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Science-Fictional Shibboleths (antipope.org)
An anonymous reader writes: SF author Charlie Stross has put together a short list of what he considers to be shibboleths for implausible science fiction. (If you're unfamiliar with the term, read the Wikipedia entry first.) So, what tops his list? "Asteroidal gravel banging against the hull of a spaceship. Alternatively: spaceships sheltering from detection behind an asteroid, or dodging asteroids, or pretty much anything else involving asteroids that don't look like [a pock-marked potato]." Another big red flag for Stross is when authors fail to appreciate Newton's second law, having their characters undergo impacts or accelerations that would turn them into a thin, reddish paste on their starship's hull. Some interesting examples from commenters include: futuristic yet manually-aimed weapons, technobabble as a plot device, and science officers with Ph.D. levels of expertise in dozens of fields. One of mine: entire races or planets full of people who behave the same, often based on some keyword. What are yours? Stross's focus is on books, but feel free to bring up movies and TV shows as well.
Earthican ale. Yeah it sounds cute but Earth does not produce just one type of ale.
Earthican coffee. See Earthican ale.
I'm looking at you, Star Wars.
Your human target is 50 feet away and barely moving and yet SOMEHOW all of your crack Stormtroopers miss with a weapon that shoots at the speed of light.
A gigantic weapons platform (the Deathstar) with virtually NO point defense, virtually NO fighter screen, and practically no close-in, anti-attacker weapon mount points. WTF??
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
The whole idea of themed planets or themed races largely turned me off of reading SF, and one of the reasons I won't go near StarWars with a 10 foot pole.
Trying to define an entire race or culture or planet with a 3 word phrase is asinine. Doing that for every race or culture or planet in a galaxy just makes me cringe. I can't read or watch it.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
I was unaware of this new definition of shibboleth that essentially mean cliché or trope.
Why does it seem that most "alien" planets have a single climate everywhere? That doesn't even seem possible in any real (~spherical) world. In our solar system, not even Mars has the same climate everywhere; it has ice caps, and plateaus with visibly different weather than the lowlands. Actual aliens that are physically compatible with humans would be expected to live on planets with variability similar to ours, with visible climate changes every few hundred km or so. Granted, you might expect a single climate if only one spot on a planet is involved in the plot. But usually there's travel on the planet, and usually it's about the same (usually desert or jungle) in all the scenes. Of course, there are few exceptions that are more realistics.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Shibboleths are entirely different things. Let's call this SF smells, mmmkay?
I suspect a Universe where every race speaks English to be very unlikely.
One thing that pisses me off is when a character is "such a genius" that they can do something like scientific testing in an absurdly short amount of time. Like doing something in five minutes which actually requires hours or days. If something relies on a chemical reaction that takes hours, you can't do it faster than that.
Two of those actually seem reasonable...
(1) The manually aimed weapons.
Especially in the event that there is some probability effect that the gunner is able to take advantage from, which a computer can not; for example: the gunner may be a main character, in which case, they can't die, which means if a preternatural aim is necessary to their survival, they will of necessity have a preternatural aim. But there's actually no reason to step past the fourth wall in this case, if we posit psychic capabilities, or very long distances relative to the speed of light vs. the speed of the craft: you will need to shoot where the enemy will be when the weapon passes through their location, rather than where the enemy currently is, and you can't depend on them to not be taking bridge-lurching evasive maneuvers.
(2) Science officers with Ph.D. levels of expertise in dozens of fields.
This isn't that unbelievable, although most of the people I know in the "science officer" range tend to be struggling somewhere early in their second dozen...
Advanced civilizations that still have royal families. Especially when they dress up in elaborate studded leather and dangly gold jewelry, and carry knives.
Everyone knows that the long term trend is towards a laid-back democracy run by people in polo shirts.
A galaxy full of upright walking bi-pedal aliens that all around just happen look and overall act like humans currently do. The notion of such widespread parallel evolution across such time and space is pretty darn unlikely. At the same time it is not like I can't suspend disbelief to enjoy fiction.
Before someone mentions it, I know they did try to resolve the parallel problem in TNG.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Since the 1950's, engagement distances have typically been long enough that you usually won't see anything of your enemy except a fuzzy silhouette in a scope or a bracket on your HUD. But sci-fi -- even the *good* sci-fi -- will show starships so close to each other and with so little velocity relative to each other that they can see each other out their windows unaided, a distance that goes beyond "knife fight" range in space and gets into the "hatefully make out with each other" range of fighting. Similarly, despite having the benefit of advanced AI systems, projectiles/energy discharges that can travel extreme distances, and seemingly inexhaustible power supplies, you always see the fights taking place between human/oid opponents manually aiming weapons at each other from less than one hundred feet apart rather than combat robots shooting at each other from dozens of miles away.
For those that cant be bothered to click the wikipedia link, a shibboleth is a mythical creature, like the minotaur or the shakira.
You mean like the "kick all the Muslims out" people?
...derpty doo doo.
This is actually a pretty good shibboleth. It can be used to identify trolling assholes with almost 100% certainty.
I feel sorry for people that don't drink, because when they get up in the morning, that's as good as they're gonna feel
In the future, everyone will wear matching clothing. It will be silvery and consist solely of one article.
