What do You Consider Plausible Science-Fiction?

[Mr. Mask]

Based off the other thread, it is a resounding yes that we don't know everything, and that some of the fields we'll discover are beyond our abilities to estimate. This sounds like it'd make things easier for scifi writers... but does it?

Do you enjoy science fiction? From Soft to Hard to Hardest, what do you enjoy? (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness) Of what you read, what do you feel made the difference from the technology feeling appealingly plausible, and it being a headache best ignored?

[Shadow of the Sun]

I personally like science fiction from both ends of the spectrum.

I think the single most 'plausible' science fiction author I've ever read is Greg Egan, whose works are really interesting, although there is a degree of mysticism involved with some of his works.

They're still really good, though.

[Starwulf]

Not really sure, given that I've only read one Author that I think can be classified as Hard SF, and even then, I may only think that because I don't know jack about the actual science behind the stuff he talks about. The author in question is Stephen Baxter and his Manifold Trilogy. If he isn't a Hard SF writer, then I don't think I could stomach an author who is, because I could barely understand any of the sciency stuff he talks about, LOL.

[Gnoman]

I prefer settings toward either end of the spectrum. Soft-science space operas and "science fantasy" such as Star Wars are pretty easy to suspend disbelief in, while works such as the Honorverse that only contain one or two breaks from reality (in the Honorverse's case, the breaks are cheap gravity manipulation and the existence of hyperspace) and uses the ramifications of them as the foundation for the setting work well as long as they hold together, which the better ones do. It's the middle-of-the road works where they try to be hard sci-fi but don't put enough logic into the way things work (as always, The Cold Equations is an ideal example of this), or (possibly worse) use a veneer of hard science to wallpaper over their space opera setting (Star Trek Voyager and Enterprise had serious problems with this, while the other series tended to be close to one end or the other depending on episode) that I have much more difficulty with.

[SowZ]

Not really sure, given that I've only read one Author that I think can be classified as Hard SF, and even then, I may only think that because I don't know jack about the actual science behind the stuff he talks about. The author in question is Stephen Baxter and his Manifold Trilogy. If he isn't a Hard SF writer, then I don't think I could stomach an author who is, because I could barely understand any of the sciency stuff he talks about, LOL.

Actually, Soft Sci-Fi can be far more techno-babbly then Hard SF. There is nothing inherent in hard sci-fi that makes them talk about the tech and theories and such. You could have Hard Sci-Fi that doesn't address the science much, and incredibly soft sci-fi that get way bogged down in describing tech/pseudoscience.

[factotum]

I've read and enjoyed all kinds of SF. That's right from reasonably realistic hard SF (A.C. Clarke, some of Niven's stuff outside his Known Space series) to the most out-there space opera (pretty much anything by Iain M. Banks). I don't think plausible levels of technology are necessary to make a good SF story, therefore. I think if an author comes out with a technology that is simply impossible even within the rules he's set up for himself I have a problem with it, though:

example: Stephen Baxter's "Raft" is a mostly hard SF novel which tries to establish what would happen if humans lived in a universe where the gravitational constant is much higher than our own. Near the beginning he has a type of tree that is essentially a giant propeller--it flies through the air by spinning, and uses a central spinning bole in a vacuum chamber to control its spin. Trouble is, of course, something like that would work fine in a vacuum, but in air the drag would rapidly bring the tree to a stop, and since the bole is the only method it has to control its spin, it would never get going again!

[Eldan]

Not really sure, given that I've only read one Author that I think can be classified as Hard SF, and even then, I may only think that because I don't know jack about the actual science behind the stuff he talks about. The author in question is Stephen Baxter and his Manifold Trilogy. If he isn't a Hard SF writer, then I don't think I could stomach an author who is, because I could barely understand any of the sciency stuff he talks about, LOL.

That sounds more like "bad writer" than "hard scifi" to me.

Now, I know that this is in fact often a disease affecting hard SciFi writers, the need to exposit about orbital mechanics and how starship drives work and so on. But think about it. One can write, say, entirely plausible historical fiction about the crusades without spending the first fifteen pages explaining the feudal system, European and Middle Eastern politics and the metallurgy of swords of the time. One can just as much write a piece of realistic science fiction without doing the same.

Then, of course, there's overexplanation. "I went up, got into the shower and dressed" can easily become "Andy opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling, which was made from a plaster made of white gypsum powder that had been left to dry. He put the blanket of cotton, imported from the Americas, aside, then put his feet on the carpet made of synthetic fibre. As was normal, he washed himself under a ceiling-mounted water dispenser for three minutes, then dressed himself the customary in articles of cotton clothing, as follows:..."

Hard Sci Fi. Well, I like much of Alastair Reynold's writing, which often at least starts reasonably hard before going off into technology that is ridiculously advanced. There's actually been a few quite good hard SciFi movies coming out the past few years. Moon, Her (also a love story),...
Hannu Rajaniemi (the Quantum Thief et al) is sort of hard, but like Reynolds of the "ridiculously advanced" kind, sometimes.

Of course, as others have said, I enjoy the entire scale. Doctor Who and Futurama are favourites for a reason.

[Gnoman]

That sounds more like "bad writer" than "hard scifi" to me.

Now, I know that this is in fact often a disease affecting hard SciFi writers, the need to exposit about orbital mechanics and how starship drives work and so on. But think about it. One can write, say, entirely plausible historical fiction about the crusades without spending the first fifteen pages explaining the feudal system, European and Middle Eastern politics and the metallurgy of swords of the time. One can just as much write a piece of realistic science fiction without doing the same.


The trouble with that analogy is that, when writing about the past, your audience is already likely to have at least a cursory knowledge of the subject, and if they're confused it is quite easy to find out more, because the foundation for the story is quite real. With even the hardest of science fiction, this isn't necessarily the case. Explaining orbital mechanics and the physics of a gravity well in a certain amount of detail really is necessary if you want your audience to understand that you really can throw a rock from a fixed point on Luna and still have it impact where you want it to on Earth, and that rock will generate an energy release in the kiloton range, because that's not only not something the average person at the time the story was written will have encountered, it's something that is very difficult to research unless you know a physicist that can run the numbers for you, because nobody's done it before.

The problem only gets worse as you travel farther into the "future" and need to explain things like deflecting hypervelocity missiles by using plasma cannon to vaporize part of them, generating thrust to knock the projectile off course, or using a space elevator to move cargo to an orbital ring, or using a gravity lens to focus a nuclear explosion through a lasing rod to generate an x-ray laser beam. It's not that the target audience is too stupid to understand such things, but that they're not familiar enough to understand intuitively for most people.

[Starwulf]

That sounds more like "bad writer" than "hard scifi" to me.


I would agree, if not for the fact that the story itself was quite good, more then good enough to allow me to continue reading, despite not understanding any of the sciency stuff being discussed in the book. I've since read several other of Baxters books, including a few of the Xeelee Sequence series(though apparently not in the correct order, lol, as I didn't know they were even part of the same series until I made it halfway through the 2nd book and started recognizing certain elements that had been discussed in the 1st book of it I had read).

So uhh...is Baxter considered a Hard sci-fi writer, or am I just THAT ignorant of all things science(I'd like to believe I have at least a nominal grasp on most science concepts, just not an in-depth knowledge of any of them).

[Eldan]

Honestly, if there's parts that you don't understand, but the story still works and is good if you don't get them, they probably were unnecessary in the first place.

[Shadow of the Sun]

I think the best way to class Baxter is 'harder sci-fi than average'. He bases a lot of his stuff on actual science, but there's also a lot of stuff that's just sort of fantastically made up and handwaved, like the building material the Xeelee use.

I think that probably the single best 'intro' example to hard sci-fi is The Martian by Andy Weir. There is nothing in that book that is not 100% plausible and even possible.

I think the biggest issue with this discussion is that science fiction is probably the broadest genre of fiction. Stories about potential future technology are science fiction. Stories about universes with consistent (but different from our own) physics is also science fiction. And hell, sci-fi can also mean 'fiction about science', which is why Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson is classed as science fiction when it's got a lot in common with alt-history with a few fantastic elements.

[Eldan]

Don't forget "action movie, but with spaceships and laser".

[NichG]

Baxter is hard sci-fi. Even the Xeelee construction material has some basis in current scientific ideas, though it takes a lot of liberties.

In some physical systems there are these things called 'topological defects', associated with embedding the symmetries of a particular kind of degree of freedom in a space of a particular dimension. For example, take something like '2d unit vectors'. A 2d unit vector is basically a line from the center of a circle to its rim, and so it can be described by an angle. Normally, an angle behaves like a number - you can add or subtract small amounts to it, etc, without knowing that its an angle. However, when you loop around, you have to get back to the same place. This means that if you create a 2d surface and associate each point on the surface with an angle, normally this would behave just like any other scalar, unless you make a loop such that the angle does a full rotation (or more) around the loop.

Once you make a loop like that, it turns out that you can't make it go away with finite deformations without moving the loop to the edge of the surface or colliding it with a loop in the opposite direction. Essentially, its indestructible without either finding the edge of space, or changing the parameters of the physics on the surface enough that the symmetry describing the field on the surface is no longer 'unit vectors' but is something else (e.g. by heating it sufficiently to cause a phase transition).

The idea with Xeelee construction material is that it's made of a planar-style (as in surface-like, not like 'planes of existence') topological defect in whatever physical symmetries underlie the vacuum state of the universe in the current epoch (e.g., something along the lines of a boundary between different ways of decomposing the unified field into component forces). If its a topological defect, then it's indestructible without either heating up the material to the energy scales associated with the unification of those forces (which are very very large), finding an 'edge' of the universe, or colliding it with a defect of opposite sign.

