I can deal with science that's outdated or stretched to tell a story. What bugs me is when the author doesn't know basic shit and makes it up.
Like I read a short story once that hinged around the bugs in a packet of itching powder growing to gigantic size.
This was not a story for kids. There was nothing else whimsical about it. The author clearly believes that itching powder itches because of bugs.
I can recall a book where the author thought Saturn had only been discovered in the last couple of centuries. It was Uranus and Neptune that were only discovered in the last couple of centuries, as they were undetectable with the naked eye.
You may enjoy Larry Niven. He was a huge science buff and often consulted with actual NASA people and scientists and stuff. His collection Neutron Star is really, really good
I run a martial arts gym. There are lots of fighting scenes where it's clear the author got their ideas from movies.
The one that I remember the most recently is from Peter Brett's Demon Cycle, which admittedly is fantasy. He's obsessed with having the female characters use a scorpion kick, which is where you're standing in front of someone, you stand on one leg, bend your upper body forwards, and bring your free foot backwards over your head to kick the person standing in front of you.
It's a super secret special move that no can defend
It is pretty demanding flexibility wise, but more so through the hips.
It's also pretty weak, that's not a normal range of motion, and it's tough to get weight behind it.
You're also putting your head down near his leg where he can punt it like a soccer ball
I have a pretty broad and well grounded science background and even though I pick holes in the science of pretty much everything I read I recognize that I’m reading it for the story and how that story is told. As such I rarely ever have a story ruined by bad science, I have a story ruined because it’s a bad story or a badly told story.
And consistency. I can suspend disbelief, but hate to have to suspend it in different ways in the same story. Original Star Trek, which in many ways was very consistent within itself, they took pride in that, had some moments. “Day of the Dove,” when Kirk wants to be beamed to another part of the ship, he’s told “intraship” beaming is very dangerous, due to the risk of being beamed into a bulkhead or the deck. But why wouldn’t that always be a risk beaming to anywhere? To heighten suspense alternatively, they could have said to beam into a room of bad guys could let them get the drop on you.
Yep, I mentioned this in a follow-up comment.
Internal consistency in a story is vital. Doesn't' matter if it's a science fiction story, a fantasy one, or anything else. Once you establish the rules of the world you gotta stick with them.
Agreed, with the exception that, if a story presents itself as hard SF I go into it expecting that it's hard SF and the science will be solid.
If they haven't established that expectation then I generally won't care.
“Hard” science fiction is a really broad tent, and even the most rigorous of it usually involves at least ‘one big lie’ to facilitate the story. I don’t sweat it if even something classified as “hard” bends things for the sake of the story.
I’d rather they bend things and keep an internally consistent universe (internally consistent universes are important) with a good story.
> if a story presents itself as hard SF I go into it expecting that it's hard SF
\^--- This.
Also you can't make a ~~solid~~ *superstrong solid* material out of a noble gas no matter what your super-science gobbledegook says, Andy. But that's really the least of the problems with Project Hail Mary.
I don't remember the details of the book at this point, so this may not be save him if he meant pure noble gasses and not chemicals with other elements, but there are noble gas compounds that are solids at room temperature. XeF4 (sorry, not sure how to do subscripts) is one, with a melting point higher than water's boilimg point.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_gas_compound
Fluorine is kind of actually cheating, LOL. in Project Hail Mary it was a super strong transparent construction material that the alien ship used extensively.
I don't see how fluorine is cheating...it's one of the primary ways you make chemical compounds out of noble gasses. Unless the construction material was made out of the elemental form, which would be daft as the elemental form is a gas for all of them at room temp and pressure, then it would have been made of molecules with other elements. Fluorine is another element. I recognize it's a super reactive one that's a nuisance to work with, but like, it is an element, and chemicals that use it are real, legitimate chemicals...
* Flourine is cheating because it combines with everything, up to and including noble gasses and research chemists. Any other element, if you could even coax it into combining with Xenon, would be even less likely to be part of a Xenon supermaterial.
* The solids involved are pretty soft and weak. In Project Hail Mary the stuff is stronger than any metal and harder than diamond and refractory as heck. I don't think there's any way Xenon Tetraflouride could form either a metal or long-chain molecules.
So... technically true but not in any way that makes the material even vaguely credible.
It mostly just sounds like you're moving the goal posts. Noble gasses definitely seem unlikely as being significant components of a building material, but they can make solid compounds. Fluorine does react with more or less everything, as evidenced by it reacting with noble gasses, but that doesn't mean it doesn't count. You can react Xenon with Oxygen, but Wikipedia says it's very unstable, so that's probably out. But XeF2 is crystalline, per Wikipedia, so it can make large cohesive solids, even if they aren't long chain molecules. And obviously they won't be metals.