...seems possible given that RADAR is already affected by mountains and such. If the objection is that there won't be that many asteroids around, they might have a point.
everyone speaks English
The GP is definitely an example of a shibboleth.
Given the summary, however, it appears that Charllie Stross doesn't know how to use the word "shibboleth" correctly.
In particular, a shibboleth is simply an expression or signal used by someone that helps other members of the in group recognize the signaler's (shibboleth user) membership in that in group. It's not used as a pejorative.
While certainly people (in or out) can react negatively to a shibboleth (like judging people who, for example, "high five" each other), shibboleths are not negative in and of themselves. Designating improbable science fictional mechanisms "shibboleths" really doesn't make sense.
At all.
blog
In the future, everyone will carry personal defense weapons that look approximately the size and shape of 20th century guns. They'll have starships and nanotechnology, and robots, but they'll still need to have holsters and ammo belts. So basically, everything is American, except the villain will speak with a Shakespearean accent and the alien love interest will look just like a 20th century supermodel, except with an interesting glowing tattoo and/or clever contact lenses, so you know she's an alien.
The future is just the Wild West with high-tech accessories.
You are welcome on my lawn.
making folks read a wikipedia definition as part of a post. LMAO
We don't know a thing about Aneutronic fusion reactors. What if it turns out that for some reason, Helium 3 is just easier? We don't have any such reactor! We have no idea what the actual engineering issues might be.
In reality we probably will find it easier to do Proton-Boron reactions. but for purposes of fiction this can be handwaved away!
Ever notice how whenever there's a Star Trek away mission, if it's not on a planet with fiberglass rocks it's on a planet that looks like Southern California? If you know anything about natural history, you not only can identify the plants in the scene as specific Earth plants, but you can place the site within a distinctive band of montane chaparral about 250 miles long by 50 miles wide running along the Transverse Range north of LA, and nowhere else on Earth.
That's understandable, since a TV show needs an affordable location shoot, but there's no reason for books to do the same thing; yet authors assume that the present flora of Earth is some kind of universal template -- that all planets must have landscapes featuring flowers, and grass, and trees, but these are all recent developments in the evolution of plants. If you landing on Earth at some random time in the past 425 million years in which there have been plants, chances are you wouldn't see any flowers, grass, or trees. The dinosaurs roamed a landscape where the largest plants were giant ferns. When you land on an alien planet, everything is bound to be alien and disorienting, starting with the division of life into plants and animals, which is Earth-specific.
Even so, I can accept that coming up with a distinct and vivid alien biome is too much work, so I'll settle on getting one thing right: gravity. It bothers me when characters in a story land on planets and the surface gravity seems to be exactly 1g or so close it's not noticeable. That's a heck of a coincidence, and if the characters land on many planets one of the first and biggest things they ought to notice is how the difference in gravity affects them. Granted if we are talking about colonized planets people would no doubt prefer planets with surface gravities near 1g, but even a few percent off normal is going to have a big impact on what it feels like to work on that planet.
Along the same vein, differences in air pressure always bother me. If there is some kind of time-travel portal there ought to be a hell of a wind passing through because of differences in air pressure, which varies with the weather. If you use a time machine that moves through time, then your ears should pop (as should Captain Kirk's after he uses the transporter).
And while we're at it, where does Iron Man store the reaction mass for his boot jets?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
As someone who is directly in the publishing chain specifically for science fiction (SF-specialized literary agency), I can tell you authoritatively that this level of meaning does not always flow from the creative's pen, keyboard or storyboard.
For example, various facets of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series have had all manner of "meaning" and "significance" applied to them by the fans, both in online forums and in person. Terry had told people several times, in various ways, "I didn't mean anything of the sort... I was just trying to be funny."
At the 2004 Worldcon, at the Retro Hugo awards presentation in Boston the same evening, he made a particularly funny remark involving J.K. Rowling up on stage. At one point he laughingly said to me, "retroactive" being the general subject, referring to the "coincidental" similarities between his Unseen University and Rowling's Hogwarts: "perhaps that is what I meant" which is both classic Pratchett and outright hilarious, or at least, it was to me. For various reasons. :)
In particular, I wouldn't go looking too deeply into Star Wars for meaning that wasn't applied retroactively by the various well-known luminaries and/or a very enthusiastic fan-base. The first one, anyway. Don't know about the rest of them. The first one is a cheesy space opera, nothing more. Fun for all of that (I'm a fan, actually), but still, it is what it is.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
My biggest cringe is when something changes size - like when Dracula changes to a bat or someone (as for instance Hugh Jackman in Van Helsing) changes into a werewolf of 2x volume. (Or Odo changing into a mouse, or when his full human size fits in a bucket.)
My second biggest is when the bullets hit everything except the person - such as running along a waist-high cast iron fence and the bullets hit the vertical bars but not the person. (I don't so much mind the "spark" that a bullet makes when it hits concrete in the movies - that's a good visual cue.) Also, someone outrunning the swept arc of machine gun bullets. Also, someone behind a couch being shielded from bullets.