The problem is, topological defects of larger than 0 dimensional pointlike structures are always either infinite in extent in those directions, terminate on an edge, or form loops or closed surfaces - which then can collapse in on themselves and self-annihilate. So from that point of view, it requires some handwavium to keep Xeelee material stable against collapse. Its also unclear why it should have the particular physical properties ascribed to it (e.g. being a hard inert surface, rather than a bouncy permeable sheet or a surface of highly damaging strong electric fields or whatnot). So that's handwavium as well.

[Gnoman]

I understood the first paragraph of that. I think.

[Eldan]

I understood the first paragraph quite well, the general idea of the second (though it was new to me) and some words from then on.

[NichG]

Maybe some pictures would help?

Here's some point-like defects in a unit-vector field in 2D (http://web.mit.edu/8.334/www/grades/projects/projects14/TrungPhan_8334WP/foundation-5.2.2/CL_1.png)

Here's some line-like defects in 3D (http://cosmology.unige.ch/sites/default/files/media/Simulations_Cordes_Daverio.jpg), evidently from a model that gives rise to cosmic strings. Superconductors and superfluids have this kind of defect too.

The main point is, the energy it takes to destroy one of these things outright scales with the size of the space in which it's contained, or you need to induce a phase transition in the physical system that gives rise to it. Both of those amounts of energy can get really huge, compared to other energy scales in a system. So the things are really really stable.

If you want surface-like ones (domain walls), basically you need a field with two potential minima embedded in 3D space, and the defect occurs at the place where the field goes from one potential minimum to the other. There may be other things which can effectively give you domain walls depending on how they're constrained (e.g. unit vectors in the presence of an aligning field, like what happens with domain walls in magnets).

[MLai]

Maybe some pictures would help?
I have no idea what you're talking about, but I'd like to at least have an idea.

From your posts, you seem to be describing the Xeelee building walls out of math. You're not talking about futuristic construction materials or techniques...

you're saying "Hey look at this mathematical model of nothing but numbers. See these irregularities which are highly stable mathematically? Well imagine if number are bricks! These aliens build their houses with these bricks!"

And I'm left wondering "Okay I'll buy super-advanced aliens. But how the heck are numbers bricks???" :smallconfused: :smallannoyed: :smallfrown:

Edit:
Okay I skimmed through the Wiki page on "topological defects", and I think I have a better idea of what you were describing.
You're talking of specific states of matter which form from extremely high-energy phenomena (in which case "what material is it?" ceases to be a relevant question), such as immediately after the Big Bang, which the Xeelee somehow use in a stable form.
And because this matter is so exotic (I'm using a layman's definition of "exotic"), they have very strange properties which is hard to imagine via human intuition, and can only really be described by using mathematical concepts. Such as "You can only destroy it by finding the edge of the universe" which is kind of a nonsensical "Wuh?" statement when approaching it from a human perspective.

[factotum]

If you think that's confusing, you really don't want to go anywhere near Greg Bear's "Anvil of Stars"--the ships in that are mostly made out of something called "fake matter", which, as far as I can remember from the explanation, is basically them tricking the universe into thinking there's matter there when there isn't. This novel also includes such things as spaceships (along with the people aboard) being instantly converted into anti-matter...

It's odd, really, because that's the sequel to "The Forge of God" which is a largely realistic SF novel about the destruction of the Earth; he just seemed to go barmy when it came time to write the second one!

[MLai]

If you think that's confusing,
I actually had a related question before NichG threw me for a loop. ba-dum tish

Why is technobabble bad? Can it ever be good? How? Or why not?

[SVamp]

Why is technobabble bad? Can it ever be good? How? Or why not?

My 2c:

To many people,perfectly valid explanations (see above) just sound like blah blah blah techno stuff blah blah. So if instead of saying something plausible/realistic but thoroughly confusing you say some misc. BS that SOUNDS like a good explanation, you stop people from going 'huh?' Which completely breaks them out of the story.

"The material is nearly indestructible because they managed to modulate its quantum signature so it is harmonious, instead of chaotic" - this is complete made up nonsense and will make anyone with a basic grasp of science go huh, and break disbelief, but it will sound just fine to someone without said basic grasp.

So techno babble can be good if your audience are non scientists, because you can focus on the story. After all, the important part is that the bloody material has to be indestructible for plot reasons.

On the other hand you CAN write hard-ish fiction and simply not explain why. After all, it's so advanced we have no clue how the hell that could work. (Example: Babylon 5, which is reasonably non-soft for being aimed at the mainstream, eventually introduces organic ships but doesn't even try to explain, and it doesn't need to)

[Telok]

Oddly my objections to the Honorverse and similar isn't the hardness of the science. I can go from Star Wars to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress quite easily and enjoy both of them. It's the planet buster issue I have a problem with. These settings have multi-ton FTL tramp freighters that can go .5 C owned by criminals and terrorists and nothing that can stop those ships after detection and before impact. There is the argument that getting a ship going that fast to hit something is difficult. But it's just as bad to have a cloud of little objects passing through your solar system at that speed.

Even worse is the realization that a cloud of ice crystals at .5 C is a deadly threat to everything in space and has no counter tactic.

Space is a volume, planets can't dodge, and anything going about 2 kps carries energy equal to it's mass in TNT.

[factotum]

These settings have multi-ton FTL tramp freighters that can go .5 C owned by criminals and terrorists and nothing that can stop those ships after detection and before impact. There is the argument that getting a ship going that fast to hit something is difficult.

I recall that being a plot point in "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman--when an attack happens, the orbiting spacecraft appears to run away; it heads toward the collapsar (black hole, basically) that it used to enter the system at near lightspeed. However, the pilot is a tricksy devil, and what he does is pass close enough to the collapsar to bend his course 180 degrees without slowing down; by the time the electromagnetic radiation revealing what he's done arrives back at the planet the spacecraft itself is only 10 seconds behind due to its speed, leaving the enemy no time to react to it.

[Gnoman]

Oddly my objections to the Honorverse and similar isn't the hardness of the science. I can go from Star Wars to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress quite easily and enjoy both of them. It's the planet buster issue I have a problem with. These settings have multi-ton FTL tramp freighters that can go .5 C owned by criminals and terrorists and nothing that can stop those ships after detection and before impact. There is the argument that getting a ship going that fast to hit something is difficult. But it's just as bad to have a cloud of little objects passing through your solar system at that speed.

Even worse is the realization that a cloud of ice crystals at .5 C is a deadly threat to everything in space and has no counter tactic.

Space is a volume, planets can't dodge, and anything going about 2 kps carries energy equal to it's mass in TNT.

Huh? The Honorverse deals with that explicitly, as the speed limits of .6c for civilain ships and .8c for military ones are the limits of the ships to sweep ahead of them gravitationally, orbital procedures are set up to ensure that nobody can go to full acel too close to a planet (civilian ships, and non-RMN ships, even Grayson warships cannot use impeller drive within a rather large radius of the Star Empire's planets, limiting them to a couple of dozen gravities) to prevent such attacks, the setting includes tugs that are designed to clean up debris so it can't hit the planet (by vaporizing them with the near-black-hole impeller wedge or using tractors to move them), and kinetic strike projectiles are standard-issue weapons for all navies in the setting. Oh, and there's the fact that Honor's entire family was wiped out by orbital debris that the tugs couldn't stop after a major attack, and without the tugs the planet would have been sterilized.

[Telok]

Gnoman, space is big. Getting up to speed near a planet isn't even on my radar, my minimum starting distance would be a light-week out.

Here's the basic scenario. Define the directions from your target star as N S E W along the plane of the elliptic, for maximum terror. Spend a year doing the calculations for your starting points, times, and intercept courses. Fill your tramp freighter with a thousand tons of water and make sure your spray nozzle is working. Jump to a point N of your target at the calculated time, accel to .5 C, spray the water out in front of you. Get a good narrow nozzle so it won't spread too much. Decel, jump back to your water source, refill. Do the whole thing again at a range of four light months from the E direction. Then repeat twice more at monthly intervals geting closer each time.

On your target date you will have four clouds of ice crystals, several thousand kilometers across, sweeping through the system from four directions at .5 C, converging on one planet. The ice crystals may only be 0.1 grams but relavistic speeds pack lots of energy into them.

And this is six guys with a tramp freighter. A military would use a guided munition loaded with submunitions. The only defense is armoring everything in space or totally controlling a sphere of space a light year in diameter or more. None of this is new, it's been in sf since the 70's and the only good solutions people have is to not use reactionless drives or to account for small groups of people being able to kill whole planets.

[Gnoman]

In the Honorverse, a ship or tug can deal with that simply by rolling on the long axis and taking it all on the impeller wedge, which destroys everything that touches it. THat sort of scenario is analyzed, processed and dealt with in-universe. Not only that, there is an in-universe treaty where doing that to a planet, ANY planet, is a declaration of war against the entire human race, and will result in ALL of your planets being similarly sterilized. Not to mention that there's rarely a point in doing so, as controlling a planet's orbitals guarantees that they can't fight you, and glassing the planet is very wasteful.

Further, you're vastly overestimating the destructive power of what you're dealing with. The tiny mass means that they'd be extremely affected by the gravity of the system bodies or the erosive effects of existing particles, the debris field that is likely to be around any spacefaring planet would stop a lot of it (striking even a loose screw at that sort of speed would wipe out both objects), and realistically the only thing you'd be doing would be dumping extra energy into the atmosphere (much less than you might expect, as much of the energy would radiate outward) as the projectiles hit the outer edges and are vaporized. Enough of them would be a very big deal, but it isn't the "you die" button that you seem to think it is.


Kinetic bombardment is a viable weapon in a sci-fi setting, but any technology base that can carry out such an attack is going to be able to put countermeasures in place to deal with it as well.

