Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy discussion

All science fiction fans must, by the nature of the genre, suspend their disbelief. If you ask me if FTL travel is possible I will say no and will discuss the physics of why it will probably never happen, but I will happily read story after story where FTL travel is involved and never give it a second thought. However, there are times where suddenly some part of a story just seems impossible. I can remember two times when this happened to me. There are probably many others but these two are the ones I can think of today.

In Stranger in a Strange Land, there is a reference to teaching the weeds not to grow. I don’t think this had anything to do with the story, some character just said it. I read the book in the mid 60’s and that is the part I remember the best.

More recently Timothy Zahn’s Anglemass gave me a bit of a problem when I discovered the black hole was sentient. That is perhaps only slightly less plausible than some other parts of the story but that is the part I found too hard to accept.

What things do you find suddenly unbelievable in the midst of a tale of the otherwise impossible?

I can "believe" almost anything, as long as the author lays out in the beginning the range of "uncanny" I'm expected to accept. A book that abruptly leaps up to another level without adequate foreshadowing loses me pretty quickly. I read a pretty wide range of sci-fi from very near-term hard SF, from which much consistency is demanded, to flat out space opera where pretty much any tech is fair play: FTL, time travel, aliens that just happen to look and think just like humans, magic, prophecies and folding space by drug-enhanced mental powers, I'm happy pretty much anywhere on that spectrum as long as the author picks a spot and sticks to it.

(I recall a novel from last year that spent the first half as hard sci-fi explaining a new technology for reading and writing neural signals down to the synapse level. I thought it was setting up a story about memory replay, perhaps, or Rekall-style memory implanting, but instead it suddenly turned the scientists into action heroes and flew off in a totally different, cartoonish direction, to my great frustration.)

In fantasy, my eyes start to glaze over when gods start taking a role in a story. I'm not talking Zelazny's Lord of Light or Gaiman's American Gods, but rather the literal deus ex machina. It's usually just the author's way of throwing in a miracle.

I can take almost any macro legerdemain. FTL, sure. Uterine replicators, why not. Time travel, it's a go. It falls apart for me when the smaller details bog down. A good one would be in the recent movie PACIFIC RIM. They're doing all this stuff with combating monsters with giant robots, OK. But then they decide to abandon that technology and build sea walls. I would believe this, except then they tell me that the wall is going to extend from Alaska to Baja California. And thump, I've fallen off the belief sled and I'm never getting back on.

I can also suspend disbelieve on almost everything, however I can be impatient if the author spend too much time hand-waving to "justify" something obviously unjustifiable. I think unless relevant to the plot, the author only need to state the rules that differ the fictional world from real world & stick to them consistently, & there's no need for excessive pseudo-scientific "explanations".

I will not extend credulity for internal inconsistency - the wizard who can open door locks with ease, but can’t unlock handcuffs; the armed space soldier wearing power armor that is beaten to death by thugs with clubs; one of the greatest philosophers in the kingdom who’s dialogues show ignorance of basic philosophy; the crime scene investigator who doesn’t know the laws on evidence.

its all got to be internally consistent....something i learned early on reading Marvel Comics from the Stan Lee days...we were all LOOKING for mistakes so we could get one of the famous No-Prizes...just keep it consistant and im game.

BTW, i do not accept that FTL is impossable...we still have alot to discover about physics and the uinverse...i belive there is a end-run around Albert E. and his theories SOMEWHERE, SOMEHOW. If not, then it's game over...i will not accept that.

Spooky1947 wrote: "its all got to be internally consistent....something i learned early on reading Marvel Comics from the Stan Lee days...we were all LOOKING for mistakes so we could get one of the famous No-Prizes....."

I hope you are right!

me too. :)

i have some crazy ideas about the Higgs-Bozon (sp?), i am likely way off base, but we might have some hope there...there ARE work-arounds to make FTL work we know about NOW, problem is the power requirements are so far beyond us it's just silly...

we COULD go near-light speeds now...in the 1950s we were pouring cash into nuke research...we made nuke-powered subs work, and were built and tested atomic rocket engines...they WORKED, but for unknown reasons that project was shelved...now do the math...6 months of constant 1g acceleration takes you to lightspeed 's doorstep. Won't pass it though...

I can swallow just about any wild premise. That's the basis of fiction, IMO. "What if?" is what SF is especially all about. BUT the story has to have an internal logic. As others have said, it's the details. Whether it's FTL or a detective that sees more action per book than real one sees in a career, it's all good until starships start making wooshing noises in vacuum or people screw silencers on to revolvers. Then I start losing my suspension of belief. It doesn't take many until it's game over.