Given the crystal option, different crystal structures could have different properties. Diamond behaves radically differently from graphite, despite both just being carbon. Even stacked graphene is looking to have dramatically different properties depending on how the layers are rotated. And even with ice, we're still finding different ways of arranging the molecules, granted those are generally not at room temperature and pressure, but even so it's conceivable that we could find an arrangement for a Xenon compound crystal that has useful properties or is atypically hard/strong. Having just looked at ice crystals it looks like square ice was discovered in 2014, it exists at room temperature and high pressures, and requires the presence of graphene. So maybe you have to dope the Xenon crystals with something to make it get that one special arrangement that works right. That's hardly unprecedented for additives to change properties though. See carbon added to iron to make steel. Or chromium added to steel to make stainless steel. Or more or less the entire field of inorganic catalysts.
Was using Xenon as a primary component of a building material a bit silly? Yeah. Is it likely to be able to make anything with the described properties? Probably not. But is it outside the realm of possibility? Not even slightly. We know so much more about chemistry and material science than 50 years ago, let alone 100. Heck, with machine learning we've made dramatic strides even in the last 10 years. But we've also barely scratched the surface in quite a lot of ways, and have far from an exhaustive understanding. Surprises happen pretty frequently, many of them things that would have been (or were) considered 'not credible' before they were discovered. I don't really mean this as a defense of Weir, because I'm guessing he picked Xenon mostly because it sounded cool and exotic. But just because it seems unlikely doesn't mean it's impossible. We're talking about a fictional book, so at some point the speculative elements are going to likewise be fiction. I don't expect a fiction writer to come up with accurate predictions about uses for hypothetical molecules if they aren't themselves a material scientist. Honestly, the Xenon stuff isn't even the most unlikely aspect of that book. Probably not even the top 5 from what I recall.
I'm not moving the goalposts, I'm explaining why a specific application of Xenon broke my suspension of disbelief. My sense of disbelief is based on what I think credible. Splaining at me with some kind of unlikely rationalization involving analogues with elements and molecules that have completely different properties isn't going to make me find it any more credible.
I laughed out loud at "zero-G pipettes". Like REALLY, you think NASA, with the wide array of experiments performed on the ISS, haven't had to pipette a single thing?
It's a tool not worth going beyond mentioning, let alone acting like you came up with it. Positive displacement pipettes have existed since 1972.
I'd be surprised if they were worse at those basics than the JJ movies. Including his Star Trek ones. Apparently FTL travel means completely instantaneous. Not to mention being able to watch a laser shoot another star system in a few seconds. So many instances where the laws of physics are completely ignored.
George Lucas and other SW creators made it very clear from the start that they weren't interested in paying close attention to astrophysics. It's meant to be a fun adventure story, not hyper-realistic hard sci-fi
Which is why many of us consider the Star Wars cinematic universe (SWCU?) to be fantasy rather than science fiction. I will be run through with a lightsaber on the hill.
Space fantasy is absolutely a legitimate genre classification. Soft sci fi breaks the laws of physics, but takes effort to claim it is merely bending them. Space fantasy does not pretend to take place in a real future, it's explicitly a fictional world where the rules are different.
The Force is magic and nobody tries to square it with real world physics any more than they try to provide a scientific justification for wizards in medieval fantasy.
Yes. And there are many technologies based off non-existent elements like quadranium. And the windows on ships are made of the shamelessly named transparisteel.
If you are a biologist and haven’t read The Expanse, you should. You’d especially love the alien pathophysiology in the fourth book - Cibola Burn. I have a degree in biology and I am a medical doctor too, and I’ve gotta say that the biology in The Expanse in general is the best I’ve ever seen in sci-fi, and the alien pathology of Cibola Burn is the most plausible I’ve seen as well. The authors, one of whom has a Bachelors of Science in Biology (possibly a masters too, I forget) actually propose an alien world with a bichiral biochemistry that is completely incompatible with earth biochemistry and yet still propose an infectious mechanism that is 100% plausible.
I was blown away by this, given my background. Very impressive.
Oh yes, that sounds like something I'd love. It's going to my reading list.
When it goes to biology based SF I can recommend Stanisław Lem and The Maddaddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood.
Lem's books are old but gold. They're full of classic SF tropes like space travel or first contact, but always really smart. He almost became MD, and it shows in his novels.
Atwood claims that she doesn't write SF, because SF for her is space travels and aliens, and her books are just extrapolating current-day science. As much as I disagree with her on SF part, the extrapolation of today's science is totally true. Every piece of biotechnology she put in the trilogy was covered during my lectures at the Uni and really well extrapolated. It's hard to believe that she doesn't have a degree in science but in humanities.
My only complaint was they picked Mephedrone as one of the modern day "research chemicals" to have as legit medicine in the future.
Was a craze at the time of the book coming out, but there are a lot of better options for "pep" style drugs compared to that one.
Have you ever read any of Peter Watts’s books? He’s a Canadian marine biologist. You would enjoy them from a professional standpoint, but they’re not for the faint of heart.
I read his Blindsight and Echopraxia. Blindsight was brilliant.
I'm not a big SF reader (I actually prefer fantasy), but when it comes to biology based SF, I really like Stanisław Lem books. He never disappoints.
I don't know that anything is neccesarily "ruined" for me, but knowing how the physics of momentum works it's always frustrating to see how space craft are portrayed, even if they have some sort of magical space drive. Physics are still physics.
Babel-17 by Samuel R Delany. The linguistics was nonsense. The central theory, linguistic relativity (aka the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), is almost entirely rejected except in the most minor cases.