My third biggest cringe is people hanging on by their hands for more than 30 seconds. People in *really* good shape can hold on for 60 seconds (try it some time), but unless you are an elite climber you won't get past the minute mark. Viz: the scientists in the 1997 movie "Batman and Robin".
Not that he's wrong; the science of lot of "science fiction" produced these days really could only be considered as valid from the viewpoint of science as it was in the 1920s. That being said, some times you just crave the mental equivalent of junk food (e.g. Star Wars) and these authors will get you by.
saving the world , when the reality is you would have to use a trampoline.
Dear Mr. Stross,
Your little tirade there was only a little less annoying than an argument about whether an Imperial Star Destroyer could beat the Enterprise-D in battle. I imagine building a time machine into a DeLorean is impossible. I know that an X-Wing banking into a turn makes no sense in terms of real space flight. But these thing can be enormous fun. I've often found that books with similarly ridiculous scenarios are quite a bit of fun to read; that is to say, I enjoy them whether you do or not. Columns, articles, books, and documentaries about how the science in much science fiction is silly (e.g. your piece on science-fictional shibboleths) are a tedious waste of time.
Your books are quite good though
S.
and jews can just fuck off there is no way I need to keep learning stupid hebrew words
http://www.critters.org/turkey... - worth reading just for its hilarity (various versions abound, google the subject of this post) this is an invaluable read for any wannabe-writer not just in sci-fi, but the terms that are defined are a special warning-shot across the bows of anyone wishing to make the jump into the especially-discerning genre of science fiction.
many wanna-be science fiction writers forget that sci-fi readers are usually extremely well-read (i.e. extremely familiar with the genre), as well as being technically knowledgeable. they are thus extremely unlikely to be fooled by basic mistakes in the laws of physics without a thoroughly well-researched and well-explained plausible background and back-story.
peter f hamilton excels at this kind of job, but it's *literally* taken him 10 years to establish one of the story-lines which permitted him to do just that (the "Void" series). even there, limitations of human knowledge on "what is known and what is not" make an interesting (sometimes nail-biting) story.
iain banks likewise, with the "Culture" series, slowly developed plausibility for the use of "hyperspace", with several passages dedicated to explanations at appropriate times, interspersed throughout the series. the concept "Infinite Fun" was introduced in the book "Excession", having many pages dedicated to explaining that "Minds" - the machine consciousnesses that utilised hyperspace to store their consciousness - were so powerful and so fast that they could develop (and thus live within) entire virtual-reality worlds that were so compelling that they would *literally* lose themselves within them.
also in the same book, one of the "Minds" devotes 25 years to being a recluse, as an excuse to prepare itself for being able to convert its *entire* cargo hold [tens of kilometres long] into an emergency engine within days, *just* in case it was ever needed. turns out that such an excuse was in fact needed, and the story, spread out quietly over a few pages, of how that ship managed to break loose of its "minders" by accelerating to a sustained hyperspace speed over 235 times the speed of light [prior records being something like 20, resulting in severe engine degradation within a few hours], had me in absolute hysterics the first time i read it.
these kinds of renditions require skill, knowledge and dedication that very few authors in the non-sci-fi-world are prepared to develop. about the only exception i've encountered is a book by Tony Gonzalez, who wrote in the MMORG "Eve Online" world - a book called the "Empyrean Age". this book, thanks to the significant backdrop of information, allowed Tony to successfully "jump in" head-first as a totally unknown and entirely new author into the world of sci-fi writing. hilariously, he opens with "The White Room Syndrome" - literally! which was very funny for me as someone who has read over 800 sci-fi and fantasy books as well as the Turkey City Lexicon, reading the first few pages in the bookshop and going "OhNooooe, White Room Syndrome!!!" - luckily i skim-read a bit more and found the writing style compelling, and was glad that i bought the book, despite it being full of some soppy film-esque cliche "poignant scenes" at various points. overall, the book worked.
which reminds me, that it's worth mentioning that comics tend to make good films, because of the significant back-drop of technical knowledge and character development that the script-writers simply cannot ignore. both marvel comics films and the (darker) D.C. comics stories, when converted to films (or TV series) tend to be consistent and successful (DC comics less so than Marvel ones), as the script-writers and the directors have people (such as Stan Lee) whom they can call on to fill in any gaps and not end up with absolute howlers that jar the audience out of the story, in just the same way that Tony Gonzales (for the most part) managed to keep me enthralled in the story he told, thanks to it operati
<-- this is the "no text" the n/t refers to
Entire planets of one biome. I'm sure even forest planets would have ice caps.
And in that sense, Stross has a point: he's identifying tropes that separate the authors that base their work on scientific plausibility from those that base their work on science-sounding fantasy truthiness, hence "shibboleths".
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
Except he doesn't say that shibboleths are negative. The posting is about what are shobboleths used by bad science fiction writers.
Man, this is some quality shit here. Been a while since Slashdot had some care put into troll posts. Hope you stick around.
One is any sci-fi story set more than a few centuries in the future that doesn't have strong AI without a damned good political or technical explanation of why not.
Another is any interstellar economy where it makes sense to ship raw materials between stars. It is hard to imagine how you'd get a habitable planet without iron. In general, if you have enough heavy elements to make a decent planet in the first place nearly all of the useful ones would likely be more or less available. Unless your story line postulates that interstellar travel is insanely cheap or that mining equipment is insanely expensive, and tells me why, this one is always an eye-roller.