Yes, internal logic allows you to just fall into the world, which is why it has to be consistent.
There are also areas where it is really worth doing the research, because people care. Like guns. It is easy to find out about guns (the NRA can help) and people who own them are happy to help. Or horses. The people who just leave the horse at the curb like a car drive me nuts.

Almost any engineer can lay out a detailed argument explaining why it's impossible for a bee to fly based on scientifically accepted "facts", yet, fly they do.

Still, must agree with Jim,...sound waves in space rumbles my colon. Some laws are not meant to be broken.

E.D. wrote: "Almost any engineer can lay out a detailed argument explaining why it's impossible for a bee to fly based on scientifically accepted "facts", yet, fly they do.

Still, must agree with Jim,...sound ..."

This is off the subject of suspending disbelief but, as a wildlife biologist, I feel this is a misconception that needs to be cleared up. Bees beat their wings extremely fast, faster than most insects their size. Their flight muscles don’t simply contract when needed, like a bird’s flight muscles, instead they set up an oscillation that keeps the wings beating at a constant rate and causes the buzzing sound they make – the wing muscles not the wings make the sound.

The wings don’t just “row” through the air, like a bird wing, instead they rotate and twist taking advantage of vortices and other aerodynamic forces created by the flapping to generated more lift than would otherwise be expected. This type of movement has been studied recently (2006??) at Caltech to help design better helicopter blades and things like that.

Bees have a constant rate of wing beats but control lift and speed by twisting and rotating of the wing. Having muscles that oscillate at a constant speed is more energy efficient than having to generate a new contraction at every beat.

Not only is bee flight well understood, but also there are robot models that simulate bee flight. I can’t find the site I was looking for. It had a really great movie of bee flight and a detailed explanation of the aerodynamics but here are two others that offer some insight:

http://www.caltech.edu/content/deciph...
http://www.livescience.com/528-scient...

I for the life of me can't understand the people that screamed bloody murder over the "sound in space" thing in Star Wars...we ALL know sound in space is impossable, but you watch those Star Destroyers without the roar or of the engines, or those fighter dogfights without the sound of the blasters spitting hot plasma...it just doesn't fit the feel of the film...in all forms of fiction, includeing SF, artistic license has the final say.....

Would you buy....

Thie Higgs-Field Dapner...by lessening the effect of the Hiss Field, this piece of kit allows for near lightspeed travel, regardless of the type of drive your ship uses, by reduceing your spacecraft to near-zero mass...

WARNING: Not ment to be used at full power. Full power use may cause the electrons to fly off the atoms composeing your body. This may be a health hazard.

Jim wrote: "it's all good until starships start making wooshing noises in vacuum or people screw silencers on to revolvers. Then I start losing my suspension of belief. It doesn't take many until it's game over. ..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvF4yu... :-)

But yes, I agree with you

Spooky1947 wrote: "I for the life of me can't understand the people that screamed bloody murder over the "sound in space" thing in Star Wars...we ALL know sound in space is impossable, but you watch those Star Destroyers without the roar or of the engines, or those fighter dogfights without the sound of the blasters spitting hot plasma...it just doesn't fit the feel of the film...in all forms of fiction, includeing SF, artistic license has the final say........"

I think the people were angry because putting in the roar is the easy way out. Rather than trying to portray what might be possible in a dramatic and awe inspiring manner, they just did it as yet another WW2 carrier battle :-(

only the greatest WWII carrier battle of all time...it was Halimton, King of the Space Opera, that made us belive the suns thundered....and if they didn't, then by the ghods, they should!!!!

Spooky1947 wrote: "I for the life of me can't understand the people that screamed bloody murder over the "sound in space" thing in Star Wars..."

You make a good point. Star Wars was such a space opera, that it could get away with things like that in sheer fun. There are different levels of accountability/reality. A story that is trying to be serious can be ruined while it's an allowable, even looked for, effect in a tongue-in-cheek, sheer adventure story.

I also have different standards that I hold movies & books to. I never expect Hollywood to get things right.

i gave up on the hobbit near the end when they were going through the troll cave.

There's trolls displaying spiderman abilities running down walls etc looking menacing but then they are brushed aside with one flick of the goodies arm, knocking handfuls aside.