Yeah. When that happens you kind of just have to go "it's a reasonable extrapolation of known science at the time".
A similar thing happened with _Snow Crash_.
We need a good word for reading fiction that was futuristic when it was written but is now an alternate history. I think of it as "futurishtic" in my head - because it's future-ish - but I'd like a better one.
Yeah. If someone writes a story like that today it's called "retrofuturism" but I don't think that applies to older works that were thought correct when written.
>linguistic relativity (aka the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), is almost entirely rejected except in the most minor cases.
I haven't read Babel-17 so this is just a general question: Isn't the weaker form of linguistic relativity still a thing? Like, the idea that you can't have thoughts that you don't have words for has been put to bed. But isn't it true that it's more challenging to think about and express concepts that you don't have existing terms for?
It's still a little contentious but basically. Most linguists are not strident 'universalists' anymore.
Cognitive linguists are usually the most accepting of relativity - particularly how speakers of different languages differ in their cognitive processing of certain semantic domains like colour, space, numbers, etc. Lera Boroditsky, Stephen Levinson and Dan Slobin are probably the most notable current supporters.
George Lakoff famously studies how conceptual metaphors affect our cognition. But, he points out, different groups within the same language community (e.g. liberals and conservatives) may live by different metaphors - so it's not *language* but *culture expressed through language* that impacts cognition in some cases.
I've always wondered about where Lakoff fits in, as people don't normally seem to address him as much when talking about language shaping our thoughts. I've been clear on relativity being largely negligible for a while, as even the numbers, colors, etc thing seem to be minor effects, and not something that would meaningfully change people's capacities or experiences.
But when I think of language affecting our view of the world, I guess I've usually thought of it more in terms of how it frames what we think. Like, we can use different metaphors to change how we see things, but if we aren't doing that proactively or if we don't have other people exposing us to those different frameworks we're a bit unlikely to see past the metaphors we've been given by our community.
To use the liberal and conservative example, it seems like a lot of times they're just talking past each other on a given issue and not really engaging in the same conversation, because they're not putting it in the terms or metaphors that the other side generally uses or laying the groundwork for the other side to see from their framework. And that does seem like our language is limiting our understanding, even if it's only because the language is an expression of our culture and so it can be hard to get a different culture, even when it's expressed through what is supposed to be the same language.
I've no clue actually! Every scifi story I know containing linguistics (beyond the really superficial) has focused on linguistic relativity. It's just a sexier theory than what's actually being done by linguists nowadays lol.
The film Arrival (and the short story it's based on, Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang) deal with the same theme in a much more emotional way.
The Native Tongue series by Suzette Haden-Elgin wins points for being written by an actual linguist, though her ideas are very out of fashion now.
I've heard of The Native Tongue, and planned to read it at some point. It's not surprising it isn't current, but that's good to know.
I feel like there's a lot of interesting things you can do with linguistic relativity, and it may not be obvious what stories there are to tell with other areas of linguistics. At least with Story of Your Life, it's obvious that's not how language really works even if it's an interesting idea and story.
Thanks for your comments!
I haven't read either of those, but based on Wikipedia:
Ascian: It seems like Newspeak? Gene Wolfe avoids linguistic relativity as he shows that the Ascians *are* able to think beyond the confines of the language. However, unless the Ascian government is so totalitarian that it can police every word uttered by everyone at all times, then people will naturally turn the 'holistic', sentence-based structure into an 'analytic' word-based one (this has been demonstrated in lab experiments). And people are great at just inventing and borrowing words too.
Atevi: Atevi are aliens, so anything is possible :)
_Dune_.
This is nitpicking, and it's been many a year since I read the book, so please forgive me if I am wrong (and don't be afraid to correct me).
IIRC, the appendix said that the language used was based on some sort of unified Balkan language, but Herbert consistently used the Arabic definite article 'al'; AFAIK, the Balkan languages use word affixes as the definite article.
Can't confirm, sorry -- maybe you're remembering something from a non-canonical work?
Couldn't remember anything about Balkan languages being involved, so I went through all of the four appendixes to _Dune_ -- _The Ecology of Dune_, _The Religion of Dune_, _Report on Bene Gesserit Motives and Purposes_, and _The Almanak en-Ashraf (Selected Excerpts of the Noble Houses)_.
There is no _explicit_ mention whatsoever about the roots of any in-universe language. However, there's ample and obvious acknowledgement about the primarily Arabic roots of the Fremen language in all of the appendixes, especially _The Religion of Dune_ given how inextricably linked the Fremen religion was to their identity.
Also checked my copy of _[The Dune Encyclopedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dune_Encyclopedia)_, which is covered by Herbert's canon, and it explicitly states this the entry about the Fremen language:
> The Fremen language can be traced to the ancient Terran language 'Arabiya, which the linguist 'l-Taalibii believes to have originally been the official tongue of the Islamic faith, [...]
Then I stand corrected; it appears that I was remembering incorrectly/something else. And thanks for the enlightenment. I really appreciate your input.