Another is also economic. Even the poorest people in halfway decent societies today have access to far better health care, diet, and fancy toys than even the richest and most powerful people of a century ago. It is hard to imagine a bright shiny future with interstellar spacecraft, compact fusion reactors, and strong AI where that would not be even more true. So again if that is not the case in your story you need to give me a convincing explanation as to why that is so.
Except he doesn't say that shibboleths are negative. The posting is about what are shobboleths used by bad science fiction writers.
Oh God, they've formed a group and are using secret signs to identify themselves to each other?
Also, what's a shobboleth... a shoddy shibboleth?
Hive minds are plentiful in science fiction.
But are absolutely not a thing.
Telepathy is not a thing.
And so is precognition.
Just putting a fancy word on it does not make it a thing.
It's ridiculous science-fiction is plagued by magic-mental-powers invasion.
There are plenty of things to choose from as special abilities if you read a biology book.
But nooooooooo science fiction writers need to shove some magic-mental abilities into their characters group spec sheets instead.
It's a typo, dipshit. Hurr hurr
And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay;
Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.
Charlie Stross meant to write about tell-tale signs for bad SF. And yes, the pronounciation of shibboleth was a tell-tale sign for being an Ephraimite instead of a Gileadite. But not every tell-tale sign is a shibboleth. For a shibboleth, you actually force the person in question to pronounce the word for you. But in bad SF, no one forced the author to put the tell-tale signs in there, he wrote them voluntarily, as he is a bad SF author.
or hacking in general. This is moreso evident on TV or in movies, but so often you'll encounter someone breaking encryption when, barring some earth shaking development in mathematics, it's impossible to do before the universe's death and they do it in scant minutes. Usually when I encounter that, I stop reading the book or watching the TV show. I'll generally stick out a movie because (seriously) I usually attend movies with friends (no, really, I have real, physical friends. Honest).
linquendum tondere
Robots using powerful beam weapons that can't hit the broad side of a barn.
I suppose this follows from good guy bullets vs. bad guy bullets. In too many movies (perhaps all that involve gunfights) the good guy runs through a hail of bullets. They either do not get hit or if hit, the bullet does little or no real damage. When the good guy returns fire, three bad guys fall (and remain down) for every shot fired. You don't want to be using bad guy bullets for your defense.
A similar situation seems to happen to the orcs in the LOTR series. Wave a weapon at them and they're down for good.
That word you keep using. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Anything lampooned by the series Hyperdrive. "An entire alien planet. What a bit of luck that they all speak English". "They've shot the captain, they've shot Officer York, they're stopping to reload and point their crossbows at me, I wonder what they'll do next". Brilliant.
Inconsistency is the cardinal sin. I can accept any generally absurd premise or technological speculation, but it must be internally consistent and must conform to our current understanding of physics. For example, an author may decide that FTW warp drive is useful to his plot. Fine, but when the ship comes out of hyperspace or whatever, and transits through a solar system at normal orbital speeds, it needs to comply with Newtonian physics. If an author decides to create a matter transporter (Star Trek) but fails to use it in all the many ways that are obvious to anyone reading (like transporting warheads near enemy ships, transporting enemy ship hull sections away, etc.) it really bugs me.
All coffee is basically indistinguishable; those who claim otherwise ...
Untrue, it definitely tastes different when the coffee beans are run through a civet cat first.
You also drink Budweiser. So let's call it a draw.
Which Budweiser? The American brewer or the Czech brewer that has been at it for several hundred years and owns the "Budweiser" trademark in Europe. If the Czech, they win.
If the blaster shot hits bare skin -- say Princess Leia's arm on Endor -- you'll wince in pain but shake it off and be back to full health within a few seconds.
Obviously the blaster shot was deflected by the midichlorians in the bare skin. :-)
" A shibboleth is some kind of passwort or parole "
Case in point: English is not your native language! I don't know what a "passwort" is, but I'm sure it makes a great tea, and "parole" in English means a pardon from a prison term, not like in French were it means speech or word.
It really takes spending a little time with WolframAlpha to pull up some numbers to understand how much sci-fi underestimates the difficulty of space travel.
Take reentry. Some flames, some shaking, right? How much of a problem is it, and why do some parts burn in the atmosphere while others don't? The communicational blackout, some weird quirk... right?
Well, take your Soyuz capsule. Take the time of "communicational blackout", find speed before, speed after, and then calculate kinetic energy at the two moments. Then divide by time for average energy dissipation.
Well, the figure you obtain is about 0.2 gigawatt for some four minutes. This is the amount of energy produced and dissipated as heat, light, sound and about all of spectrum, from deep ultraviolet far past microwaves. No wonder no radio can push from a noise like that. No wonder superior heat shielding is needed with heating like that. And the capsule MUST descend rapidly into thicker atmosphere, because even if less heat was produced during more flat reentry, the thin atmosphere wouldn't be as good at removing it - superheated ablator is blown away before its heat can penetrate deeper into the ship; remove it slower and the inside will heat up!