Why make them look so menacing then make them so pathetic within a blink of an eye?

We should probably distinguish between movies (where the visualness of the spectacle rules) and books, where there is some hope of rationality. There are so many movies where all pretense of realism is gone (all James Bond movies, forex) that we could talk about nothing else.

Also the whole sound in space thing - its is a movie it may be wrong but it would be a boring moving. People expect sound, explosions etc.

I tend to "believe" most things in books unless it something utterly out od character or just plain silly. Besides spot the wonky science is a fun game to play.

Brenda wrote: "We should probably distinguish between movies (where the visualness of the spectacle rules) and books, where there is some hope of rationality. There are so many movies where all pretense of realism is gone (all James Bond movies, forex) ..."

As an aside, I think a lot of James Bond movies are no more absurd than a lot of space opera books. Especially the very early and most recent Bond movies (there was a lot of weirdness in the middle.)

But you are right that movies (and TV) have different rules for dramatic visuals and also production limitations. (E.g., there is clearly some artificial gravity device waiting to be discovered that is extremely small and cheap so that it can be installed on even the smallest spacecraft, and is so reliable that it continues to function even after everything else fails :) Most of us just accept that as the minimum required suspension of disbelief for any space-based video (a few exceptions such as 2001 and Mission to Mars notwithstanding.)

If I am not willing to suspend disbelief I shouldn't be reading fantasy:) Or to an extent any fiction.

All those romance/erotica books with HEA, bad boys (or girls) who fall for the wallflower, the unrealistic sex, everyone who looks like a cross between Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp...

I'm more than willing to suspend disbelief as long as the author is willing to keep to the rules they set for their universe. I hate it when the way it is arranged changes or older events are ignored to make the story go where the author wants it to.

Alexandra wrote: "Also the whole sound in space thing - its is a movie it may be wrong but it would be a boring moving. People expect sound, explosions etc.

I tend to "believe" most things in books unless it somet..."

2001 has no sound and was amazing. The spacewalk in 2010 where all you could hear was john lithgow's breathing made it so much more terrifying.

I think serious films should adopt the no sound and Star Wars et all should have sound.

On topic above, I commented on a behavior I've noticed in engineers.., their proclivity to prove other's ideas won't work. Usually preceded by chanting "energy can be neither created or destroyed". My bad for defaulting to cliche to make a point.

Of course we know how bees fly! The Nice Man With The White Beard Who Lives In The Clouds knew all about aerodynamics before it, or bees, even existed..and He reveals His mysteries to us through the miracle of high-speed film. :}

I recall a short story in Heavy Metal magazine where a small minority of intelligent people supervise a dumber populace through perceptual control. Cars have ports in their dashboards that blow high pressure air in the drivers face to simulate high speed. The cars never exceed 25 mph (safety concerns), but the speedometers read 200 mph. They're convertibles with fins and lots of useless gauges and blinking lights.

"Sound in space" always strikes me as a similar device. Can't help it. It's like a tick, or something. Kind of like sailboats making tire-screeching noises when they turn at speed. It might be entertaining, but it'd make no sense.

If you go see PACIFIC RIM (a terrible film) you can hear the explosions under water. Totally unrealistic.

E.D. wrote: "'Sound in space' always strikes me as a similar device. Can't help it. It's like a tick, or something....."

Usually, sounds in space movies & TV just wash past me unnoticed. One exception was an episode of the 1995 Fox TV series "Space: Above and Beyond": The squad was in some sort of windowless spacecraft without "sensors", and some enemy fighters went "whooshing" by. That not only revealed the presence of the enemy, but one of the characters identified the spacecraft type based on the sound! My suspension of disbelief cracks when the script actually calls attention to the error.

Im a big Star Trek fan, but it drives me nuts when the "tech-babble" has holes big enough to fly a starship through...or when the problem is solved by cobbleing together two or three off-the-shelf Starfleet standard-issue bits of kit...

on the other hand, when the Third Doctor from BBCs Doctor Who could turn a flashlight into a lazer by "reverseing the polarity" i would just lol....

I'd also say that my suspension of disbelief isn't usually phased by things like sounds in space, particularly when they're done for an aesthetic effect, that of excitement.

But like others I'm thrown out of stories that don't remain consistent. During the DARK KNIGHT film I never got back into the film when Batman (1) charged the Joker on his Batcycle, apparently committed to running the villain down, and (2) suddenly changed his mind and crashed his cycle, putting himself at the villain's mercy.

