So I was thinking about how SF in visual media (other than Halo) is a lost cause, absolute nonsense by people with no inkling what, for instance, is involved in orbit-insertion, and I was wondering, what got it to that point? I mean, there was a time when "mainstream science fiction" meant Heinlein, and the engineer Heinlein of "Farmer in the Sky", not the later Heinlein of the incest fantasies. So who killed that? Who dashed that promise, left that colossus uncompleted for his dreams of fame in foreign lands (so to speak)?
A lot of people blame Roddenberry. Now, I'll give you that Star Trek has a lot to answer for; the ships are unbalanced (with a naval floorplan), fly on antimatter, and have nonsensoleum teleporters because the staff are too unimaginative to come up with a stock landing sequence. We'll allow warp drive and artificial gravity, since the one could mean the other—also Los Alamos' archive has papers about them, so, yeah—but that list right there is insane.
But Star Trek was a blip, for all its influence; fundamentally the stories were still very hard sf, in spirit if not in practice, indeed almost too. In Star Trek, multiply-competent techies are still the guys who go into space, and their 'jury rig' is what an engineer would call a jury rig, which (I've seen them) still looks like a damn professional piece of work to the layman. All the other flaws were just television, and from those we have never fully escaped. No, look elsewhere to lay the blame.
It's Lucas' fault.
Stitch your garments back up and stop crying aloud on Heaven, I have a point here. Star Wars is, in fact, more technically plausible than Star Trek: its ships at least usually have their engines squarely in the rear and there are no teleporters. But it was Star Wars that brought back the really pulp scifi, the Lensman stuff and the 1930s adventure-story tropes. There aren't a lot of guys like Han Solo in Star Trek, now are there? Maybe it's 'cause Roddenberry was a pinko, but at least his spaceships are regulated like the nuclear weapons they are. But the 1930s was full of the hand-to-mouth spaceship captain, because it was full of the hand-to-mouth steamship captain. Star Trek at least made gestures in the direction of worldbuilding, however perfunctory; Star Wars dispenses with them altogether.
And the interesting thing is, I don't care.
Star Wars, after all, is a triumph of the human spirit; Lucas saved film and probably all of fiction from the abyss of 1970s nihilism. I may be an SF fan but I'm also a human being, and that's more important than plausible space stories. Before you worry about whether your story or its world are plausible, you must first ask if they are liveable, and if your default answer is not "Well, uh, no, they aren't; how could they be?" you very largely have Lucas to thank for it.
This puts me, as an SF fan, in the position of a man whose town had to be sacrificed in a war against a civilization-destroying menace. Sure, SF reverted to its pulp-era silliness: but man did not revert to barbarism. Our cathedral was destroyed in the bombing: but the Prussian was driven back. Watch a few movies from, oh, 1974, and then tell me you'd prefer hard SF to Star Wars' legacy. If you would, I don't know what to tell you—I don't speak lizard-thing.
Now, civilization having been preserved, obviously, the task now is to rebuild our town and its cathedral. Just because the pulp silliness was necessary in the war does not mean we have to keep things that way; one fights that one may leave off fighting. But also, remember what that war was fought to protect—just because we are now free to make our setting as scientifically rigorous as possible, is no reason for a reductive anthropology. Remember, Skinner was the one who tried to make the social sciences "hard", and he tortured toddlers. The film that saved civilization had to go back to pre-war pulp in part because post-war SF had become, far too much, a weapon of the nihilism it managed to beat back.
Are you so weak you must sacrifice your heart to have a worthwhile head?
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