Guide Adventures in Science-Fiction Reality: The True Confessions of a Convention-Goer

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But anyway This is going to work fine against irregulars attacking a patrol or convoy, but relies on a lot of logistical support to keep it going, and it'll break down when someone mounts a proper ambush.

In the real plagues Jews came through fairly well why they were scapegoated for them , presumably due to cleanliness rituals, and there were Jews throughout Europe and Asia--all the way to Kaifeng China. So why no Jewish characters in the book? IIRC our choice of stereoisomerism is baked-in; can't remember the source, remember reading about it as an emergent property of stereoisomerism observed in the components of protoplanetary dust clouds and attributable to some sort of underlying cosmological chemosythetic process.

The point is that it's already been done, and Dirk's right, it's not that hard to camouflage a spaceship from observation from a particular direction. It should also be noted that stealth planes and ships are not universally invisible from all directions. Indeed, they have to fly a precise route what do they call it, the blue line? Stealth as a real-world technology is more Oceans 11 than cloaking device.

Everyone talks about how time dilates as you approach C, a few mention how there is no experienced time at C, but I'm yet to see anyone who considers how it works if you are going faster than C. Mathematically you can handle it easily enough to get a real number. But for storytelling purposes, that real number is now dilating in the other direction - instead of things being slower on the ship relative tot he outside, they are now faster relative to the outside. You then need some sort of time retardation device so that your passengers don't die of old age. If your starship now has a time dilation device for FTL travel, why not drop the FTL travel and save yourself the trouble of patching over all the implications for your story from that?

But you don't need a precision weapon to have the same failure rate as a bullet; you need it to have the same failure rate as number of bullets fired per target killed , which is some thousands to tens of thousands. Whereas a bullet that jams takes out your weapon and ensures all your remaining bullets are useless. Yeah, it's been several years since I've read them too. So I don't remember what ship speeds were, I'm pretty sure that MacLeod says that shipboard travel time was measured in weeks, so slightly less than FTL?

And I seem to remember a character in the second book commenting that 50 years had passed on one planet since they'd last been there, though it had only been a couple for them. We know that Buzzard Ram Jets don't work now. I prefer magic technology etc. Quantum Computers as magic infinitely fast solve everything machines.

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We already have a solid understand what QCs are theoretically capable of. Sentience achieved just by making a network bigger and more connected — "the internet wakes up" trope. In fact pretty much any "accidental" sentience. For no obvious reason all the aliens we meet are conveniently just at just the right technological level for interesting conflict.

And also have it be obvious enough that a moderately clever reader would make the same crucial observation before the protagonist. That's really unappealing. I find it grating in both science fiction and fantasy when there's plot-setting dissonance. Or where magic has thoroughly permeated war and adventuring but nobody ever applies it to ship navigation, agriculture, household chores, or anything else out of the heroic mode.

There's SF where protagonists have all the ingredients of at least a weakly post-scarcity society but the economy is thoroughly late 20th century Commonwealth Saga, I'm looking at you! Also SF where anyone can have a reactionless drive, compact nuclear reactor, self-reproducing robotic factory, etc. I recently saw a movie where robots have taken all the jobs except those of the Exploited Prole and his friends working in the dangerous grimy robot factory run by an Evilcorp.

Plot-setting dissonance can sometimes be patched over by invoking secrecy or cultural taboos, but it just makes things worse if the dissonance is ubiquitous. Like the Butlerian Jihad of Dune that means nobody ever builds autonomous machines, the Eugenics Wars trauma of Star Trek that justifies the whole Federation of the 23rd century having less genetic technology than the early 21st, or not one person on Earth being able to reverse-engineer the magical superbattery Shipstones of Heinlein's Friday because they're just not smart enough.

Though in the case of Friday I kind of wonder if the Shipstone is an authorial wish fulfillment about being able to publish books that can't be copied, transposed to batteries in the story.