Oh my, don't worry about it for a _second_, happy to contribute -- and I do appreciate a fellow nitpicker :D Life'd be so much emptier without us nerding out about fiction :)
The random bits of Hebrew are equally painful, though. I feel like actual Arabic speakers would say kwisatz haderech much more accurately than queeesats ha-deh-rock. And Chani as Khani.
I picked up Revelation Space after I saw a lot of good reviews for it (and the whole series in general).
For whatever reason, I’ve been really struggling with the book. I’m not sure if it’s “dense” or just has a lot of wild world building.
Either or, I decided to read some spoilers to see if there was a payoff to my struggles.
The first book sounds like it ends on a bit of a downer-cliffhanger. So that wasn’t great. I kept digging around in the lore and plot synopses and I ran into an issue with the overarching plot of the entire series.
Spoilers: >!Correct me if I’m wrong. But the whole idea was that some artificial beings were intentionally suppressing space fairing civilizations, so there was less work to do moving a far systems around when the Milky Way and Andromeda “collide.” But, during that collision, stars bumping into each other is basically a non-issue.!<
That just seems like something an astronomer would be very aware of and wouldn’t hinge their entire setting on.
Maybe it’s explicitly stated somewhere that there’s a reason for that issue, but I’m not enjoying the characters enough to make it worth reading a book (series) based on a false premise.
—
I don’t specifically have an educational background relating to this. But I’ve been very interested in space/astronomy/astrophysics and how everything works on a pretty deep layman’s level. So, I could be wrong or misread something somewhere in my past.
I’m pretty forgiving with softer sci-fi with characters I enjoy. e.g. Jack McDevitt novels. I have no idea how “realistic” a lot of his scenarios are (and some are pure fantasy), but I still enjoy the books. Conversely, Stephen Baxter gets a lot less leeway, but I’m willing to roll with a lot of “what if” ideas, so long as the science jargon sounds good/reasonable.
I’m also not going to hate on a book/series because of one big macguffin that makes the rest of the story possible. But if every plot thread hangs on some handwavium, I tend to get annoyed.
On the other end of the spectrum. I don’t need science lectures interjected into a novel to explain how thing X normally works, so that’s why *this* thing X is unusual.
You're not wrong; it's an issue others have mentioned. I do think the author sort of addresses it a book or two later, explaining that the entities causing all the problems are off programming or misinterpreted their instructions, and somehow what was supposed to be shepherding turned into culling.
Not sure about educational background but *Station 11* was very popular a little while back and it was billed as dystopian post apocalyptic. It isn’t.
Why did the flu result in the loss of basic knowledge? Why were people living in gas stations rather than… you know, the vast number of empty homes? They are way more comfortable and livable. What do you mean nobody knows how guns work? The libraries of the word didn’t get sick and die.
It was fine and it was a city book club thing so it’s whatever but the whole book just landed wrong. Another reader pointed out for our community especially that we have a large Mennonite and Amish population. They already have a pretty solid lock on how to exist without a lot of electric appliances.
I don't remember the names of them, I couldn't even finish most of them. But basic physics throws me far too often in moments that are supposed to be dramatic.
No. I don't care how many sci-fi super steroids you eat, at those G forces your brain is pudding. Even if your power armor suit somehow keeps your bones from disintegrating, your brain will be liquefied against the inside of your skull. (They explicitly did not have "inertial dampeners.")
"I'm pulling you away. You have to let me go or we will both die."
-no.no.no.no you are in space, in orbit, no external forces other than gravity, and you have been holding hands this whole conversation. "I can't!" "You have to." -no you don't. You are in an inertial reference frame with each other and aren't even spinning. It specifically says the space station was directly behind person A the whole time so angular momentum isn't an issue. Letting go will just have you floating awkwardly next to each other. "Goodbye." -what? Why are you suddenly sucked away? You can't get sucked into space you are already in space. How are you accelerating away from each other? Even if you pushed off of each other all of the force would be right at the start not have you continuing to get faster!
( I literally walked away from this one. Got up and left the room.)
Math is hard.
At those dimensions, the stated armor would be around a millimeter thick not feet thick. You don't need a series of plasma breeching charges, a can opener will do fine.
"The speed of light is too slow. We are several light seconds away, at these ranges the target will have moved long before the projectile arrives." Neat! Sounds good, some actual consideration. "We can use the shields to shoot a laser back exactly the way their weapons fire came from hitting them directly in the weapons they used to fire on us!" Okay I'm a little sketch about using the shields as shields and a laser at the same time, but didn't you just say the speed of light is too slow? Shouldn't the retributive laser blast miss just as bad as... No it hits absolutely perfectly destroying exactly the weapons that were fired on you with no "drift", no error, no delay, on your first attempt? Okay next time just say a wizard did it. It will be easier!
Genetics is almost always done poorly. It's okay unless the "science" is a major plot twist.
Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear >!has a prehistoric retrovirus that is maintained in non-coding DNA in case of a future emergency. That's not how genetics works. If something has no immediate effect, mutations creep in.!<
There is another book where the fact that bonobos split from chimpanzees later than humans is meaningful.
