artificial gravity (except that made by rotation), FTL jumping/warp drive, etc. "
I think your criteria for hard SF is too restrictive. Traditionally, the difference between hard and soft SF is that hard SF focuses on a realistic and logical application of science and technology, while soft SF focuses on social or non-scientific issues in a fictional setting.
While some authors prefer to restrict themselves to a rigorous application of known-science only, others allow notions such as FTL and/or artificial gravity to creep in to enable their stories to be told. Peter Hamilton, Arthur C. Clarke, Ben Bova, Isaac Asimov, Robert Forward, James Hogan, and many others have written arguably hard science fiction stories that break the rules you've defined.
I'd argue that hard/soft sf exists on a continuum ranging from the extreme of authors who would meet your criteria, to the extreme of authors like Ray Bradbury who prefer to write social commentaries with murky applications of science at best.
If there's anything in the story that's beyond current physics, then it's not "hard sci-fi"
What about unconfirmed theoretical predictions of current physics, like wormholes?
Pitch Black appears to involve interplanetary travel, which again can't be hard sci-fi unless it's a generation ship that rotates to generate gravity, and while I haven't seen the movie, I doubt that's the ship they depicted.
Pitch Black has aliens in it, so I'd assume that disqualifies it harder than the magical gravity -- especially since you could easily re-write the movie with the magical gravity removed, but without the aliens there's no plot.
Unless going beyond current biology doesn't count?
There's very, very few "hard sci-fi" movies in existence that I can even think of. Even 2001 didn't really count; it had the magical monoliths.
Huh. And all this time I thought the term "hard sci-fi" was relevant to my interests. But if 2001 and Contact don't count then, well, it turns out whether something is "hard sci-fi" is meaningless to me. :/
What's the term for Sci-Fi that treats all elements that are related to known physics and technology in an accurate and rigorous way, but is also allowed to speculate on the unknown or incorporate other unexplained elements?
The enemies of Democracy are
According to the purists here on Slashdot, you're wrong. Anything that violates currently-known rules of physics is "soft sci-fi" or even "fantasy", and therefore "bad". Just wait, you'll see tons of posts from the hard sci-fi purists espousing this very viewpoint.
I'd like to see a show that's a lot like Star Trek: TNG, showing a future where humans have a healthy, strong society, everyone does what they're supposed to most of the time, people aren't all a bunch of greedy selfish fucks, and they spend their time exploring the unknown and making contact with interesting civilizations.
Yes, I know it's completely unrealistic and totally contrary to human nature, and that "Hunger Games" is far more realistic, but it's fun to watch and fantasize about instead of everything being dark and miserable all the time.