Comparison and Interpretation

Yes, if you go back and look at reporting on the faceted F, you'll find occasional mention of pilots carrying mission tape cassettes. It was designed to be radar and optical stealthy against sensors in the USSR. On that score, there's no evidence that it failed, but there were other sensors that hadn't been taken into account. So it flew big and bright over guys in Canada and elsewhere who liked to watch satellites. Ahem: Bussard sic ramscoops do work probably ; but they're incredibly good brakes , rather than being good for acceleration.

Indeed, they're so good at slow-down that they may have a role to play on interstellar missions for that very purpose; use a propulsion beam system powered from back home, coast for most of the distance, then engage ramscoop for deceleration into destination star system. These are all egregiously misused fluff which often signals that the author doesn't know what they're talking about and just wants a buzz-word.

This is not always the case, but you should use them sparingly unless you know exactly what you're doing. Before I answer, I'd like to note that the two most "throw the book at the wall" examples of supposedly-sympathetic narrator who didn't deserve any sympathy I've encountered were both memoirs.

Sound Design and Science Fiction

I couldn't read either Henry and June or American Sniper for this reason. One thing which immediately signals that I'm reading the wrong book is what I call the "drive-by message. While I'm no fan of Ayn Rand's politics, I think her books were better for never trying to hide what they were about. However, if the author is trying to tell a story but feels the need to throw in an aside about how "all libertarians are stupid" or "SJWs caused the downfall of civilization" or somesuch, it takes me right out of the narrative.

Unless the writer is exceptionally skillful, it sticks out in a cliche-inspiring way. If you want to write about why people like me are what's wrong with the world, by all means, do it.

Sound Design and Science Fiction

If it's a good book, I'll probably still enjoy it. But, if you are writing about about space kangaroo pirates and you have one of them essentially look at the camera every couple of chapters and say "Oh, and by the way, Ridley Kemp is a terrible person," I'm out. Lately I've been stumbling across a lot of books with really bad orbital mechanics -- the spaceplane that leaves the Earth's atmosphere and minutes later docks with a station at L5, asteroid bases trailing a few million miles behind the Earth in its orbit, spaceships that drift to a stop between planets when their engines fail, military missile platforms orbiting over the north pole.

In a few cases, I thought the author was having a little fun with us readers, and we would soon find out about some magic technology -- inertial cancellation, gravitic engineering -- that would explain it. But no. The author just didn't know the physics. I can enjoy military SF and space opera that doesn't have clanking hard science, but some of this basic stuff just breaks me out of the story. You had a civilisation that had been technologically stagnant for millennia, and yet were able to go around invading anyone they liked because they were the only ones with force fields.

By the time of the novel everyone due to be invaded had known they were coming for about years, yet nobody had put any effort into physics research. It's a lot easier to reproduce a technology if you know it is possible. It's slightly more plausible that the starfish aliens have toys that the humans haven't copied yet, but when you can make superhuman AIs at the drop of a hat then there is no reason for them to be beyond humanities ken for long.

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Yes — Bussard damn… always get that wrong ramscoop as brake is fine. I only wish that was a feature of the story I was thinking of ;-. Having elves leave Middle-Earth wasn't decreed by Eru. Rather, the Valar discovered that the elves had sprung up, and wanted to keep them safe from Melkor, so they appointed some leaders to get them to the West. Tolkien rather strongly hints that this was not a good idea! In other words, unless the elephantoid is deliberately helping the monkeyoid in part of the process, the monkeyoid can make a fire by itself.

Now note that something shaped like a velicoraptor might be able to make a fire.


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It's not limited to tailless bipedal tetrapods. Getting a starfish to make a fire is something else entirely.

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One thing no one to my knowledge has ever tackled is the possibly symbiosis between a failing human colony and an intelligent but non-technological alien. The aliens keep the humans alive through whatever their means are, and the humans make fires, cook food, and do other stuff for the aliens. It's in the theme of "humans make great pets. But nothing else changes, and it's still an Orwellian state where the cops gun down the underclass and the citizens gun down everyone else. It often reduces to "I would put a lot of ball bearings in orbit" "I would nuke it a lot" or "I would drop a lot of rocks on it at high velocity".