When I was a child I used to read a lot. Still do, though my tastes have changed just a little. But from the age of eight to fifteen I would read any piece of fantastic literature I could get my hands on. Comics were of course a favorite, and I would even read the letters to the editor in the back of each one. I remember one in particular in The Incredible Hulk. The writer commented on how it was impossible for the Hulk to pick up a castle and throw it at the army he was fighting. Not because he wasn’t strong enough. No, the Hulk was that powerful. Instead the writer, who was an engineering student at some major University, commented on how the structure itself would not hold together while lifted out of the ground by a pair of hands, no matter how over sized. The structure, which had been designed to sit on a large flat piece of ground, would fall apart, and the Hulk would find himself holding onto a couple of handfuls of stone while the castle fell in pieces on him and around him. And of course he would get even more pissed, but even the anger of the green beast couldn’t change the laws of physics. I also remember, though at a latter age, how Larry Niven fielded questions from engineering students about the properties of Scrinth, the marvelous substance that was the matrix of Ringworld. Someone had done the math and shown that it was impossible for a structure of any conceivable matter to hold together under the forces it had to endure. Niven had commented that it was almost impossible to come up with some high tech idea that someone couldn’t shoot down. Another famous example of a fan finding fault through factual analysis was the famous treatise on the power of the Death Star. You know, the moon sized station from Star Wars that could totally destroy Earth sized planets with a one second blast. This analysis has appeared in many places on the net, and the analyzer, who I think was a physics student, took into account the force of gravity, mass of the planet, and many other factors. Definitely something I couldn’t have done. He found that to totally destroy an Earth sized planet, meaning to blast it into pieces that did not fall back into a globe and form a new, if somewhat lifeless, planet, required half the energy produced by the sun for a year. The author made a remark about the capacitors of the Death Star, but plainly he was pointing out that such a weapon was impossible using any kind of tech as we understood it.
Now I try to make my work as technically factual as possible, as long as it doesn’t destroy a good story. I was trained in psychology, with a minor and some more in biology. I still know enough physics and chemistry to not make any huge errors, I hope. And some things I just put down to faith that we will solve insurmountable problems, at least problems for our current tech. I used inertial compensators in spaceships, with no idea how they would work, because they are necessary to advance the story. I figure that inertia would be converted to heat, so now I have another problem, like how to get rid of all that heat. I hand wave it away, because I figure that it will either be solved or not. But again I try to make whatever is factual in the story fit the known facts. No magical fifth or sixth fundamental forces of nature. Then I read the work of other authors, some of them doing quite well, and the responses of their readers, and wonder why I even bother. I might find the mistakes in the works of others, but the fans either do not or don’t care if they do.
A couple of years ago I was reading a series by a well known writer about an interstellar conflict started by turning a gas giant into a star. Now the technology used seemed a little over the top, but who can say it was not possible, moving a neutron star through a wormhole into the heart of the gas giant. Now I believe the result would have been to add the mass of the gas giant to the outside of the neutron star as a new layer of neutronium, but in the story the compression resulted in the gas giant sustaining fusion and becoming the life giving light to its moons. I guess it could happen. But the error that destroyed my suspension of belief was that the new gas giant/star, which now had a mass much greater than the star it orbited, was still orbiting that star. What I am sure would have happened is that solar system would have rearranged its orbits to compensate for the greater mass that now ruled the system. I wondered how many people actually caught that error, and how many cared who did. More recently I read a novel in which the premise was that colony ships had been sent to nearby stars because an asteroid was about to hit the Earth. Now from what I have read, most experts agree that once we have gotten interplanetary travel pretty much under control we will not have to worry about random rocks striking the Earth. We will detect them and we will move them. So it didn’t make sense that we would have interstellar travel, even sublight, and have to worry about a rock striking the Earth, especially if it gives us enough time to equip ten expeditions to other stars. Now I was surprised that a book would be based on such a poor premise, but I was even more surprised by some of the reviews of this book, in which readers said it was based on such a believable premise. I guess they don’t read the views of the experts on the future dangers of asteroid strikes.
Now all writers make mistakes. The physicists make errors with biology, the biologists with physics, and on and on. I try to make my work as accurate as possible within the constraints of the story. I will still use handwavium or unobtanium when necessary to move the story forward. I will not make people float off a world for no know reason, or fighters bank in vacuum, or G class stars go supernova as part of their natural evolution. I know I will make mistakes, and hope that my readers point them out in a non-obnoxious manner. But reading some of the things I have read, and seeing what is put on the screen, silver and small, makes me wonder if anyone really cares. I know that I do, and I will continue to try to make my stories make sense.
Ringworld
All posts tagged Ringworld
Hollywood have given us so many high budget, spectacular special effects movies recently, it’s almost hard to remember that it wasn’t always like this. Science Fiction movies used to be mostly B grade low budgets specials with maybe a guy in some kind of monster suit and spaceships suspended from visible wires. I recently did some research on movies and found that while there were a lot of bad scifi movies dating back to the twenties, there weren’t that many fantasy movies. I guess the effects were so bad that most producers wouldn’t take a risk on fantasy, or else scifi was just more popular. I think the old movie that really went over the top for me was Forbidden Planet. Made by Disney, it had ground breaking special effects and big name stars. It still took a couple of decades before that became the norm. Now we have Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, the Star Trek movies. There are even TV shows with great sets and effects, and all the big name actors seem to jump at the chance to get a role in one of these spectaculars. Now there are still a lot of great books out there that have yet to be made into movies, while Hollywood goes through a remake cycle of old movies that can be updated by new effects. It saddens me that they keep ignoring so many good books. Especially the one I really want to see, Larry Niven’s Ringworld.
I would think that most true hard science fiction fans know the work of Niven. His Known Space series is his most famous setting. And Ringworld is the most well known novel within that setting. Now Hollywood likes to wow us with special effects. Death Stars, miles long spaceships, huge asteroids falling from the sky. Ringworld is so big that the crew of the Death Star would die of old age before they caused appreciable damage to it. It would take a thousand Enterprises beaming their entire crews to the surface to explore even a significant fraction of the surface. What could be more spectacular than a ring built around a sun, with thousand kilometer high walls along the edges to keep the air in as it rotates around the central star. Three million times the surface area of the Earth, with tens of thousands of species that evolved from, well, us. With enormous shades orbiting between it and the sun, mimicking the day/night cycle. Huge Bussard Ramjets using the plasma of the sun to keep the ring centered. Even the defense system is huge, magnetic lines on the floor of the world pulling gas from the sun and turning it into a huge gas laser. Sprinkle in advanced technology and aliens; a half ton carnivorous feline (Kzinti), a two headed herbivore (Puppeteers) and the ultimate killing machine which is what we are supposed to become (Pak) and you have one of the greatest cast of characters in scifi history. And the technology is there to make all of this come to life. There have been many rumors through the years that Ringworld was coming to the silver screen. None have materialized. There is a current rumor going around that it will be done, but I will believe it when I see it. Maybe it is that Hollywood can’t come up with a good enough script dumbed down for those who know nothing about science fiction, the oh wow crowd who goes to see mindless action. It is a shame, but I can see a lot of people coming out of the theater shaking their heads and wondering what all that was about. I do know that I will pay to see this movie, probably a couple of times. And then I will buy the blue ray, and then the extended blue ray, and watch it over and over again. Because even though the wow factor is cool, the wow factor combined with love of the material is the ultimate cool.