Or take the LEO speed. About 9 km/s. That's a meaningless number to most, but maybe 26 mach is closer to your heart. Most ammo doesn't exceed 1.5km/s. So energy of impact is roughly 36x of equivalent bullet. Or an object 1/36 as big as a bullet can cause the same damage.
Then we can get started on how big space is, and how much effort matching orbits is... how the Gravity movie was such a bullshit.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
A widespread SF movies mistake is sound in space. While it is cool to hear spaceships roaring with Doppler effect, we can be certain it will never happen.
Science is difficult and usually makes for dull reading. Science is inconvenient and complicated. It's hard to keep SF grounded in any real science and too easy to add great globs of fantasy sauce to the mix to keep it interesting. Even the masters at whose sainted feet we writhe sometimes resorted to hand-waving and goofball trickery.
It bugs me that Stross is bothered by story lines that violate the laws of physics, but he labels the definition of kinetic energy, E = 1/2 m * v^2, as Newton's Second Law. Newton's Second Law is F = m * a.
People that think I shouldn't like something because they don't like something.
"A jungle planet."
"A swamp planet."
"A desert planet."
And of course, all of these places are filmed on one planet that has them all.
But in bad SF, no one forced the author to put the tell-tale signs in there, he wrote them voluntarily, as he is a bad SF author.
Only if you buy into the idea of creating absolute lists of story elements that are bad.
For example, he slags on asteroids in a bunch of ways, but much of the big-name, known-good, Golden Age sci-fi has that sort of event. And the situations generally warrant it. Maybe this guy just reads awful books, and so the asteroid sequences suck. His actual example is a movie, which he says at the top he doesn't "do." Other sources seem to indicate that there is a full range of sizes of stuff to bounce off your hull, from dust all the way up to... whatever mass you can't escape.
His crap about Newton's Second Law is just a bunch of crap; yes, unless a story solves a bunch of specific problems with technology in the story, it would be impossible. I'm not sure he even understands what hard sci-fi is, and he doesn't seem to imagine that sci-fi authors are usually engineers. He basically writes a bunch of fiction in his essay about Victorian navy battles in space and the impossibility of various types of drive technologies... simply by proving that they are hard engineering problems. Wait, wait, we're supposed to agree that science fiction is bad or unrealistic if it solves hard engineering problems?!
He bitches about mining H3 on the moon, because it is expensive and hard and all these things, and those reasons may apply to bloviators in the media who talk about mining it in relation to space exploration, or some lame idea, but for fictional books?! All it takes to make it a good idea in a book is for fuel to be really expensive, and politics to prevent you from getting it anywhere closer. Done. Suddenly if you can afford it, it might be a good idea! Or maybe you're quarantined on a lunar colony, and figured out a way to mine it with the available tools. Done. I can keep going, and I'm just a reader not a writer.
He says he has a bunch more, but I think he's libeling himself with secret evidence. ;)
So many movies recently include the concept of "the lower decks" or "the back of the train" or "factions".
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
I cringe if a spaceship without propulsion is in danger of falling into a nearby star (or planet).
There are only 3 reasons to fall into a sun:
1) the course is already so
2) drag from friction with the outer heliosphere
3) application of the *missing* propulsion to counter the orbit velocity
Nearby a black hole are 2 more reasons:
4) at close distance there is no stable orbit
5) loss of energy by gravitation waves
If one of the two black hole options apply, the tidal force would transform the crew into reddish paste.
Planets, yes. But the difference with latitude should be a lot less on moons - tidal heating plus reflected radiation from more diffuse angles. So Endor is safe.
You don't need math to understand the problem with Gravity - you just need a Kerbal Space Program player in the room, who will inform you most loudly every time something ridiculous is achieved.
OT God was a pretty nasty piece of work.
The asteroid thing is about density. The 'belt' is really not dense. At all. Deep space probes routinely fly straight through, hitting something is not a big concern. The only way you're getting hit by an asteroid is if you aim for it. Yet ships dodging through an asteroid belt or hiding within one is a very common cliche in sci-fi - including the venerated Star Wars. If the rocks were that close together, they'd have long ago coalesced under gravity into a planet.
It also applies to Science Fiction, too. ; ), and any endeavor involving a bunch of people. It's on Wikipedia, if you missed it.
Jay Leno when he was still an occasional guest on The Tonight Show, had in his act a bit about Star Trek. Where they come across a planet with all women. And they are all beautiful, hair done up, skimpy attire, push up bra. Yeah, on this brothel in outer space.
And in the third scene between their Queen and Captain Kirk she snuggles up to him and says, "What is this Earth kiss that you speak of?"
Actually, I kinda enjoy that. I wish it happened in more Star Trek Episodes!
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
INTERSTELLAR movie's astro-physics and its surrounding issues. Which are quite valid, but at short end's with the way how the physics are conceived in movies.
There are other things in scifi which are utterly ridiculous but it seems everyone is accepting: :-) :-)
For example in The Matrix it was said the first matrix was perfect but people did not accept it.
So are you telling me anybody would refuse to live in Heaven?
Or how about TNG episode in which Riker refuses to become Q?
Is there any sane or even insane person who would refuse something like that?