[NichG]

With regards to technobabble and 'the story', one of the traditional roles of hard sci-fi in particular was to make the readers (and often the author) mentally adjust to circumstances which were alien to anything humans had ever had to deal with in the past. If you just did this arbitrarily, it would be impossible for any real understanding to grow out of it, so you have to do it with respect to the science which necessitates it. For that particular role of hard sci-fi, the story is actually less important than the point at which the reader realizes that the story follows directly from the ways in which this alien world is different.

E.g. "I need something indestructible, so lets build it out of math" is less the point than "What if math were bricks, how would that change our assumptions about how the world works, and what would catch us by surprise?". Baxter is more the latter type than the former. For example, he has a book that explores 'what if the gravitational constant were much larger than it is in our universe', a book that explores 'how would it be different for a form of life engineered to live in the superfluid interior of a neutron star?', etc. While those books do have stories which are important too, the purpose of the books isn't just the story.

Similar 'what if' authors: Arthur C Clarke is famous for writing books of this sort that ended up being turned into real inventions, or at least things plausible enough that people spent a lot of effort working out the engineering details later. Robert Forward wrote this kind of stuff as well - 'what if there were a form of life that used nuclear decay processes for its energy source?', as did Charles Sheffield - 'what if we could change the underlying timescale associated with human existence, so we could perceive the universe at speeds 10 times slower, 1000000 times slower, etc', for example.

[Jay R]

I want to know that the author has some understanding of science, and for the science to either be plausible, or at least a consistent invention. A few early episodes of Star Trek the original series rose to this level. The Next generation didn't even bother - the first draft of their scripts actually said, "Insert technobabble here."

And it's still closer than Star Wars which, despite ray guns and space ships, has no science elements at all. A farmboy is given his father's sword by the hermit wizard of a great secret order and goes out to rescue a princess - this is straightforward fantasy. What's the justification for a light saber? None - "a more elegant weapon, for a more civilized time" isn't science or engineering. But Star Wars is a triumph as a story from the fantasy genre in a science fiction setting. [The one time they tried to add a science fiction element (midi-chlorians) the fans revolted - correctly, in my judgment. It doesn't belong.]

The science fiction of Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, E. E. Smith, and Arthur C. Clarke was always valid and reasonable, even when it was merely implicit in the setting.

[Shadow of the Sun]

NichG: Greg Egan (who I will refuse to stop pimping) has one of my favourite examples of that.

For his Orthogonal series of books, he looked at an equation that governs space time, and flips a minus sign to a plus sign, and from there he develops an entire universe with internally consistent physics based on that single change. It ends up very weird.

[Wardog]

I like both ends of the scale - and stuff in the middle as well, as long as they are done well.

They just serve different purposes (pure escapism vs. exploring how scientific or technological advances could affect society) and both are enjoyable. (And thinking about it further, soft SF isn't necessarily pure escapism in any case, as there are plenty of non-scientific issues your story can explore while the protagonists are zipping from galaxy to galaxy in their personal space cars).

The main issue, IMO, is more about how well they are written.

Bad soft SF can still be entertaining in a so-bad-its-good way, or failing that instantly forgettable.

Bad hard SF though is rarely even entertaining, and in the case of "classic" hard SF, gets dated very quickly. Of the ones I've read, a lot seemed to be the result of someone wanting to write an essay about e.g. the problems an interplanetary mission would face if the valves in their computer broke, but then decided to turn it into a story by adding a narrator.


(I was recently reading an anthology of classic hard SF recently, and while there were a few interesting ideas or predictions - including one from the 1920s that had anticipated the internet, social networking and online shopping - they were mostly very dry, and didn't seem to be able to envisage any sort of society or culture other than 1950s white middle-class America (or 1950s white middle-class Britain) - even when the characters were aliens).

[Jeff the Green]

Depends entirely on what sci is being fied. I prefer softer sci-fi when talking about physics and chemistry and hard sci-fi when talking about biology. Mostly because I cannot get through something like Avatar and not want to scream at the fact that everything on Pandora is six-legged except the Naavi (who arguably would have the strongest selection pressures to keep them, being arboreal tool-users). Or pretty much anything that happens on CSI.

This may or may not have something to do with the fact that I don't understand physics beyond balancing pulleys, and I'm not sure I can do that any more.

[gomipile]

Based off the other thread, [...]

Which other thread?

[FLHerne]

Like a few people above, I'm happy with either end, not so much the middle. 'Doing cool stuff IN SPACE' with starfighters and handwaved everything is fine. Building a consistent (plausible helps, but not so important) physical model for things and then doing cool stuff or using said model for plot points is even better (yay Honorverse!).

What I really don't like are stories that pretend to be hard-SF, and build plot off their 'physics', without making any attempt to keep the physics consistent or pay attention to obvious side-effects of technology that gets used.


Gnoman, space is big. Getting up to speed near a planet isn't even on my radar, my minimum starting distance would be a light-week out.

On your target date you will have four clouds of ice crystals, several thousand kilometers across, sweeping through the system from four directions at .5 C, converging on one planet. The ice crystals may only be 0.1 grams but relavistic speeds pack lots of energy into them.

And this is six guys with a tramp freighter. A military would use a guided munition loaded with submunitions. The only defense is armoring everything in space or totally controlling a sphere of space a light year in diameter or more.
Honorverse drive systems are big, too. :smalltongue:

A superdreadnought's wedge is hundreds of kilometers across, the orbital tugs have overpowered SD-sized wedges too.
Since the former are drilled to form giant 'walls' as a military maneuver, you actually could just wall off the entire side of your planet with wedges. Fizzap, no more ice.

If you don't have a battle fleet handy, just use your local tug/freighter to sweep it up over a few passes. You have good acceleration, a higher maximum velocity* than the stuff you're sweeping, and an impenetrable plane of (consistently-)handwaved physics on each side of your ship. :smallbiggrin:

All of this gets used in Mission of Honor (IIRC) if you haven't read it yet. :smallwink:

*Relative velocities of things moving at high fractions of c is something the Honorverse doesn't really care about, AFAIK? Time dilation on long trips is mentioned in passing sometimes, but I'd have thought it should be significant in battles. :smallconfused:

[Bulldog Psion]

I'm pretty much on the side of science fantasy, because the harder the SF, the faster it gets dated. I mean, some of those stories in "I, Robot" have people wandering around in space in suits made out of cork. And riding on robots with extremely long ears designed for use as handlebars.

"Schlock Mercenary" sciencey is enough for me. :smallbiggrin: For example, I've got the idea that their stuff is powered by something called annihilation plants, and the power generated is a geometric progression, rather than an arithmetic progression, based on the physical diameter/mass of the annihilation plant. I don't have the faintest idea how it works, but I know that a big annie plant = tremendous power, etc.

A little internal consistency and a good story are what I'm looking for. The tech is something that makes me say "wow, cool!" rather than "hmmmm, how exactly could we build this?" -- because I don't know the latter.

So, anyway, that's my take. I realize it's only valid for me, but since this is an "air your thoughts" thread, that's what I'm doing. :smallbiggrin:

[Sith_Happens]

I don't think I have any particular hardness preference, what I do care about though is verisimilitude. If something in your sci-fi universe is supposed to work a certain way, then all of its depictions had damn well better be consistent with that (unless of course the inconsistency is a plot point) and there had definitely not be any conflicts in the story that are only possible because all involved users of said tech/science are idiots (unless of course they're explicitly idiots, but in that case you'd better be playing that idiocy for laughs and/or drama).

[Mr. Mask]

Which other thread? Sorry, I posted this so far back I can't remember. It's probably somewhere on the first page of threads.


Good posts everyone. It's interesting to read different takes on the subject.

To add my own thoughts, I enjoy hard scifi that allows me to learn details about the given science. I enjoy most other levels of scifi, if the story is good and the technology is consistent as others have said.

[Jay R]

I enjoy hard science fiction, and I equally enjoy fantasy. But I enjoy them differently.

Many modern stories are fantasy, even if they are presented in science-fiction trappings.

The classic example is Star Wars. No scientific ideas ever intruded (with one failed counter-example), and there was no intent to explain the advanced phenomena, nor to create situations in which the nature of the world affected the story.

In fact, when Lucas attempted to introduce a single SF element - a scientific explanation of one phenomenon (midichlorians), the fans revolted, and the idea was never mentioned again.

So we are left with the classic fantasy take - a farm boy meets an old wizard in his cave, who gives him the sword his father used as a knight, and he goes off to rescue the beautiful princess.

It's pure fantasy. It happens to be given a science fictional background, but it remains fantasy. And it's excellent fantasy.

[stcfg]

I don't think have a preference for the hardness of science fiction but I don't really like it when they use common science misconceptions.

For example, the movie Lucy using the 10% of the brain myth turned me off of it.

If no one believed that myth, it wouldn't bother me as much. But since there are a decent number of people who actually believe that, it feels like they are promoting scientific ignorance.

[Sith_Happens]

For example, the movie Lucy using the 10% of the brain myth turned me off of it.

Don't even get me started on that movie. Nearly every line made my inner scientist die a little, and I am not exaggerating. It even managed to get everything about being a scientist wrong.

[Caesar]

That sounds more like "bad writer" than "hard scifi" to me.
Then, of course, there's overexplanation. "I went up, got into the shower and dressed" can easily become "Andy opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling, which was made from a plaster made of white gypsum powder that had been left to dry. He put the blanket of cotton, imported from the Americas, aside, then put his feet on the carpet made of synthetic fibre. As was normal, he washed himself under a ceiling-mounted water dispenser for three minutes, then dressed himself the customary in articles of cotton clothing, as follows:..."

Oh god. I'm reading 'The Reality Dysfunction' by Peter Hamilton, which I had the misfortune of assuming was hard sci-fi (it's not at all). Not only that, but I swear you could cut his 1000+ pages of bloat down to half if you simply removed the constant whole-paragraph descriptions of every single character's outfit, which happens not just when a character is introduced, but also every single time they change clothes. If you removed the highly frequent and completely superfluous sex-scenes as well, the book would be under 400 pages.

