"Science fiction readers are interested in science,..."
-AUTHOR'S NOTE, p. 150.
I am not so sure about that. Some readers, and writers, just want a spaceship to fly but are not interested in how it flies.
"...and it's a pity that they get so little of it. With a few honorable exceptions, writers are all too prone to create either rank impossibilities or minor variations on the Earth and the Western civilization we already know." (ibid.)
"'It's Martian weather. Hot as hell daytimes, cold as hell nights."
-Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (London, 1977), p. 102.
If nothing else, Mars is much further away from the Sun than Earth so how can even a soft sf writer suggest that Mars would be not cold all the time but cold by night but hot by day? Why call this fictional planet Mars?
"...the 'maps' of Mars which I have consulted since I got back are so inconsistent with one another that I have given up the attempt to identify my own handramit. If you want to try your hand, the desideratum is 'a roughly north-east and south-west "canal" not more than twenty miles from the equator.' But astronomers differ very much as to what they can see."
-CS Lewis, Out Of The Silent Planet IN Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), pp. 1-144 AT Postscript, p. 141.
Lewis does better than Bradbury. He rightly exploits differences between astronomers to create a space for his fiction. The handramit (canyons) were seen as canali from Earth. Lewis said elsewhere that he probably knew at the time of writing that the Martian "canals" did not exist but he included them as part of his literary-mythological Mars.
2 comments:
If you're using technology not currently possible (especially not currently possible according to present understandings of physics) you should keep the "handwavium" to a minimum.
Doing too much explaining was a weakness of early SF -- Doc Smith's giant springs under the spaceship's deck to compensate for acceleration, for example!
In my latest time-travel novel the protagonists are historians; they don't know what the hell all the equipment surrounding them does, they're told it's time machine, and they don't believe it...
Until they end up 2000 years ago.
Then they believe it's a time machine, but they don't try to speculate much about how it worked or what its parameters were, since the inventor is dead and they know nothing beyond a "Popular Science" level about that stuff and anyway it's irrelevant because they couldn't possibly get the technology going where they've ended up.
So it's a mystery to them, and since the book is done in "close 3rd person", the readers know nothing about it either.
Poul was an actual physics graduate -- something that was both an advantage and a drawback.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
While I agree with your comments here, I think the advantages of Anderson having an expert knowledge of physics outweighed the drawbacks. And partly explains why so many of his stories are still so readable.
Ad astra! Sean
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