De Romanicorum Physicalium 3

Thoughts upon SF.

• So I forgot, but my ships doing 20-30 gs was one rewrite ago; now they do 8-11. Which I like, because that's much more reasonable vis-à-vis the structural integrity, but I'd still have to have people in tanks if they were gonna not have artificial-gravity based acceleration protection. After all, 9.5 gs (the average) is about twice what luge does. It's hard to set a scene on a giant luge.


• My felinoids, I decided, perfume their clothes. Why? Because a lot of etiquette—it's a universal—involves concealing potentially offensive feelings from others, and if you've got a sense of smell like theirs, that's a problem. Plus, it can let love scenes have a peculiar nonhuman intimacy, a character putting her nose to her lover's fur and smelling his feelings.
  
  I admit, I didn't entirely come up with the idea on my own, though I'd been somewhat troubled by what role to have their sense of smell play in the story. I got this idea from Halo: adolescent Brutes' emotions are very easy for their elders to read. They learn to control those pheromones when they grow up. That last bit struck me as unlikely—can you sweat on command?—but it gave me an idea. And perfuming your clothes is not only much more plausible, it's a fun cultural-setting tidbit.


• I came across people debating 'realistic space combat' on an old forum thread, and some of them were saying you wouldn't want a long skinny ship, because of maneuverability. But they were all forgetting that what propels a decent rocket is uncorked nuclear holocaust.
  
  In reality, a realistic rocket design is, essentially, a compromise between keeping the crew at a safe distance from the engine, and decent maneuverability. And mass will of course be a factor. Since one dimension is already determined, the only way to keep the volume (and therefore the mass) within a manageable limit, is to keep the other two dimensions as small as possible. Executive summary, "long skinny ship".


• I realized, I have some kind of a grudge against science fiction tropes. Don't get me wrong, I use 'em—they represent concepts, images, ideas that I really like. But I don't use their names.
  
  I've got military parasite-spacecraft, but I never call 'em "fighters"—and the things that carry 'em are "motherships", not "carriers". I've already mentioned how I use the Asian-style non-branch-specific military ranks. I also mentioned, in passing, that I've got 3D computer displays: but I call them "volumetric displays" rather than holograms. Artificial limbs are called 'prosthetics', just like in real life, rather than "cybernetics"—cybernetics is restricted to computers (prosthetics do involve cybernetics, in the 24th century, of course). I'm torn as to whether to call people with prosthetics "cyborgs", and I'm leaning to the negative—consider how dicey a proposition it is to call people "paraplegics" or "albinos" now. Nanomachines are "nano-robots", since that's the most dignified of the names they're actually called ('nanoids'? I think not).
  
  I'm not sure why. I think a big part of it is, these tropes have become cliches, and a person who sees "cyborg" or "hologram" thinks of the cliche/trope, rather than the real concept. There are two problems there; the first is that the cliche is often, if not usually, inaccurate—compare the Wikipedia article on volumetric displays to sci-fi holograms.
  
  The second problem is a very peculiar thing, almost disgusting. Namely, SF, the very literature of wonderment, has made people jaded by these marvels. Now, the society in the book shouldn't find them any more wondrous than we find 1280x1024 flatscreen monitors or artificial legs you can play basketball with, but if some part of you, the reader, isn't saying "Gee whiz!" like a towheaded seventh grader from 1958, you ain't getting full value for your science-fiction dollar. Holograms, cyborg limbs, and nanomachine self-repair systems are not supposed to feel commonplace, and I figure changing the names might force the reader to think, at least a little, about what they are.


• I'm curious, do people understand just how bad TV science fiction is nowadays? Leave the fact Firefly and Battlestar Galactica are uncredited reboots of Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman and The West Wing, respectively; have you ever watched Eureka or Sanctuary? I think I mentioned it before, but Eureka has sub-Jimmy Neutron technobabble—also no particularly likeable characters and enough over-ripe cliches to gag a buzzard.
  
  Or take Sanctuary (please). Cryptozoology is a lousy basis for a series, especially since it, like Star Trek and Stargate, is full of mystico-magical elements dressed up in sciencey-sounding nonsense. Plus, it doesn't even stick with cryptozoology half the time. There was an episode recently with a time dilation bubble where, get this, one day outside is something like six years inside. Only, the sunlight inside comes from outside. Yeah, let's not discuss how the people survive in multiple years of perpetual daylight followed by the same number of years of unrelenting night—they collect solar energy to keep the plants alive, but what about what the temperature must be? All that heat's gotta go somewhere, folks. But it gets worse: think about it for a moment, and you'll realize the bubble would appear completely black, or else as a massive optical distortion, from outside, and the only light inside would come from internal sources. Why? Because otherwise, it would violate the conservation of mass. The only way a time dilation bubble can cause one day's worth of sunlight to give daylight for three years, would be if it also caused each and every photon to be multiplied hundreds of times over.
  
  Plus, apparently these people don't own photos of Nikola Tesla.