Our asteroid belt is not dense, does not mean other asteroid filled areas are not more densely populated
My gripe is in EVERY scifi movie/tv show, EVERYbody speaks English.. yeah, I know viewers of said program likely speak/understand English, but what would be FAR more convincing would be some made up "alien" language, then subtitles in English. I've seen a VERY few sci-fi movies that did that, and it made the movie far more convincing... And yes, I know about Startrek's universal translator, but the gibberish and then subtitles would be far better, IMO
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Actually, other asteroid filled areas are as void as ours. Asteroids have mass, and they pull each other, forming bigger asteroids and leaving empty space between them.
more than a few scenes with subtitles are obnoxious because you can't really see the movie anymore if you are constantly reading the subtitles. The next thing is you can't relate the various speakers to their text, especially if there is a heated discussion with multiple people. To add insult to injury subtitles are mostly a severely condensed version of the spoken text because the average reader simply can't read with the same speed as hear the words.
It may be more a "realistic" (what ever this means within fiction ;)) story but it isn't a realistic story device.
I have read a few books where after a few paragraphs with translation of foreign language there was an explanation that for the convenience of the reader from this point on all was shown in the language of the reader. maybe this could be used in movies as well.
I'm surprised this didn't make it in the list... seems a bunch of TV and Movies get this wrong... portraying it as if going into a gravity well and then coming out again is enough to give you the sling shot effect. Not sure about books... never seems to be a plot point probably because the action pacing is different in books it's not quite needed.
This is my biggest problem with Popular Science Fiction. I do not think it will ever happen to any useful extent. We, as flesh and blood individuals will never be hurtling about the universe in a tin can... There will be no Star Trek, No Star Wars. Also there will be no encounters with other biological aliens. In 500 years the dominant lifeforms that ascended from humans will be silicon, or whatever smart matter is based on. I think that many of Greg Egans science fiction books such as "Permutation City" and "Diaspora" represent the direction that we are more likely to take. The problem is that these scenarios are truly alien, and most people find it hard to relate to these stories. Remember, Science Fiction is really about entertainment for people here and how, thus we get lots present day humans hurtling about the universe. Most Popular Sci-fi reminds me of the Farr Side cartoon that showed cave-men pointing and hooting at a primitive flying saucer made of stick and rocks.
He doesn't even mention the `belt, though. He's talking about all of `em.
But you can get a bunch of pebbles banging on your hull without having a large density across a broad area. You only need a localized density. A more serious sci-fi fan would already be aware that many objects are loose aggregates, not solid rocks. OK, now land "on" that thing to hide from radar, which is another thing this guy can't comprehend and for some reason thinks won't work. You might actually "sink" or settle down into the aggregate. Then when you fire thrusters to take off, you turn your "rock" into a cloud of gravel. If the ship has significant mass, it might then attract to the ship; it would indeed be bouncing off the hull, "ding ding ding."
A lot of people, including the author of TF essay, seem to be unable to use their brain in the "when would X be realistic" mode. They can only do, "in the first example I thought of" type of analysis. If a person actually reads significant enough quantities of science fiction to even have attempted his snobbery, they should have been exposed to numerous examples that are plausible. He hasn't, because he doesn't even read; he admits his attention span is too short for movies or television and then his only example, for any of the stuff he complains about, is asteroids in a Star Wars movie. Derrrrrrrrrrrrr
I hate to say it, but you seem to be in the same category. Read some sci-fi, then check back in. I mean, I blew up the idea that the asteroid belt not being dense prevents a ship from being in a gravel cloud... really easily. When you're trying to prove that things are so impossible that they are "unrealistic" in the context of science fiction, even hard sci-fi, there is a really high burden of proof. I mean, if you just can't think of the scenario, then that disproves the complaint. Why would object density be needed, other than when you're near a massive object like a planet? Sure, in Earth orbit it is different. And yet, satellites do get clipped; and not just by human space junk. You would need to be an expert in all these things to make the assertions. If you're not, even if you think you're right, you're not, because you don't really know. And if you do know, it should be obvious that the guy who wrote the essay... doesn't have even a minor clue.
As for his Star Wars (movie) complaint that he blames on science fiction books, I don't think we've explored that part of whatever galaxy they're in. Even if you claimed such fields would not naturally form, in the context of that story that is no impediment at all. They don't go into the background enough to say either way. They don't make the mistake accused, because they don't try to get science-y and explain it. Also, Star Wars isn't hard sci-fi. You can only make these types of plausibility complaints about things that are supposed to be hard sci-fi. Otherwise it is "reader error." If you're worried about Han hiding from space worms inside rocks, what about the worm that supposedly keeps you on life support for thousands of years while it "digests" you? Seems somebody didn't understand digestion. And light sabers. I mean... come on. An energy weapon dueling sword I could easily accept, but one that intercepts and blocks shots from a laser rifle, or other energy weapon rifles? Exploding a planet suddenly with an energy weapon the size of a small moon?! If you hit it that hard, and it is a rocky planet similar to Earth on the surface, there are a bunch of things that could happen but none of them are it exploding like a grenade. If you were causing enough mechanical forces that it would break apart and send pieces flying, it would shoot off like a baseball. Home run! If they were knocking planets into their stars it would be more realistic. Or if they caused one side to massively heat up, and it returned to a molten proto-planet stage with no life, that would be more realistic. Even if you could cause massive cavitating vibrations in the core, you're turn it into a melted misshapen blob long before it would explode.