I might buy this if it was shown that this Batman had some ironclad rule against killing. But the consistency of the character was far from ideal, on that point or most others.

E.D. wrote: "I recall a short story in Heavy Metal magazine where a small minority of intelligent people supervise a dumber populace through perceptual control. Cars have ports in their dashboards that blow high pressure air in the drivers face to simulate high speed. The cars never exceed 25 mph (safety concerns), but the speedometers read 200 mph. They're convertibles with fins and lots of useless gauges and blinking lights.
"...."

I'm sure I remember the story. Wasn't the final crunch the fact that humanity had been bred to be smaller to fit more people in, but actually it had meant an unexpected loss of IQ ?
Or am I mixing up two separate stories?
Well over 30 years ago that I read either of them :-)

E.D. wrote: "..."Sound in space" always strikes me as a similar device. Can't help it. It's like a tick, or something. Kind of like sailboats making tire-screeching noises when they turn at speed. It might be entertaining, but it'd make no sense."

Tires squealing on dirt roads & horses that change sex & markings during the same scene. That's why films are in a different category for me. Hollywood screws up so often that I make an effort to just go with it sometimes. Often I just do something else.

The dumb people short story made me think of another where a medical bag was sent back in time to our own by a similar society. An old, ruined doctor uses it to become rich, but has a ruthless woman as an assistant. At the end (view spoiler)[ the future tech realizes what the 'dumb' scientist has done & turns off the medical instruments' power, just as the woman is demonstrating how safe the scalpel is. She winds up cutting her own throat. (hide spoiler)] Anyone remember what that story was & who wrote it?

Yes, I remember the story, it's an old classic. (Too bad I can't remember title or author, but somebody will.)
As I say, we could complain about movies and TV for ever. Comic books also have their own separate rules, not only with physics/materials science (Superman holding a jet up in two hands? Adamantium, really?) but even costuming. You try running any distance in four inch heels -- go ahead, try it and report back, but only if you have health insurance so they can fix your broken ankle.
So that leaves us with fiction, where a sufficiently deft author can completely fool the eye with the clever palming of cards. A good example might be the stillsuits in DUNE -- impossible but so cool nobody cares. Or the design of Minas Tirith, which necessarily entails every scrap of food, water and armament to be hauled up a mountain road. My idea is that there's freight elevators at the back, and that the city was made possible when Otis Elevators got the contract.

Oh, man. Two Jims simultaneously. :} I'll just type..you guys work it out.

Been racking my brain trying to recall author and title (yep, 30+ years of cerebral hoarding), and population control was a factor. Guy from past(woken from cryo) has marketing skills from his/our time, and is asked to help solve population problem. His solution is vacation trips to Venus. Only problem is Venus is just like it is now, a dead planet. With a heavy ad-campaign, the morons flock to the rocket pads and never come back.

In the end the ad-man is re-frozen by the leaders because he's a threat to take over.

The medical bag story isn't popping (not saying it isn't in here somewhere), but it probably ended up as a Twilight Zone. Or should have.

Only one Brenda. :}

I wanted a stillsuit! Maybe the contract went to Otis the Cave Troll & Sons Rope and Tackle, original "brand name" of Otis Elevators. Wonder what IPO shares would be worth now?

i think the 2 stories are:

The Marching Morons

and

The Black Bag

both by C. M. Kornbluth (sp?)

Just wiki-ed and you nailed it, Spooky! Salute!

Me and Jim were close. Jim was closer. The other Jim.

I'm confused. :}

:)

Jim wrote: "E.D. wrote: "..."Sound in space" always strikes me as a similar device. Can't help it. It's like a tick, or something. Kind of like sailboats making tire-screeching noises when they turn at speed. ..."

I remember the story in a Short Story anthology but I've not got a clue about the writer

E.D. wrote: "Just wiki-ed and you nailed it, Spooky! Salute!

Me and Jim were close. Jim was closer. The other Jim.

I'm confused. :}"

we're both the other Jim :-)

Thanks, Spooky. I remember both stories, too. Excellent.

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Sometimes books run into our personal knowledge base & are the worse for wear. My boss recommended that I buy a UV sanitizer to run over keyboards & mice during the last cold & flu season. I wasn't particularly interested, but did some checking into them & found that the low levels most put out require keeping the UV light on the same area (usually a couple of square inches) for half an hour or more. At that rate, I might be able to sanitize a keyboard by the end of the day, so I could safely beg off dealing with another gadget. (I could more easily carry my own keyboard & mouse around.)