[Kato]

Don't even get me started on that movie. Nearly every line made my inner scientist die a little, and I am not exaggerating. It even managed to get everything about being a scientist wrong.

Totally off-topic but OH GOODNESS YES. I didn't want to watch it because of that. Then I watched it with a friend anyway, because I thought I could just turn my brain off/chant the MST3K mantra whenever something stupid happened. But there was so much stupid! If it was just the 10% stuff I could have accepted it but there was not a single line in relation to science in that thing that didn't make me cringe. "Humans are the peak of evolution" my ****...


Ahem, on-topic... I'd argue it's sometimes hard to pin down what is "realistic" scifi. People throw the square-cube law at everything with giant robors or monsters, ignoring that it depends on the material which can be used. Yeah, superlight and superstrong materials are a bit unlikely but not impossible. And similar things go for other stuff. Scientists fifty years ago would be baffled at what kind of technology we have today. (Well, some of it, I guess)
That said, I rarely have a problem with any kind of scifi, except when they obviously ignore things that should happen in a setting. Or things like an utopia which just is because people figured out that being evil is not a good thing to do... Or vice versa society going downhill because of stupid reasons.

[BannedInSchool]

The readers are basically at the mercy of the technical competence of the author. If they're competent and they genuinely believe it could happen, then it's Science Fiction. There's still a scale of "could happen" from "hey, we could do that if we wanted" to "nothing impossible, but such a fictional setting it's not going to happen in the Real World".

[Dodom]

Personally, I don't have a set preference on the hardness of science fiction, but I am annoyed when they attempt to pose as something they're not. I'm not unforgiving, I love Star Trek, but when it attempts to treknobabble around a plot hole, I'm not exactly laughing *with* it.

I think the worst is when an author has a belief they want to get accross and then pretend to write hard sci-fi but all the science is built around proving themselves right and sounds like a giant deus ex to anyone not already believing the same thing.

[russdm]

but don't put enough logic into the way things work (as always, The Cold Equations is an ideal example of this),

The reasons why "The Cold Equations" is crap should be required reading for every aspiring "Hard"-scifi writer. To prevent more crap like it from being written.

Personally, I find only some "Hard"-scifi good, because some of it ignores cultural and social impacts of the tech, while some stories do that. The other issue is that it quickly becomes dated as science marches on. Frankly, I prefer "soft"-scifi since it tends to be more rooted in people and their views whereas most "hard"-scifi is mainly about the technology and little about the people (from what little "hard"-scifi I haven't liked that I have read). I have mainly read Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. Don't much about other writers and the main "hard"-scifi stories beyond those.

[Gnoman]

The reasons why "The Cold Equations" is crap should be required reading for every aspiring "Hard"-scifi writer. To prevent more crap like it from being written.


I'd like to hear your reasenos. I ahve a list als mong as my arm, but I'm interested to dsee fig they match,.

[Telok]

I'd like to hear your reasenos. I ahve a list als mong as my arm, but I'm interested to dsee fig they match,.

It starts here for me: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/blastoff.php#intro

I also note that the story in question was written in 1954. It would get a pass from me if the issues were from outdated science, progress marches on and new discoveries can eclipse the old. But the issue is more bad engineering and really incompetent characters.

[Knaight]

I'd also be interested in seeing the list against the cold equations. I don't remember anything that egregious, but it was a while ago that I read it, and I tend to catch chemistry errors more reliably than physics.

[factotum]

As I understand it, you shouldn't really blame the author for any scientific mess-ups in "The Cold Equations"--as I recall, John W. Campbell (editor of the magazine the story was published in) kept sending the story back to the author until he came up with a version where the girl didn't get saved by some ingenious trick.

[gomipile]

Why all the beating around the bush regarding the plot hole(s) in The Cold Equations?

Please come out and say precisely what you think is wrong. Use language and description that lets us go read(re^n-read for some of us) the story and finely match your reasons against its plot.

The above link doesn't even mention The Cold Equations, so it wasn't really relevant as part of an answer, since you didn't directly explain how your thought process connected the physics with your problem(s) with the story.

[Telok]

The above link doesn't even mention The Cold Equations, so it wasn't really relevant as part of an answer, since you didn't directly explain how your thought process connected the physics with your problem(s) with the story.

I'm sorry if I wasn't clear. That link is to a web site for writers, specifically science fiction writers to help get the science right.

It may be buried in there (unless I linked the wrong page) but minor mass/fuel adjustments aren't usually an issue unless you're riding the ragged edge of your performance envelope. Our probes have tolerances that tight because of economics, it costs so much for us to put stuff in orbit that we minimize the on-board fuel to pack in more instruments and that requires us to use long, slow trips with gravity assists. In that story a young girl gets into a secured area (no basic competence guards), onto a (ought to be) sealed ship, hides in a coat closet (wasted mass and volume on a space ship, no preflight check), and her less than 0.001% mass change to the loaded ship will doom the mission. Except of course that they can spare the mass for a gun, an extra door that they don't need, an airlock on a ship that never opens outside an atmosphere except to jettison stowaways, and a "pilot" that doesn't do anything but enter numbers into a computer and push some buttons at the right time, on a trip that takes approximately two hours. Oh, and she isn't noticed untill half way through the flight by the temperature increase from her body heat because her mass apparently didn't alter the launch and acceleration phases of the trip enough to notice.

It's not a bad story, it's perfectly accurate and fine on the character end. But the rocketry parts have holes in them. It's not really bad science like stealth in space or every spaceship in the universe being a relavistic kill vehicle, it's just a couple of fridge-logic holes. If you have exactly one shot at saving anywhere from six to sixty thousand lives and you're using a system with built in human error (live pilot) then you need to build in some leeway and tolerances. Apparently if they'd been taking stuff to a more populated planet and someone had put the wrong crate on board they wouldn't have noticed untill the ship crashed from the shortage or excess of mass. They use a person for a button pushing timer and have zero margin for error (actually just enough to write a story).

[Knaight]

In that story a young girl gets into a secured area (no basic competence guards), onto a (ought to be) sealed ship, hides in a coat closet (wasted mass and volume on a space ship, no preflight check), and her less than 0.001% mass change to the loaded ship will doom the mission. Except of course that they can spare the mass for a gun, an extra door that they don't need, an airlock on a ship that never opens outside an atmosphere except to jettison stowaways, and a "pilot" that doesn't do anything but enter numbers into a computer and push some buttons at the right time, on a trip that takes approximately two hours. Oh, and she isn't noticed untill half way through the flight by the temperature increase from her body heat because her mass apparently didn't alter the launch and acceleration phases of the trip enough to notice.

The 0.001% mass change is debatable. The ship she gets onto is explicitly described as small. Besides that though, you're right about the engineering being sketchy at best. With that said, it's very possible the load was comparatively small to begin with, and even a minor change in the amount of stuff-that-isn't-fuel necessitates a fair bit of fuel, though given that they were landing I'd expect it to necessitate less.

[russdm]

The 0.001% mass change is debatable. The ship she gets onto is explicitly described as small. Besides that though, you're right about the engineering being sketchy at best. With that said, it's very possible the load was comparatively small to begin with, and even a minor change in the amount of stuff-that-isn't-fuel necessitates a fair bit of fuel, though given that they were landing I'd expect it to necessitate less.

It's implied in the story that the ship is designed to land via crashing like our Apollo modules did with the parachutes. It's also stated some-what that the ships are single use and won't get refueled.

As for the problems...there are many:

1) No security

There is no security provided to keep the ship from being broken into or sabotaged with no mention of any kind of guard. The pilot is issued a gun to shoot stowaways since the ship apparently can't afford the mass for a lock in the airlock. Access to the ships have a sign wearing people to stay away, as opposed to an actual guard stationed always on duty.

2) Disruptive extra features

There is an airlock in the ship, along with a closet large enough to hold a person. There is no need for such a large closet nor is there mention of the ship (the ships) being designed to have a crew resting area. So the closet doesn't need to be that large or even exist. The supply closet exists to hold the serum, but why use a closet instead of cabinet? Even more random, the closet has a door rather than be open so the pilot can see inside. There is no need for a door.

The ship has an airlock. Why? What event would make this worth having? Why not just have a door similar to what we have used on the Apollo modules? Once the door gets shut, there is no need to open it until the ship gets to its destination.

Why there is so much space inside the ship if the fuel/mass constraints are so high? The story has the pilot walking across to the closet, not simply moving the chair or himself weightlessly instead. There are drive units inside that the girl can sit on. Why? Why so much space inside when keeping mass down is so important?

3) Lack of fuel for safety margins

The amount is set at a limit that doesn't allow for any kind of safety margin, meaning that if even a feather is placed on the ship, it will promptly crash. The ship has barely enough fuel to propel the ship with a pilot and its standard features plus cargo whereas a proper safety margin when mean having something like 30 to 40 minutes of extra fuel incase of special maneuvering. There is none of that. Nothing but the bare minimum. What happens if a slightly heavier pilot ends up having to fly? The ship crashes.

4) Lack of proper engineering principles

The ship is not designed with proper engineering methods despite the fact the its supposedly designed by engineers. The ship is made to be small and collapsible, thus created from light metals and plastics, but being collapsible means that every component such as the rocket engine and the fuel/fuel container plus the closet, computer, pilot seat, and airlock all have to be installed before fuel can even be inserted. That doesn't work for something that is collapsible, because it means building it every time. Even more stupid, the ships don't possess parachutes to land with, but instead require the fuel as if the ship runs out of fuel it will go into a free fall. Adding in extra space for extra fuel is apparently not feasible somehow.