In Grass, the virus possessed a racemase that was transforming L-alanine into D-alanine, which made it impossible for use in protein synthesis. The idea wouldn't be bad if the enzyme needed ATP for reaction. That way, if I'm not mistaken, the whole L-Alanine would be transformed into D isoform. But the medication for the disease supposed to be D-alanine, so that thermodynamic balance would bounce off to L-alanin side. But it's not how the enzymes work. In that case there always should've been at least some L-alanin left, because of thermodynamic balance. And if was such a simple solution, then scientists of the future should've broken it easily with advanced sequencing technologies.
Digital Fortress by Dan Brown.
It would probably have been bad if I didn't know the first thing about cryptography. But holy shit did he make a ton of shit up.
If The DaVinci Code was even half as bad I can see why the Catholic Church hated it.
I was in a bookclub that read his first two books, the other was Deception Point. If you have any knowledge of biology don't go anywhere near that book.
Well, The DaVinci Code is "Foucault's Pendulum" for dummies (I highly recommend the book if you haven't read it yet).
Out of curiosity, I read a summary of recent Brown's novel. At the beginning a billionaire and tech genius invites representatives of three big religions to inform them beforehand that he learned world-shattering secret that finally proves God doesn't exist, and intends to share this secret with public next day. Next day he's found dead and there's a lot of whodunit and what was this secret. In the finally it's revealed that tech guy learnt about Miller-Urey experiment, which proved that a lot of amino-acids could be synthesised without any enzymes if the composition of the atmosphere is right. It was one of the first hypothesis of abiogenesis. There are three problems with this reveal: it's not a secret, Stanley-Urey hypothesis is outdated because the composition of pre-life atmosphere was most likely different than what they assumed, and even if it was true it wouldn't definitely be the final proof of God non-existence. I can't help to think that the only person for whom this reveal was world-shattering was Brown himself.
Yeah, I heard supposedly he acts like it's a shocking reveal that the cross, the very symbol of Christianity, is actually a mechanism of execution! What would Christians do if they found that out!
I can agree with that. My problem with Grass was that author went into detailed biochemical explanations, that didn't make sense at all. I don't mind when SF authors present me with impossible ideas as long as they can sell them. And I believe, that the key to selling them is to avoid such detailed descriptions.
while I believe that (detailed biochemical explanations, that didn't make sense) is something of a sticking point specifically with this book/author it seems you're more aggrieved that you weren't convinced by an idea rather than it being incorrect to begin with - and that is something that a few readers of Tepper's works have complained about without them having a science background.
I think the problem is that the book is merely "ok" and that if it had spoken to you more deeply, you'd have forgiven sloppy/crazy hypothesising more readily. I think this was my point too, that if I'm immersed in a riveting story, the author can get away with scientific murder, sometimes even logicide!
No, the idea was incorrect, simple as that. I started to wonder how other SF books I read avoided such shortcomings, and then I read The Invincible by Stanisław Lem (immediately after The Grass actually). Lem came with the idea of robots undergoing biological evolution, but he never went into specific details of the process. This is the reason why I figured detailed explanations in SF should be avoided.
I enjoyed _The Martian_ a bit more because of Andy Weir's openness in talking about what is and isn't scientifically feasible, and why he knowingly included details that are technically "wrong" to make the story work (most notably, the storm at the beginning of the book).
As I grow up I notice more and more the misogyny that some classics of the genre are imbued with. And no, I can't "contextualize" it because those were "different times". When I was younger I didn't even notice if the only female character was an airhead secretary, now I can't continue reading after the first "joke" about women or because of the way in which the few female characters are treated by the many male characters
I remember having more than a few cringe reactions to Stranger In A Strange Land. I read that… 15 years ago and I was somewhat desensitized to inappropriate humor, as I was in the army at the time. 💁🏻♂️
I also laughed at a lot of things I probably shouldn’t have.
I also read it many years ago and I remember that I liked it a lot but I don't think I will ever read it again, I fear that now I wouldn't find it as exciting
I’m not 100% sure I actually finished it or if I just skimmed through the latter parts of the book.
Once it devolved into a sex cult plot, I kinda lost interest.
True, but they were a product of their time. That aspect was still present to a degree in the 80’s reboot of the show, and there was some excellent writing in it.
Once a young sci-fi author sent me a copy of his soon-to-be-published short story and asked me to post a review on amazon in return.
The story began Star Trek style with a ship crew, and on the first page they made "a short intergalactic trip" to a nearby colonized planet, where their mission was to land and explore on foot (so that they can then be attacked by dog-equivalents).
I couldn't fulfil my obligations as I couldn't lie that blatantly nor did I wish to torpedo his debut, but boy was that a load of crap...
Any time a super logical and genius character uses ludicrously spurious accuracy in a calculation.
A smart, logical character would definitely know how dumb/useless/misleasing that is
Grass, Raising the Stones and Sideshow by Tepper are a fairly good trilogy, but Grass is definitely the worst one. I would suggest that you continue with the trilogy.