It's handguns.
Specifically...
I've got a whole bundle more shibboleths up my sleeve that flag a work of SF as being implausible... futures in which we wear mini-dresses and three-piece suits, drive gas-burning automobiles (or hovercars: it's just a rabbit/smeerp replacement), carry handguns (or blasters: see rabbit/smeerp), eat the kind of food we eat today, live the kind of way we live today, and most importantly think the way we think today.
And much more.
But as far as guns and food are concerned... whatever his reason for abjection may be it is either genuinely retarded (hrrr-drrr... gun control will take R gunz... hrrr-drrr nobody wants guns... hrrr-drrr handwave-magic-chemistry-denial-field...) or specific to the point of "because" (everyone eating pills...because... everyone eating solar through spliced plant genes...because... everyone eating vegetarian...because... everyone eating cloned humans... because...).
BTW... He also has issues with "Faceless 80's style corporations ruling entire planets (hint: who handles the externalities?)... political structures based on design patterns proven to be unworkable in the context of any society more modern than the late middle ages (empires in space, I'm looking at you): any interplanetary/interstellar setting where the mechanics of trade are lifted straight out of a Joseph Conrad novel, or 1920s era pulps about life aboard a tramp steamer".
He wrote Saturn's Children. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The novel chronicles the travels and perils of Freya Nakamichi-47, a gynoid in a distant future in which humanity is extinct and a near-feudal android society has spread throughout the Solar System.
Wealthy and self-indulgent "aristos" own and have enslaved most of the populace; the remaining "free" androids struggle to keep themselves independent and can rarely afford the exorbitant costs of interplanetary travel.
Freya, a robotic courtesan designed to please humans but activated a century after their mysterious extinction, is considered obsolete and works menial jobs to survive.
When she offends an aristo and needs to escape off-world, she accepts a job as a courier for the mysterious Jeeves Corporation and becomes embroiled in a complex and dangerous war among factions conspiring against each other for control of society.
Sooo... near feudalism and slavery and ... perpetrated by robots to robots... and faceless, humanless corporations that rule everything.
Now... If he had only looked in the mirror and then shibbolethed THAT guy... things would have surely been simpler for everyone.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
You'll only anger it. And then it will catch you and eat you.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
but they'll still need to have holsters and bullets.
Holster is there to make carrying and use of a weapon safer and easier.
And unless humans start growing or grafting prehensile tentacle - maximum number of objects a person can effectively carry and use with their hands at the same time will remain two or less.
Thus pockets. And bags. And belts.
All of which can cause one's weapon and or hand to snag on them while getting it out.
Ergo - holsters.
As for bullets...
As long as conservation of momentum still works in the future, projectiles WILL be transferring the product of their mass and velocity to the object they collide with.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
You don't seem to understand the basic rule about space - space is big.. The real problem with the whole asteroid field thing is that even if you fly through a dense asteroid field the average distance between the asteroids will be thousands of kilometres. The only way normally to meet two asteroids together is if one of them is in orbit about the other - and even then such orbits are usually very delicate and impermanent.
The one exception to this are the rings around some gas giants, like Saturn. An extremely limited and relatively tiny space - and even then the fields are not as dense say as they appear in Star Wars or in most sci-fi I have read....
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
Exactly.. Gravity was super annoying..
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
It turns out that Carlie Stross is kind of a shitty writer without much to say. He must have a good editor to help make his novels readable.
Designating improbable science fictional mechanisms "shibboleths" really doesn't make sense.
At all.
Yep Stross appears to be confusing Poetic Licence with Shibboleth
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
My favourite one involves a postapocalyptic world and fingerless gloves. Seems like you simply can't survive in the future without fingerless gloves.
First, If you were to travel across the asteroid belt the odds are you won't come close enough to see even a single asteroid. Not one. There is that much space between them. Second, if by some stroke of luck you were to see one, odds are it would be moving very fast relative to you -- thousands to tens of thousands of mph. Clouds of dense asteroid fields just don't happen. Gravel gently raining on your hull doesn't happen either. A single piece of pea sized gravel hitting your hull at average orbital intercept velocities would blow a hole in your spacecraft like a bomb.
Spacecraft in orbit around Saturn somewhat routinely pass through the plane of the rings and hit nothing.
So, space is big, things involving small objects are rare, therefore? I just don't see where you're going. Space is big, but small objects are locally common. You're talking about the distance between objects... in scenarios other than the one in my comment. Explain why the large space between objects means that if you disturb one of those objects, it won't turn into a cloud of pebbles that (because of the vast space between objects that you mention) will be more attracted to your hull than anything else, and will be pelting your... shields or whatever. If you're in motion you're not going to see a cloud of pebbles, because they are still stuck together into a dirty potato, sure. But there are all sorts of situations in a story where somebody else might have just disturbed that potato, not even just the situation I came up with.
Don't just repeat the sciencey memes without understanding the basics of the physics. None of the things you say apply to the scenario I described. Indeed, flying through the "rings" of Saturn is nothing like what I described. Though if you're going through at a high speed, single small particles are major impacts.