5) Improper and idiotic mission plan arrangements

The ships are fueled by a computer that allows for only the minimum fuel for a mission to be completed. No extra fuel is placed in nor is the computer allowing for any kind of error to occur. Even if someone accidently leaves a glove behind, it causes the ship to crash. There is no allowance for course corrections or the possibility of the ship being hit be a meteorite. There is no checks carried out for stowaways before the ship launches from the cruiser and apparently there are no guards posted around the ship at any time, despite the fact that the ship has to be constructed completely before use. The pilot does nothing to find out if there is a stowaway without finding out from an instrument, rather than doing a check since that would proper procedure considering stowaways are supposedly a concern. The only procedure seems to be for the pilot to enter the craft, and take it out without inspecting anything, then wait to see if the sensors pick anything up.

6) No law of the universe demands the death

It is not the laws of the universe that require the death, it is human stupidity and idiocy with massive design flaws that requires it. There are no moments where the laws are being fulfilled without some kind of human error being involved. The cold laws of the universe don't use human failure and here, that is how it works being that it fully employs human failures rather than the laws themselves.

This story is simply a terrible one and one that should not be used as an example of how to write a good story.

[Gnoman]

3) Lack of fuel for safety margins

The amount is set at a limit that doesn't allow for any kind of safety margin, meaning that if even a feather is placed on the ship, it will promptly crash. The ship has barely enough fuel to propel the ship with a pilot and its standard features plus cargo whereas a proper safety margin when mean having something like 30 to 40 minutes of extra fuel incase of special maneuvering. There is none of that. Nothing but the bare minimum. What happens if a slightly heavier pilot ends up having to fly? The ship crashes.


The worst part about this is that building a fuel tolerance this tight means that the ship will fail approximately 100% of the time. Ignoring the facts that measuring mass that precisely is far more trouble that it's worth, and that the mass of several components is variable (the pilot's weight will fluctuate from day to day, air is very difficult to perfectly meter and measure (particularly since no airlock was used to enter the ship in the first place; it is impossible to manufacture the fuel, fuel feed, and the engines precisely enough that you can make use of such measurements. If the fuel just happens to burn a tiny bit less efficiently because of a tiny impurity, a feed line develops a tiny leak under acceleration, or an engine burns 101% as much fuel per thrust as it's supposed to because of a tiny manufacturing error, the ship crashes because a tiny bit of Delta-V was no longer available. If the pilot or control system misreads a sensor and misapplied thrust (the most logical reason for having a human "in the loop" in the first place, even when the story was written, would be to make sure that the instrument data made sense instead of, for example, reading the wrong speed because weather interfered with the pitot tube), the ship crashes because there was no safety cushion to allow recovery from mistake. A tolerance of a hundred kilos would be reasonable. 50 kilos? Dangerously close. The story implies that the tolerance is far, far less.


The second criticism that I have with the work, and don't see listed here, is that even with the absurdity of the scenario, there was no need for the girl to die, not if there was time to space her in the first place. There was quite a bit of superflous mass on the ship, which could easily be spaced instead. The pilot has a gun, and both of them are wearing clothes. Neither is essential for successful landing. There is, as mentioned, an entirely pointless door on the storage closet, which could be removed and discarded. The pilot's chair is unneeded. If all that, along with any other loose items (the existence of which is, iirc, mentioned) doesn't add up to the 100 kilos (or more likely less, 100 kilograms is on the very heavy side for a human female), there is almost certainly enough excess air onboard to make up the difference, given the extravagantly large interior volume.

[factotum]

I'll just answer some of russdm's points here:

1) Agreed. The hand of the author was showing very strongly there--the girl had to be able to get aboard the ship in order for the story to happen, so she did.

2) Disagree here. This ship was not constructed specifically for this one mission--it is a general purpose ship that might be called upon to perform any number of roles, and so things like airlocks and cupboards big enough for people to hide in are there in case they're needed.

3) Cobblers, to put it bluntly. The ship has already been decelerating for some time when the girl is discovered, and after she's discovered, the pilot reduces thrust (but does not turn off the engines entirely) for another fairly lengthy time interval. All that indicates that there *is* some fuel margin, it's just not enough of one for the ship to safely reach the ground with the extra mass of the girl aboard. Given that we don't know how fast the ship is travelling, what type of engine it has, or what type of fuel it has, that is an entirely reasonable proposition.

4) Possibly. I don't know enough about mechanical engineering to judge this point.

5) See my answer to point 3--there *is* some extra fuel margin aboard, so your basic premise is flawed.

6) As I said above, blame John W. Campbell for that, not the author; the author had several ingenious solutions to save the girl, and the editor insisted that he use none of them and that she should die.

[Gnoman]

I'll just answer some of russdm's points here:

3) Cobblers, to put it bluntly. The ship has already been decelerating for some time when the girl is discovered, and after she's discovered, the pilot reduces thrust (but does not turn off the engines entirely) for another fairly lengthy time interval. All that indicates that there *is* some fuel margin, it's just not enough of one for the ship to safely reach the ground with the extra mass of the girl aboard. Given that we don't know how fast the ship is travelling, what type of engine it has, or what type of fuel it has, that is an entirely reasonable proposition.


If you don't have enough safety margin for an extra hundred kilos of mass, you don't have a safety margin.

[factotum]

If you don't have enough safety margin for an extra hundred kilos of mass, you don't have a safety margin.

To get an extra 100kg of mass from the ground to LEO would require about 1500kg of extra fuel. As I said, we don't know the speed, rocket or fuel involved in the Cold Equations, so it's impossible for us to say how much extra fuel is needed in their situation, but it might be a lot more significant than the margin required to, say, account for minor course changes caused by gravitational anomalies.

[007_ctrl_room]

I have always been a huge sci-fi fan since the very first time I watched the original Star Wars as a kid. While I got away from sci-fi books for a long time, the last two years I have really made a push to catch up on some really amazing novels; I just read Ender's Game for the first time about six months ago, and I can't believe I passed on this one for so long - arguably my favorite sci-fi read of all-time. As a Marine, I also really enjoyed Haldeman's The Forever War, which is probably a close second for me at this point.

I am always open to other suggestions as well!

[russdm]

To get an extra 100kg of mass from the ground to LEO would require about 1500kg of extra fuel. As I said, we don't know the speed, rocket or fuel involved in the Cold Equations, so it's impossible for us to say how much extra fuel is needed in their situation, but it might be a lot more significant than the margin required to, say, account for minor course changes caused by gravitational anomalies.

Given that the girl's weight will crash the ship, I would have to say no considering that gravitational anomalies would weigh or have a mass greater than the girl. Also, she has to be tossed out at 19:10 no matter what. Part of the ship's mass is the fuel and as the fuel gets used, it should lower the ship's mass but that is not mentioned or considered either.

Yes, you can blame the editor, but the writer wrote the story instead of telling the editor he was being stupid here. From what I recall, the author might not have ever personally mentioned anything about it being the editor's fault while it shows up later.

Overall, it is a bad story to take writing tips from.

[NichG]

What, pray tell, is a 'gravitational anomaly'?

It seems to me that the human factors are a sufficient critique here. But maybe the true human factor that is relevant is 'if the editor demands you not use the clever things you came up with to turn a situation around in the plot, you have to change the scenario so that the clever things you came up with actually don't work or they're going to be plot holes'.

After all, its not that 'situations in which there's nothing you can do to due to realities of the universe' can't exist, it's just that this particular situation doesn't appear to be one of them under close inspection. Trying to return from Mars and you miss your Hohmann transfer window? You're dead already, because suddenly its not 8 months to get home, its 36 months to get home.

So it feels like the problem is not so much in the story's conception but its execution, its particular choices.

[gomipile]

What, pray tell, is a 'gravitational anomaly'?


It would be when the gravity acting on the ship is different than one would expect based on the ship's course and the known masses of the astronomical bodies near that course.

[russdm]

It seems to me that the human factors are a sufficient critique here. But maybe the true human factor that is relevant is 'if the editor demands you not use the clever things you came up with to turn a situation around in the plot, you have to change the scenario so that the clever things you came up with actually don't work or they're going to be plot holes'.

Sounds like trying to pull A Lucas to me and reminds of the prequels....

[factotum]

It would be when the gravity acting on the ship is different than one would expect based on the ship's course and the known masses of the astronomical bodies near that course.

Exactly. An uncharted asteroid passes through space near the ship and its gravity would knock the thing off course ever so slightly. For that matter, the same could happen if they didn't know the orbits of all the planets in the system precisely, which is quite likely considering it's a newly colonised one!

@russdm: the gravitational anomalies are (hopefully) not inside the ship itself. My LEO example earlier was intended to show that you need a *lot* of extra fuel to shift extra mass around via rockets, the rocket equation being as it is, and so the extra mass makes a lot more difference than you're maybe giving it credit for. It's not like a car, where the weight of an extra passenger might reduce your fuel economy by 0.1%!

[Knaight]

To get an extra 100kg of mass from the ground to LEO would require about 1500kg of extra fuel. As I said, we don't know the speed, rocket or fuel involved in the Cold Equations, so it's impossible for us to say how much extra fuel is needed in their situation, but it might be a lot more significant than the margin required to, say, account for minor course changes caused by gravitational anomalies.

In the story it's launched from deep space (a larger craft), to go land on a planet. That implies a lot less fuel necessary.

[factotum]

In the story it's launched from deep space (a larger craft), to go land on a planet. That implies a lot less fuel necessary.

It implies nothing of the kind. We don't know how fast the FTL cruiser is going relative to the planet when it drops the ship off, and that will be the primary driver of how much fuel the ship has to use in order to decelerate to survivable speeds before it hits the atmosphere.

[Telok]

The really sad thing is that stowaways happen often enough on the emergency ships that there's a law for it. A decent lock would solve the problem.