One of the books I read shortly after that had a person being decontaminated with a UV light & it would have sounded good if I hadn't just studied up on it a bit. Ignorance is bliss in that case. It's such niggling errors that can build up & really hurt a story.

It came up again in the book I'm listening to now, too. In this one, Bujold makes a point of saying it was outside a quarantine suit & that it would have given Miles burns if it had been on his skin. It still took a long time to decontaminate him. Well done!

It's far worse when the knowledge is part of my unconscious, ingrained life, though. I'm not a professional horseman like most of the rest of my family, but I have ridden, lived, & worked around them all my life. A horse whinnied when a rider jerked on its reins in one fantasy novel. It knocked me out of the story completely for a while. I had to make conscious decision to get back into it, but the flow of the story & the scene were in tatters.

My wife actually threw a book across the room one time when an archer stashed his bow in the horse's girth. The horse didn't mind, no one commented. Ugh. Girths have to be tight or the saddle would slip, so I'm not sure it's even possible, but even the best tempered horse would flip out if someone tried. It would be like sticking a pen into a girl's bra strap along her ribs. I'll bet she moves fast to get away & likely slaps your head clean off as she does so.
;-)

Jim wrote: "Thanks, Spooky. I remember both stories, too. Excellent.

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Sometimes books run into our personal knowledge base & are the worse for wear. My boss recommended that I buy a UV sanitizer..."

Your comment about horses just brought up another thing I simply can take. I work with wild animals for a living. Too many movies and TV shows, like the current version of Primeval, just get their animal behavior all wrong.

Animals, no matter how social or how adept at problem solving, just don’t go into a completely new situation and act as a coordinated group to solve complex problems and systematically search out and attack people. They get really scared, run away, and hide.

And guns. There are lots of people who know lots of stuff about guns. Does the writer really want to get it wrong and peeve them off, people who have guns and know how to use them? No.
It is easy to find stuff like this out, so there is no excuse. If you are a writer you can ask people even the most startlingly personal and even criminous information and they are happy to confide in you. Once I needed to find out how to mainline heroin (and what it feels like) and there were plenty of people to talk to me about it.

Guns, yeah. Silencers on revolvers. Ugh.

This wasn’t intentionally science fiction but I just watched an old MacGyver where he was in the kitchen while the bad guys were in the living room. To create a diversion, he took all the ice cubes out of the refrigerator, but them in a bag, and perched a bunch of things on top of the bag of ice. When the ice melted the junk fell over making noise and distracting the bad guys in the next room.

Really. Have you ever tried to pour ice cubes from one container to another silently? It can’t be done.

I get bothered by people who open doors and sneak by without anyone noticing – no one is that quiet. Also, people who hide behind curtains. No one is that skinny. Of course, this happens more often in movies and TV than in books.

Remember that there is only one superpower: the writer's thumb on the scale. With the writer on his side, the hero can do just about anything.

When it's good enough that I don't notice or think about it or care for that matter. When everything culminates into into an acceptable result is when I believe it. Rewatching or reading something I might go, "Well, that's not..." but even then I've already bought into it; it's kinda like realizing a magician's trick after the fact—it's still really fun you got tricked in the first place.

I was reading through this thinking that I can believe just about anything as long as it is consistent within the story (and I don't really care THAT much about the sound in space films thing), but the horse issue reminded me of something.

One thing likely to make me stop reading/watching something and scream in irritation is the whole 'big bad wolf' thing. In other words, wolves being treated as just 'evil' and 'vicious' things that go to any lengths to attack anything and everything in their path (and humans in particular) just for the sake of it, and with no explanation at all as to why. Wolf behaviour isn't hard to research, but some authors/film-makers obviously can't be bothered with even the basics - they just want some random 'villain' that sounds 'nasty' to add 'peril', and the poor wolf is all too often a convenient scapegoat.

That's probably just me, though!

I'd guess it's not just you T., since Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat. He's pretty popular & exploded those myths when he lived next to a pack unarmed save for a pot of tea to help mark his territory.

T. wrote: "...the poor wolf is all too often a convenient scapegoat.."

I think perhaps T & Jim might be... werewolves? Is this a new Public Relations campaign in preparation for them revealing themselves to the general public? Last night: Full Moon. Coincidence? I think not.

I'm not a werewolf, as far as I knooooooooooooowwwwwwwww!