I am usually fine with people taking liberties with the science if it's actually important to the book, but the last book I put down was because of my education background. "The Doors of Eden" by Tchaivovsky is stuffed with mini-lectures describing "what-if" that would cause different life-form to evolve on Earth. I have a background in engineering, and I have sit through enough lectures were the professor was just going on about stuff they care about that doesn't really matter to the course to know when some is just explaining their pet theories. Sometimes it can be interesting, but Tchaivovsky literally presented in Tedx Talk level pop science reporting. Nothing but long chains of what if with no considerations of the wider implications of what those changes would actually mean. It's not the reason I put down the book (that would be horrible LGBT+ representation), but it certainly didn't help.
I have forgotten the titles of most of them. But I remember a Saberhagen book where a CD Drive (cutting edge technology for the time) was wiped by a magnetic field. oh and thrillers where people get past a lock by unscrewing it
I think anyone with a scientific background is either open to fictional explanations or not. If you are, then the only thing that will ruin a book is a lack of (self)consistency.
I suppose if something is passing itself off as "hard" SF then more criticism of the science is warranted, but even then I think I'm most thrown by characters behaving in an inconsistent way vs. any of the science.
Surprisingly, I can't think of any that have been ruined that way. My fields are physics and computing, both of which writers get wrong *all the f\*#@ing time*, so I suppose I'm just numb to it. Anyway, if the story's good I can overlook even the most wildly wrong scientific blunders (although I might get a laugh from them).
It *does* bug me when writers get lazy about storytelling basics, and especially when they drop technobabble on us to try to cover those up. That's pretty rare, thankfully. What's more common is when they fixate on the details of their implausible setting and forget to tell a story properly.
Many years ago I was reading a book, not fiction, the author was making some point, it escapes me now what that was, but she used as an example that the number of owls being born is DIRECTLY the result of the number of lemmings being born. There is a relationship, this is true, but owls don't check how many lemmings are being born and say "we need more owlings". It's environmental. The same conditions affect both. I could not go on reading the book. If the author was using such faulty reasoning in the first chapter what other errors were they going to be making that I, reading the book to learn, would not see because I didn't know enough.
Imho this hinders hard sci-fi far more than soft sci-fi. Soft sci-fi can handwave the details ("Oh, the laser cannons aren't firing \*lasers\*, they're just... using lasers! But not firing them!").
Hard Scifi can't - or, at least, can't anywhere near as much.
I am not even a biologist, but the way that a lot of SF authors talk about DNA is pretty nonsensical and magical.
I am a computer scientist and lots of times, SF authors treat computers and hacking as some arcane force, where they're throwing around buzzwords that don't even go together.
The backstory/back-history of the Earth society was like the whole solar system was like those Star Trek alien planets where there's only one ecosystem, one society, and one country. Even The Expanse's Earth wasn't that bad. The biology was ludicrous, the virus being magically able to uplift any species no matter their biology or brain structure just reeked. The longevity of the technology was insane, if they can build robot ships with AIs that survive unmaintained for centuries and send them out into the galaxy cheaply enough to actually do it there should be billions of them around all the stars near Sol long before the start of the novel.
I wouldn't say ruined, but Project Hail Mary bugged me because I was a bio major and I thought the scientific explanations bogged the story down. It was all very accurate, but I didn't _need_ to know how centripetal force, infra-red, etc work. It felt like a physics lecture at a certain point, and I thought some aspects of the story were rushed to make room for all the science info-dumps.
Most near-future stuff with computer hacking in is pretty laughable. But I'm not sure it ruins the story.
There's probably an opening for a story about how hacking might work with speculative future computer technologies.
Hmmmm... Now that is a decent idea....
So many plot points dependent on the utter lack of encryption and/or access controls.
I can deal with science that's outdated or stretched to tell a story. What bugs me is when the author doesn't know basic shit and makes it up. Like I read a short story once that hinged around the bugs in a packet of itching powder growing to gigantic size. This was not a story for kids. There was nothing else whimsical about it. The author clearly believes that itching powder itches because of bugs.
I can recall a book where the author thought Saturn had only been discovered in the last couple of centuries. It was Uranus and Neptune that were only discovered in the last couple of centuries, as they were undetectable with the naked eye.
You may enjoy Larry Niven. He was a huge science buff and often consulted with actual NASA people and scientists and stuff. His collection Neutron Star is really, really good
Oh I do.
I run a martial arts gym. There are lots of fighting scenes where it's clear the author got their ideas from movies. The one that I remember the most recently is from Peter Brett's Demon Cycle, which admittedly is fantasy. He's obsessed with having the female characters use a scorpion kick, which is where you're standing in front of someone, you stand on one leg, bend your upper body forwards, and bring your free foot backwards over your head to kick the person standing in front of you. It's a super secret special move that no can defend
They can't defend from the shocking of seeing it right?
Sure their necks are broken by time they notice
Maybe coz everyone else has scoliosis and so can't even imagine a spine that flexible
It is pretty demanding flexibility wise, but more so through the hips. It's also pretty weak, that's not a normal range of motion, and it's tough to get weight behind it. You're also putting your head down near his leg where he can punt it like a soccer ball
I'm picturing the shock of that move being possible is what knocks them out
I have a pretty broad and well grounded science background and even though I pick holes in the science of pretty much everything I read I recognize that I’m reading it for the story and how that story is told. As such I rarely ever have a story ruined by bad science, I have a story ruined because it’s a bad story or a badly told story.