[Tyndmyr]

I actually had a related question before NichG threw me for a loop. ba-dum tish

Why is technobabble bad? Can it ever be good? How? Or why not?

Because it's a replacement for an explanation. It never ACTUALLY explains things, it merely makes people bored/confused/etc until they stop asking the question.

There are several better solutions. First, you could actually answer the question. Second, you could simply not bring the question up. Third, you could leave the question open, depending on the sort of book you are writing. Not everything needs to be explained.

Sure, technobabble is perhaps most notably bad when you understand that they are speaking gibberish, but it's bad all round. It contributes to a perception that science is some arcane incomprehensible thing, for one. Even in the optimal case, someone who hasn't the faintest clue what you're saying....who really watches a show to be confused?


Schlock Mercernary is actually surprisingly hard sci-fi. I'd peg them as basically up there with the Culture(and strangely similar in some respects).

[NichG]

In the story it's launched from deep space (a larger craft), to go land on a planet. That implies a lot less fuel necessary.

When people talk about equations ruining their day in space travel, it's usually this one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation). The harsh thing there is the logarithm. It means that for every 100 m/s of delta-v you want to add to a craft, you have to multiply the amount of fuel by some factor. So the fuel needed is exponentially dependent on how 'far' you want to go (where far here is measured in terms of difference between orbital parameters, not physical distance in space). That's really harsh - it means that it costs you a lot of extra fuel to add a tiny margin.

This kind of thing was a big problem for mission design and its why we do these crazy gravitational assist maneuvers that involve flinging yourself around three other planets (including maybe an inner-system one) three times before heading off to Jupiter or Saturn rather than just adding a bit of fuel and doing a direct transfer.

So probably that kind of thing is the idea that the author was trying to get across, but was foiled by problems of execution.

[Qwertystop]

For me, the important bits are that it's self-consistent and doesn't go too far in explaining things. Asimov's Nemesis (which used a plot device I'm sure he used in at least one short story before that, the hivemind-microorganisms over an entire planet), has a lot hanging on hyperdrive and "hyper-assistance" (skimming between hyperspace and normal space, averaging lightspeed, figured out long before stable hyperdrive). The only thing explaining how it works beyond that is used more for character development (a lost-and-marooned situation and the dialogue around that, before and after it was figured out) than for technobabble. And it works - good book, the tech is understandable to the extend that it's explained, and any more explanation would be superfluous.

Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth books are in a bit of a different direction. The main line goes a bit too skew for my liking - around the later bits, which go straight past it's old "mild fantasy elements" into "hyperadvanced precursor aliens from long before the other set of hyperadvanced precursor aliens who were themselves long before humanity and the rest of current-timescale history, apparently predicted the protagonist's existence and unique ability to end a universe-destroying threat", which would frankly be a bit of a stretch even in high fantasy.* However, some of the tech is very interesting - especially the KK-drive engines and the scene of the invention of the SCCAM missile and stingship. One makes intuitive sense even if the underlying tech probably wouldn't work in reality, and the other fits together established tech in a way that feels ingenious even when I already knew the background from Tar-Ayim Krang. I honestly can't tell whether the author came up with the drives or the stingships first.

*wow, that sentence


Don't even get me started on that movie. Nearly every line made my inner scientist die a little, and I am not exaggerating. It even managed to get everything about being a scientist wrong.

Hm. On the one hand, morbid curiosity. On the other, I'm not very willing to subject myself to something so awful. Any specific examples?

[MLai]

Hm. On the one hand, morbid curiosity. On the other, I'm not very willing to subject myself to something so awful. Any specific examples?
Morgan Freeman plays a Scientist in the movie Lucy. His portrayal as a scientist there makes his narrator role in Through The Wormhole look like Einstein.
The writer of the script basically has no inkling or even shred of grasp on what science is or what scientists do for a living.

[Jay R]

I actually had a related question before NichG threw me for a loop. ba-dum tish

Why is technobabble bad? Can it ever be good? How? Or why not?

If it were good, it wouldn't be babble.

Consider two questions. Is this discussion technically accurate? And is it needed for the story. Technobabble is neither.

In old-style science fiction (and some modern SF), technical issues were actually considered correctly. In "Marooned Off Vesta", by Isaac Asimov, three astronauts are trapped in orbit without propulsion, so there is no way to escape. They eventually cut a hole in the water tank, so the water spewing out acted like a rocket to push them home.

In the novel Have Space Suit, Will Travel, Heinlein discusses many of the technical details of a space suit (before NASA), so the audience would know about the difficulties his hero would face.

These discussions are not technobabble. They are technically correct, and important parts of the stories, which are about the human difficulties of facing technical problems.

In Star Trek, transporters were invented just to avoid having to spend time showing getting into and out of a shuttle. It's an intelligent literary device, to make the story move faster. It's not technically correct, but it's needed for the story.

But trying to explain the "science" behind it is not science, and is not a necessary part of the story. The explanation has no purpose, and is false science. This is technobabble - pretending to be technological, but really being just babble.

Similarly, the Force and light sabres weren't science, but they were part of the story. Nothing wrong with that. Technically unexplained ( and unexplainable). But inventing midi-chlorians later to try to explain the Force was just technobabble.

The fourth category is technically correct discussions that are not needed for the story. The most egregious example I know is the long discussion of whaling details in Moby ****, which are not important to the story being told.

[noparlpf]

I tend to consider "soft sci-fi" as more of a fantasy sub-genre and "hard sci-fi" as just sci-fi.

I also tend to get hung up on minute details when something is passed off as "sci-fi" when I would let it slide if it just claimed to be fantasy. If you're going to call it sci-fi, then it should generally adhere to current scientific theory. Breaks from reality for hypothetical ideas are okay as long as they don't drastically contradict current scientific theory and as long as the author explains it realistically. When an author makes a science error that could have been remedied by five minutes on Wikipedia I cringe and end up wiki-walking for about half an hour reading up on just how wrong they were (if it's something I'm only vaguely familiar with and need to look up, anyway) before finishing the episode.

For example, a show I watched recently made the claim that humans are the only organism with 23 pairs of chromosomes except for the olive tree. Thirty seconds on Wikipedia shows that two Artiodactyl species (just on that hugely incomplete list of organisms by chromosome count) also have 23 pairs of chromosomes. It's ultimately irrelevant to the larger point being made in the scene, but even something that small still trips me up.

Another example is when they talk about Duchenne muscular dystrophy in Toaru Majutsu no Index. They were probably thinking of ALS but somehow pulled out DMD instead. Not sure if that's from the author or from the translators, but either way, those are some pretty different problems. Edit: Looks like the Japanese manga (couldn't find the light novel raws) used "kin jisutorofi" (muscle dystrophy), whereas ALS is something like "kin ishuku seisokusaku kokasho" (muscle atrophy [lateral] sclerosis). Anyway, seems like either an error on the author's part or an attempt to dumb it down for kids compounded by translation. Maybe both.

[Gnoman]

In Star Trek, transporters were invented just to avoid having to spend time showing getting into and out of a shuttle. It's an intelligent literary device, to make the story move faster. It's not technically correct, but it's needed for the story.

But trying to explain the "science" behind it is not science, and is not a necessary part of the story. The explanation has no purpose, and is false science. This is technobabble - pretending to be technological, but really being just babble.


Going to disagree -vehemently- with you on this. Even when "how this works" has no basis in scientific fact, it can provide a significant story purpose and be quite essential. The Star Trek transporter is a perfect example of this.

The way a Star Trek transporter works:

1. Target or destination is located with sensors
2. Target is converted into a form of energy or particle stream that can be transmitted
3. Target stream is held in a pattern buffer
4. Target stream is reconverted into mass at the destination

Most of this was established early on, and stuck with for the entire franchise. What story purpose does this serve? For one thing, it means that things like Montgomery Scott surviving in the pattern buffer for 75 years is just an application of what exists rather than something pulled out of a black hole, that all those situations where transporters didn't work were logical and consistent instead of simply being Diabolus Ex Machina, and that there were grounds for some of the more bizzare malfunctions such as Tuvix.

A lot of fantastical or outright impossible devices (ST warp drive, the ubiquitous cloaking devices in sci fi, SW hyperdrive, the impeller wedge from the Honorverse) could be examined the same way.

The sort of technobabble that IS bad, and which ST had a bad problem with later on, is the "I've written in a problem, now what's the best way to solve it? I know, I'll just have Spock/Data/Wesley/B'Elannna throw SCIENCE at it with a sciencey-sounding explanation."

[Telok]

3. Target stream is held in a pattern buffer

Yay, cloning!

"Ignore that man behind the curtain! I am the great wizard of Oz!"

See, the issue for me isn't generally the tech stuff but what the characters do with it. That teleporter turns a physical object into a pattern of energy. Since they use a computer to manipulate the pattern (momentum, inertia, and orientation) and produce the energy from the ship reactors they can reproduce anything that has been teleported. Except that this is never done.

People would do it but the author ignores that because the tech would also wreck the story. The author is either ignorant, sloppy, or desperately hoping you won't notice enormous violations of either the laws of physics as the author wrote them or violations of basic human nature.

Ignorance I can excuse. People learn and new discoveries are made. But bad writing annoys me.

[Knaight]

The sort of technobabble that IS bad, and which ST had a bad problem with later on, is the "I've written in a problem, now what's the best way to solve it? I know, I'll just have Spock/Data/Wesley/B'Elannna throw SCIENCE at it with a sciencey-sounding explanation."

With that said, even technobabble along those lines can have a purpose, if it is used for characterization instead of forcing the plot out of the corners it's in. If a character is established to be an expert in some field, having them use terminology of that field in the appropriate context can establish that aspect of the character. This applies just as much to unrealistic far future technology in the sort of "sci-fi" better characterized as space fantasy (Star Trek, Star Wars).