It seems that most orbits would require passing through the imaginary "plane" (presumably we're talking about the plane of the mean center of the rings, there isn't an actual physical thing that is a plane) unless they're geostationary. It sounds like you said something, but it was so heavily hedged by that word that it has no meaning. Presumably your intent is to say that spacecraft in orbit around Saturn routinely pass outside the rings, and don't hit anything. That would all be expected. If you meant to say that they routinely pass through the rings, that would be at least relevant to the parent, though not my GP post. I would at least expect a person to be able to adapt their comment to the context in some minimal way.
It is obvious that a person who believes everything in my post would also agree that the rings of Saturn do not represent an area where loose aggregates are locally common.
Three plausible explanations to the "Earthican ale" dilemma.
1) Racism context. The say way one might say American Beer is piss. I think it is understood that not all American beer is piss, and that other beers are avialble, only that most of it is piss, and the most popular is piss, and therefore colloquially given the identification of piss. Hence the Romulans refering to Earthican ale, and Earthicans to Romulan Ale.
2) That given normal evolution of markets, and sufficient time, all tend to trend towards monopoly. Thus fast forwarding hundreds or thousands of years in the future, maybe there is only one Earthican Ale, the tastiest ale on Earth. TM.
3) Given the unlikely united global government that everyone seems to enjoy, perhaps ale production has been nationalized, and our all caring beloved leaders have selected only the best ale to be produced for consumption, as surely they know best!
It is not the noise. Plasmas are electrically conductive and make fine RF shields. For the same reason there are no photons to see from before the recombination era which took place about 380,000 years after the big bang.
Then we can get started on how big space is, and how much effort matching orbits is... how the Gravity movie was such a bullshit.
Yet they did it during the Gemini Program with computers not much more powerful than today's drugstore calculator. Twice.
And with proper main thrusters and RCS. Not a backpack, a bunch of landing SRBs and a fire extinguisher.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Crossed wire or crossed communication. I don't think my comment was even in reply to yours - certainly wasn't meant to be.. I was just talking about the standard SF use of asteroid fields where the field is a maze of closely tumbling rocks. Its not just bad authors that have used it but many good ones as well. BTW small objects like dust might be attracted to your hull but electrostatic forces are like to dominate as the gravity involved with small objects like spacecraft is ridiculously tiny.. Relative orbital velocity for objects around small asteroids can be human walking pace or slower..
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
I was just talking about the standard SF use of asteroid fields where the field is a maze of closely tumbling rocks
Nobody has even presented an example. I've read over half the books from over half the famous "Golden Age" sci-fi authors, and it doesn't jump out to me as a standard thing. The example in TFA isn't a book, but the movie Star Wars. If it is an element of bad sci-fi movies, I wouldn't doubt that. But books? Is it even described as that when it exists in the book that the movie was based on? I haven't read Star Wars books, so I don't know about that example.
Electrostatic forces isn't going to mean that the aggregate isn't bouncing off your hull in my example scenario, it just means that many particles give you a single ping before sticking. Surely if the author is detailing the exact musical rhythm created by the particles they should take this into consideration, but I'm not sure I've ever read an author claiming it. The vast, vast majority of asteroid involvement in stories I've read has to do with dealing with small, widely spaced dust-like particles at a high speed, or situations like in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress where they're man-made weapons.
Without even a single example, I think this is an example of a meme that is based on a movie but is perceived as existing in books. Which books? Oh, those bad sci-fi books that I didn't read, of course.
And BTW, "human walking pace or slower" would produce exactly the sort of hull-pinging that is being slagged on. And many particles at that speed are not going to stick from electrostatic forces on the first hit; they might bounce a couple times. ;)
You are right of course. I think I can think offhand of dense asteroid fields in only about two or three SF books I have read out of hundreds. I'm sure there are more - I used to specialise in reading the old space opera stuff, from EE Doc Smith onwards, so I've read a lot of those 'bad' pulp sci-fi novels. Of those I can remember - one was in one of the Asimov robot stories, another was from Steven Donaldson's Gap series. .. UFO . Space 1999 .. Blake's 7 .. Dr Who .. The Black Hole .. and probably many many others..
The real source of the dense asteroid fields is Yes in old sci-fi movies and TV, both after, and long before Star Wars.. I wouldn't be surprised if there was one in at least one of the old Flash Gordon episodes.. Lost in Space.. maybe Star Trek TOS
The grit thing - there are certainly places it would happen - like in the tails of comets or around asteroids after a high speed collision. The way that space works though - like a crazy fairground ride - means that things tend to get spread out and very quickly and the particles will all be separated by many kilometres or millions or billions of kilometres of space..
The really big problem with grit bouncing off the hull though and the heart of the articles complaint is that in space most of the time average closing speeds tend to be very high. In the solar system and around Earths orbit these speeds tends to average on 10's of kilometres per second. The only real way you can really have grit bouncing off your hull is if your hull is surrounded by a force field or is extremely thick or protected by extremely tough armour..
Again you can have slow grit - such as must be hitting the Rosetta probe from comet 67P Churyumov–Gerasimenko, it is relatively very rare..
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..