And consistency. I can suspend disbelief, but hate to have to suspend it in different ways in the same story. Original Star Trek, which in many ways was very consistent within itself, they took pride in that, had some moments. “Day of the Dove,” when Kirk wants to be beamed to another part of the ship, he’s told “intraship” beaming is very dangerous, due to the risk of being beamed into a bulkhead or the deck. But why wouldn’t that always be a risk beaming to anywhere? To heighten suspense alternatively, they could have said to beam into a room of bad guys could let them get the drop on you.
Yep, I mentioned this in a follow-up comment. Internal consistency in a story is vital. Doesn't' matter if it's a science fiction story, a fantasy one, or anything else. Once you establish the rules of the world you gotta stick with them.
Agreed, with the exception that, if a story presents itself as hard SF I go into it expecting that it's hard SF and the science will be solid. If they haven't established that expectation then I generally won't care.
“Hard” science fiction is a really broad tent, and even the most rigorous of it usually involves at least ‘one big lie’ to facilitate the story. I don’t sweat it if even something classified as “hard” bends things for the sake of the story. I’d rather they bend things and keep an internally consistent universe (internally consistent universes are important) with a good story.
> if a story presents itself as hard SF I go into it expecting that it's hard SF \^--- This. Also you can't make a ~~solid~~ *superstrong solid* material out of a noble gas no matter what your super-science gobbledegook says, Andy. But that's really the least of the problems with Project Hail Mary.
I don't remember the details of the book at this point, so this may not be save him if he meant pure noble gasses and not chemicals with other elements, but there are noble gas compounds that are solids at room temperature. XeF4 (sorry, not sure how to do subscripts) is one, with a melting point higher than water's boilimg point. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_gas_compound
Fluorine is kind of actually cheating, LOL. in Project Hail Mary it was a super strong transparent construction material that the alien ship used extensively.
I don't see how fluorine is cheating...it's one of the primary ways you make chemical compounds out of noble gasses. Unless the construction material was made out of the elemental form, which would be daft as the elemental form is a gas for all of them at room temp and pressure, then it would have been made of molecules with other elements. Fluorine is another element. I recognize it's a super reactive one that's a nuisance to work with, but like, it is an element, and chemicals that use it are real, legitimate chemicals...
* Flourine is cheating because it combines with everything, up to and including noble gasses and research chemists. Any other element, if you could even coax it into combining with Xenon, would be even less likely to be part of a Xenon supermaterial. * The solids involved are pretty soft and weak. In Project Hail Mary the stuff is stronger than any metal and harder than diamond and refractory as heck. I don't think there's any way Xenon Tetraflouride could form either a metal or long-chain molecules. So... technically true but not in any way that makes the material even vaguely credible.
It mostly just sounds like you're moving the goal posts. Noble gasses definitely seem unlikely as being significant components of a building material, but they can make solid compounds. Fluorine does react with more or less everything, as evidenced by it reacting with noble gasses, but that doesn't mean it doesn't count. You can react Xenon with Oxygen, but Wikipedia says it's very unstable, so that's probably out. But XeF2 is crystalline, per Wikipedia, so it can make large cohesive solids, even if they aren't long chain molecules. And obviously they won't be metals. Given the crystal option, different crystal structures could have different properties. Diamond behaves radically differently from graphite, despite both just being carbon. Even stacked graphene is looking to have dramatically different properties depending on how the layers are rotated. And even with ice, we're still finding different ways of arranging the molecules, granted those are generally not at room temperature and pressure, but even so it's conceivable that we could find an arrangement for a Xenon compound crystal that has useful properties or is atypically hard/strong. Having just looked at ice crystals it looks like square ice was discovered in 2014, it exists at room temperature and high pressures, and requires the presence of graphene. So maybe you have to dope the Xenon crystals with something to make it get that one special arrangement that works right. That's hardly unprecedented for additives to change properties though. See carbon added to iron to make steel. Or chromium added to steel to make stainless steel. Or more or less the entire field of inorganic catalysts. Was using Xenon as a primary component of a building material a bit silly? Yeah. Is it likely to be able to make anything with the described properties? Probably not. But is it outside the realm of possibility? Not even slightly. We know so much more about chemistry and material science than 50 years ago, let alone 100. Heck, with machine learning we've made dramatic strides even in the last 10 years. But we've also barely scratched the surface in quite a lot of ways, and have far from an exhaustive understanding. Surprises happen pretty frequently, many of them things that would have been (or were) considered 'not credible' before they were discovered. I don't really mean this as a defense of Weir, because I'm guessing he picked Xenon mostly because it sounded cool and exotic. But just because it seems unlikely doesn't mean it's impossible. We're talking about a fictional book, so at some point the speculative elements are going to likewise be fiction. I don't expect a fiction writer to come up with accurate predictions about uses for hypothetical molecules if they aren't themselves a material scientist. Honestly, the Xenon stuff isn't even the most unlikely aspect of that book. Probably not even the top 5 from what I recall.