It does have to be done well though. "Midichlorians" were a mistake, Flash Gordon technobabble is hilarious in how terrible it is, but someone fixing things while requesting a bunch of esoteric tools can be fine.

[gomipile]

I tend to consider "soft sci-fi" as more of a fantasy sub-genre and "hard sci-fi" as just sci-fi.

I also tend to get hung up on minute details when something is passed off as "sci-fi" when I would let it slide if it just claimed to be fantasy. If you're going to call it sci-fi, then it should generally adhere to current scientific theory. Breaks from reality for hypothetical ideas are okay as long as they don't drastically contradict current scientific theory and as long as the author explains it realistically. When an author makes a science error that could have been remedied by five minutes on Wikipedia I cringe and end up wiki-walking for about half an hour reading up on just how wrong they were (if it's something I'm only vaguely familiar with and need to look up, anyway) before finishing the episode.

For example, a show I watched recently made the claim that humans are the only organism with 23 pairs of chromosomes except for the olive tree. Thirty seconds on Wikipedia shows that two Artiodactyl species (just on that hugely incomplete list of organisms by chromosome count) also have 23 pairs of chromosomes. It's ultimately irrelevant to the larger point being made in the scene, but even something that small still trips me up.

Another example is when they talk about Duchenne muscular dystrophy in Toaru Majutsu no Index. They were probably thinking of ALS but somehow pulled out DMD instead. Not sure if that's from the author or from the translators, but either way, those are some pretty different problems. Edit: Looks like the Japanese manga (couldn't find the light novel raws) used "kin jisutorofi" (muscle dystrophy), whereas ALS is something like "kin ishuku seisokusaku kokasho" (muscle atrophy [lateral] sclerosis). Anyway, seems like either an error on the author's part or an attempt to dumb it down for kids compounded by translation. Maybe both.

So, would you agree that you appreciate it when everything outside of the "One Big Lie"(it can be more than one, but you get the idea) of the story is well-researched and agrees with reality? That's pretty much where I stand with science fiction that has one or more Big Lies(FTL travel, psionic abilities, instantaneous communication, etc.) Sometimes a counterfactual point can be used to tell an interesting story that couldn't happen otherwise. If the counterfactual idea doesn't really ever matter for the story, or could be replaced by something mundane, then the story isn't taking "proper" advantage of the science fiction setting. I'm revealing the limits of my own snobbery, but there it is.

[noparlpf]

So, would you agree that you appreciate it when everything outside of the "One Big Lie"(it can be more than one, but you get the idea) of the story is well-researched and agrees with reality? That's pretty much where I stand with science fiction that has one or more Big Lies(FTL travel, psionic abilities, instantaneous communication, etc.) Sometimes a counterfactual point can be used to tell an interesting story that couldn't happen otherwise. If the counterfactual idea doesn't really ever matter for the story, or could be replaced by something mundane, then the story isn't taking "proper" advantage of the science fiction setting. I'm revealing the limits of my own snobbery, but there it is.

Yeah, pretty much. And I want the "fi" part to be as "sci" as possible.

It's funny, because when something just doesn't bother and claims to be magic I'm pretty likely to give it a pass, but when something in the same show claims to be science and it's wrong I'm super hard on it.

[MLai]

If it were good, it wouldn't be babble.
Consider two questions. Is this discussion technically accurate? And is it needed for the story. Technobabble is neither..
However, there is a use for technical-sounding babble which is neither technically correct nor necessary for plot. That is, jargon to build atmosphere.
Imagine your character is a sci-fi engineer or specialist of some sort. Nothing he does using futuristic equipment is going to be technically accurate, or you might as well become an inventor. If he starts spouting some professional jargon, it's not going to be needed for the plot. But it can give you a feel for the character and what he does.

Otherwise, you're asking for all novels (even non-scifi genres) to not include specialist details whenever it doesn't directly impact the plot. If the average reader won't understand the jargon, don't include it even if IRL the professional would say it. Dumb everything down.

[tyckspoon]

Yay, cloning!

"Ignore that man behind the curtain! I am the great wizard of Oz!"

See, the issue for me isn't generally the tech stuff but what the characters do with it. That teleporter turns a physical object into a pattern of energy. Since they use a computer to manipulate the pattern (momentum, inertia, and orientation) and produce the energy from the ship reactors they can reproduce anything that has been teleported. Except that this is never done.


I'm pretty sure this is how Trek's replicators work, actually. It's hardly unused - the ability to duplicate things via transporter tech is foundational to the Federation's whole post-scarcity society bit (which doesn't come up much in the shows, admittedly, since their premises generally have the action happening far away from the Federation proper.) It's also why the Ferengi and others who still use a currency based economy use latinum; it has properties (insert handwave here) that make it nonreplicable. The gold it's encased in is just a pretty and durable way to carry it around.

[Telok]

I'm pretty sure this is how Trek's replicators work, actually. It's hardly unused..

Someone dies on a planet after being transported down. They could simply fire off the transporter again and have the person back as they were before the mission. It would make for a facinating setting and stories but it's not done because no matter how logical or rational it is the authers don't want to. Which would be fine as long as they addressed the issue in a beliveable way.

My problem is this: The author adds some tech to the story as is normal for sci-fi. The story becomes implausible when that tech is not used in a manner consistent with human nature or the tech's own description.

[factotum]

My problem with transporters and replicators is this: if the Federation have the ability to directly convert matter into energy, and vice versa, why the heck do they mess around with antimatter to power their ships? It makes no sense! Instead of carrying dangerous antimatter in containment fields, just carry a few hundred tons of lead bricks as fuel, and convert those directly into energy to power the warp drive.

[noparlpf]

Someone dies on a planet after being transported down. They could simply fire off the transporter again and have the person back as they were before the mission. It would make for a facinating setting and stories but it's not done because no matter how logical or rational it is the authers don't want to. Which would be fine as long as they addressed the issue in a beliveable way.

My problem is this: The author adds some tech to the story as is normal for sci-fi. The story becomes implausible when that tech is not used in a manner consistent with human nature or the tech's own description.

You could argue that the amount of computer space necessary to store multiple active human minds long-term would be impractical. They did think that we'd still be using tapes. But on the other hand, I think there was a robot in Next Gen that had a mini-replicator to manufacture whatever complicated tool it needed at any given moment? If that thing had enough onboard storage for however many dozens of complicated nano-scale machinery designs then they should be able to store the schematics for human brains pretty easily.

And I would totally save backups of myself every couple of hours. I play enough video games that being sent back to a save point wouldn't throw me off too much. :smalltongue:

[Gnoman]

Star Trek actually has a couple of plausible in-universe explanations for this. First, trying to hold someone in the pattern buffer is shown to be both technically difficult and energy intensive when it used in an attempt to store Montgomery Scott and a fellow survivor of whatever tragedy struck his ship. In that case, it failed in half the cases, killing the other survivor.

Second, it's shown a few times that a "soul" or discrete, transferable unit of consciousness exists in this universe, and can be moved independently of the body. What is never shown is an ability to duplicate this unit at will; as every time a transfer is made, even by extremely advanced aliens, it is a transfer, not a copy. Accepting that "copying a person via transporter" is something that can only happen by a freak, unduplicatable accident is something I find plausible.

[noparlpf]

What about the one where the transporter made two Kirks? It's clearly capable of generating additional functional human bodies.

[Gnoman]

That would fall under the category of "freak accident", particularly since it would have been fatal to both Kirks if not reversed. Thomas Riker and Tuvix were also freak accidents.

[noparlpf]

That's a lot of freak accidents. I think there's something here that bears investigation.
*science happens*
So, we figured it out, and now we can save people on a flash drive and copy them whenever it's necessary.
*transporter cloning is instantly banned*

[Gnoman]

Three freak accidents in three completely different non-duplicateable situations over the course of a century isn't exactly "a lot", nor do they lend themselves well to research.

[noparlpf]

Three freak accidents in three completely different non-duplicateable situations over the course of a century isn't exactly "a lot", nor do they lend themselves well to research.

Eh, just set up an algorithm to transport a block of cheese back and forth across your lab automatically with the settings tweaked randomly each time. See what happens. When you get two blocks of cheese and one has a goatee, you know you're getting close.

[factotum]

That would fall under the category of "freak accident", particularly since it would have been fatal to both Kirks if not reversed. Thomas Riker and Tuvix were also freak accidents.

But how does that fit with the idea of a transferable soul you mentioned earlier? Did Tuvix have *two* souls? Did Thomas Riker have half on one? Or was he somehow soul-less and yet still able to behave and act just like Will Riker? Because if the latter, seems this whole "soul" thing isn't as important as you're suggesting.

[Telok]

When you get two blocks of cheese and one has a goatee, you know you're getting close.

That's what lab mice are for.

In unrelated news I found something that I lost years ago. It's a link that I think will be handy here. Unfortunately it doesn't handle small, fast objects well and it tends to treat them as if they were only going 72 km/s when they hit the atmosphere. It's a rough estimate tool.

http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/

Handy reference numbers follow.
Circumference of the Earth: 40,075 km
Speed of light in vacuum: 299,792 km/s

[Eldan]

My problem with transporters and replicators is this: if the Federation have the ability to directly convert matter into energy, and vice versa, why the heck do they mess around with antimatter to power their ships? It makes no sense! Instead of carrying dangerous antimatter in containment fields, just carry a few hundred tons of lead bricks as fuel, and convert those directly into energy to power the warp drive.

Energy density, probably. You'd save a lot of mass by using antimatter.

[factotum]

Energy density, probably. You'd save a lot of mass by using antimatter.

How? We're talking total conversion of matter to energy either way round--annihilate 1kg of matter with 1kg of anti-matter and the result is exactly the same as converting 2kg of normal matter directly to energy. I chose lead in my example because it's the densest readily-available material and thus occupies a nice small amount of space, so it's as energy dense as anything you'll find short of stuff from the interior of stars!

[Eldan]

Huh. True, of course. How silly of me. Perhaps it's easier to annihilate matter with antimatter instead of just straight convert matter to energy?

[hamishspence]

Nuclear fusion's a good example of converting a small amount of matter to energy - the atoms after fusion mass less than the atoms in the fuel the reactor starts out with.

[Jay R]

What about the one where the transporter made two Kirks? It's clearly capable of generating additional functional human bodies.

Each one only got half of Kirk's soul. That was crucial to the story.

[noparlpf]

How? We're talking total conversion of matter to energy either way round--annihilate 1kg of matter with 1kg of anti-matter and the result is exactly the same as converting 2kg of normal matter directly to energy. I chose lead in my example because it's the densest readily-available material and thus occupies a nice small amount of space, so it's as energy dense as anything you'll find short of stuff from the interior of stars!

But with the replicators they should be able to easily store energy in osmium bricks. Just turn the lead into energy, then back into osmium.


Each one only got half of Kirk's soul. That was crucial to the story.

Eh, maybe they could work out how to duplicate a soul eventually. A soul has to be a quantifiable body of energy just like everything else.

[Kato]

How? We're talking total conversion of matter to energy either way round--annihilate 1kg of matter with 1kg of anti-matter and the result is exactly the same as converting 2kg of normal matter directly to energy. I chose lead in my example because it's the densest readily-available material and thus occupies a nice small amount of space, so it's as energy dense as anything you'll find short of stuff from the interior of stars!
Eh, not sure that's how it works? To be honest, it's been a while since i was really into Star Trek but I don't think it's an "turn matter into energy" device. However else it works...



Eh, maybe they could work out how to duplicate a soul eventually. A soul has to be a quantifiable body of energy just like everything else.

Heresy, you can't make a soul, a soul is... eh, wait, I think I'm getting into religion here. Anyway, I don't think Star Trek would have gotten into the question of whether you can duplicate a soul, not back in it's days and probably not now either.

[stcfg]

Heresy, you can't make a soul, a soul is... eh, wait, I think I'm getting into religion here. Anyway, I don't think Star Trek would have gotten into the question of whether you can duplicate a soul, not back in it's days and probably not now either.

I think it was mentioned in this thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?394610-A-Philosophical-Conundrum-Involving-Spock-s-Brain) that a certain natural biological process can make a unique person with a soul, and it might be able to possible to duplicate that with a sufficiently advanced technological process.

[noparlpf]

If all you need to make a soul is a bit of sex, it can't be that hard to reproduce it.

[Jay R]

A soul has to be a quantifiable body of energy just like everything else.

[citation needed]

[Gnoman]

But how does that fit with the idea of a transferable soul you mentioned earlier? Did Tuvix have *two* souls? Did Thomas Riker have half on one? Or was he somehow soul-less and yet still able to behave and act just like Will Riker? Because if the latter, seems this whole "soul" thing isn't as important as you're suggesting.

Tuvix clearly had two, as they were able to separate the minds of Neelix and Tuvok back into their original forms. As for Thomas Riker, it is less clear. However, the accident that resulted in him was, IIRC, even more convoluted than the first time the Enterprise went back in time.

[BannedInSchool]

Tuvix clearly had two, as they were able to separate the minds of Neelix and Tuvok back into their original forms. As for Thomas Riker, it is less clear. However, the accident that resulted in him was, IIRC, even more convoluted than the first time the Enterprise went back in time.Naw, obviously the first time you go through a transporter your soul is destroyed forever and you're no longer a person. On the plus side, being a copy you're also no longer morally responsible for anything done before you went into the transporter. :smallbiggrin:

[Milo v3]

[citation needed]

If it isn't quantifiable then it doesn't exist.

[Mr. Mask]

If it isn't quantifiable, then a method to quantify it doesn't exist.

[Jay R]

If it isn't quantifiable then it doesn't exist.

[citation needed]

A groundless statement that is not generally accepted is not made more convincing with another groundless statement that is not generally accepted.

[noparlpf]

It's most parsimonious to assume that everything is quantifiable. Not necessarily by our current understanding, but by some system.

[Shadow of the Sun]

It's most parsimonious to assume that everything is quantifiable. Not necessarily by our current understanding, but by some system.

Yeah but after a while we run into Godel's incompleteness theorem shenanigans. Eventually we have to accept that there is a level that we don't understand.

[noparlpf]

I'd still say that's more a limitation of humanity than of reality. For a lot of people, an electron's wavefunction isn't quantifiable. Doesn't mean other people don't grok it. (I am not one of those people. I failed that class.)

[Telok]

Alternately, how do we know that something unquantifiable exists?

[Qwertystop]

I'd still say that's more a limitation of humanity than of reality. For a lot of people, an electron's wavefunction isn't quantifiable. Doesn't mean other people don't grok it. (I am not one of those people. I failed that class.)


Alternately, how do we know that something unquantifiable exists?

See "Godel's incompleteness theorem." I don't pretend to know how it works, exactly, but it has definitely been proven that there are unprovable things. I expect that can be extended to say that there might be unquantifiable things, at least in theory, and would not be surprised to find that the two are actually equivalent.

[NichG]

Often when things are unquantifiable, it's because we believe that there is something that should be important but we cannot figure out how to define it precisely so that there aren't exceptions, places where the measurement breaks down, etc. That is often because, at a lower level of description, the thing we want to measure may become meaningless at certain points. A silly example is how longitude becomes meaningless at the poles (a coordinate singularity), but there's also the example of how above the critical point of a fluid you can no longer tell the difference between the liquid and gas phases of that fluid. It's not that we just don't know how to measure which is which, it's that the distinction doesn't exist anymore at those high temperatures and pressures.

But usually we're the ones at fault there, not the universe - we're assuming we can project reality into a specific framework that defines things that are convenient to our philosophy. If you don't do that, then its worth pointing out that most of physics is computable (trivial in the sense that we can set up the calculation that one would need to do), and the potential exceptions to that tend to be in places where our theory has little or no experimental data (e.g. quantum gravity, string theory, time travel shenanigans in relativity). So, currently my bet is on the universe being computable. If it's computable, then its also quantifiable (since quantifying it is a prerequisite for computing it).

That doesn't mean that every question one could ask about the universe is answerable, however. That's where Godel comes in. You can formulate questions involving the universe that, due to being self-referential in some form or other, cannot be conclusively answered within the universe. Even without being self-referential, you can get in trouble by taking infinite limits and things like that for abstracted descriptions of the universe (for example, whether or not Euler's equation has a unique solution is still an open problem iirc, and it's just the limit of continuum fluid flow to infinite Reynolds number).

[noparlpf]

That doesn't mean that every question one could ask about the universe is answerable, however.

See also: Most of philosophy. :smalltongue:

[Avilan the Grey]

I am not a Science Fiction person. Well at least not according to the "classic" Sci-Fi people, the ones that looks down on Fantasy and argue thats Sci-Fi is so much better because it tells the human condition, investigates deep issues etc. I am almost completely uninterested in Sci-Fi novels.

Movies or TV-shows though? Bring them on.

I like explosions, grand stories and heroics. I might not be a Michael Bay fan, really, but I definitely would pick J.J. Abrams or Del Toro over any "plausible" Sci-Fi out there.

This means I care very little for "Plausible" stories. At least if the setting allows for it. With that I mean that in a setting like Star Wars, Mass Effect or the Marvel Universe, I don't mind FTL, mind control or life forms that have evolved to survive in the vacuum of space. My Suspension Of Disbelief is ruined though if the same things are suddenly introduced in a setting like Firefly. Basically it's as simple as this: Consistency.

[factotum]

I am almost completely uninterested in Sci-Fi novels.

Movies or TV-shows though? Bring them on.

I like explosions, grand stories and heroics.

I can't help but feel you have a very narrow view of literary SF if you don't think it ever has those things in it. Try reading any novel by Iain M. Banks (RIP), for instance--if you want destruction on a massive scale then the orbital Vavatch going up in smoke (from Consider Phlebas) is about as good as you'll find anywhere.

[gomipile]

I am almost completely uninterested in Sci-Fi novels.

If your experience with them led you to think the term "Sci-Fi" is a connotatively and/or denotatively accurate and adequate description of the entire subgenre, then you likely haven't explored the field much.

[Telok]

the ones that looks down on Fantasy and argue thats Sci-Fi is so much better because it tells the human condition, investigates deep issues etc

First I've ever heard of this. You might consider checking out a SF&F convention sometime if any are near you.

Classic sci-fi can range from "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" where the most out-there things are an AI and the decision to put a penal colony on the Moon, to "To Sail Beyond The Sunset" which is pretty much as space fantasy as Star Wars is.

And that's just Heinlein. Asimov wrote fantasy, Jack Vance and Burroughs are both considered classic sci-fi writers, and going way back Jules Verne wrote sci-fi.

If you want explosions and heroics try the short story collections titled "There Will Be War" or find one of the Retief books.

[noparlpf]

You could write rubbish hard sci-fi that doesn't go anywhere near the human condition or very deep, intellectual fantasy. That totally depends on the author and on what story they're telling.

[Avilan the Grey]

Point is that this is the argument used against Fantasy by Sci-fi connoisseurs (and I assume Sci-fi nerds) back in the old Mailing List and Newsgroup days. Remember the 90's?

Basically on most of the Newsgroups you were laughed off if you tried to argue that Fantasy was of the same literal standing as Sci-fi, since Fantasy was "kid stories" and Sci-fi was (insert list of legendary Sci fi writers here) and their quest to explain the human condition.