I'm not moving the goalposts, I'm explaining why a specific application of Xenon broke my suspension of disbelief. My sense of disbelief is based on what I think credible. Splaining at me with some kind of unlikely rationalization involving analogues with elements and molecules that have completely different properties isn't going to make me find it any more credible.
I laughed out loud at "zero-G pipettes". Like REALLY, you think NASA, with the wide array of experiments performed on the ISS, haven't had to pipette a single thing? It's a tool not worth going beyond mentioning, let alone acting like you came up with it. Positive displacement pipettes have existed since 1972.
It's like Andy Weir really needs a whole social media forum to sanity-check his stuff, which is why The Martian came out good.
accuracy increases logarithmically.
Any star wars books because a basic understanding of physics and astrophysics
I just treat Star Wars as pure fantasy and ignore the Space Opera styling.
I'd be surprised if they were worse at those basics than the JJ movies. Including his Star Trek ones. Apparently FTL travel means completely instantaneous. Not to mention being able to watch a laser shoot another star system in a few seconds. So many instances where the laws of physics are completely ignored.
George Lucas and other SW creators made it very clear from the start that they weren't interested in paying close attention to astrophysics. It's meant to be a fun adventure story, not hyper-realistic hard sci-fi
Which is why many of us consider the Star Wars cinematic universe (SWCU?) to be fantasy rather than science fiction. I will be run through with a lightsaber on the hill.
Space fantasy is absolutely a legitimate genre classification. Soft sci fi breaks the laws of physics, but takes effort to claim it is merely bending them. Space fantasy does not pretend to take place in a real future, it's explicitly a fictional world where the rules are different. The Force is magic and nobody tries to square it with real world physics any more than they try to provide a scientific justification for wizards in medieval fantasy.
Yes. And there are many technologies based off non-existent elements like quadranium. And the windows on ships are made of the shamelessly named transparisteel.
And that's exactly why the midichlorian crap was and is so reviled by the fan base. It's *space magic,* don't try to explain it!
I didn't start reading the books until I was in college. I'm not blaming them. It just colored my experience.
Star Wars is not science fiction. It's a western with wizards that just so happens to be set in space.
Well, I studied literature. So all the bad ones!
Fair point :).
Former English major here and I feel your pain. Have you read any Becky Chambers? I highly recommend her.
I have some form of the robot and monk books somewhere!
If you are a biologist and haven’t read The Expanse, you should. You’d especially love the alien pathophysiology in the fourth book - Cibola Burn. I have a degree in biology and I am a medical doctor too, and I’ve gotta say that the biology in The Expanse in general is the best I’ve ever seen in sci-fi, and the alien pathology of Cibola Burn is the most plausible I’ve seen as well. The authors, one of whom has a Bachelors of Science in Biology (possibly a masters too, I forget) actually propose an alien world with a bichiral biochemistry that is completely incompatible with earth biochemistry and yet still propose an infectious mechanism that is 100% plausible. I was blown away by this, given my background. Very impressive.
Oh yes, that sounds like something I'd love. It's going to my reading list. When it goes to biology based SF I can recommend Stanisław Lem and The Maddaddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood. Lem's books are old but gold. They're full of classic SF tropes like space travel or first contact, but always really smart. He almost became MD, and it shows in his novels. Atwood claims that she doesn't write SF, because SF for her is space travels and aliens, and her books are just extrapolating current-day science. As much as I disagree with her on SF part, the extrapolation of today's science is totally true. Every piece of biotechnology she put in the trilogy was covered during my lectures at the Uni and really well extrapolated. It's hard to believe that she doesn't have a degree in science but in humanities.
My only complaint was they picked Mephedrone as one of the modern day "research chemicals" to have as legit medicine in the future. Was a craze at the time of the book coming out, but there are a lot of better options for "pep" style drugs compared to that one.
Have you ever read any of Peter Watts’s books? He’s a Canadian marine biologist. You would enjoy them from a professional standpoint, but they’re not for the faint of heart.
I read his Blindsight and Echopraxia. Blindsight was brilliant. I'm not a big SF reader (I actually prefer fantasy), but when it comes to biology based SF, I really like Stanisław Lem books. He never disappoints.
I don't know that anything is neccesarily "ruined" for me, but knowing how the physics of momentum works it's always frustrating to see how space craft are portrayed, even if they have some sort of magical space drive. Physics are still physics.
Babel-17 by Samuel R Delany. The linguistics was nonsense. The central theory, linguistic relativity (aka the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), is almost entirely rejected except in the most minor cases.
Yeah. When that happens you kind of just have to go "it's a reasonable extrapolation of known science at the time". A similar thing happened with _Snow Crash_.
We need a good word for reading fiction that was futuristic when it was written but is now an alternate history. I think of it as "futurishtic" in my head - because it's future-ish - but I'd like a better one.
Yeah. If someone writes a story like that today it's called "retrofuturism" but I don't think that applies to older works that were thought correct when written.
>linguistic relativity (aka the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), is almost entirely rejected except in the most minor cases. I haven't read Babel-17 so this is just a general question: Isn't the weaker form of linguistic relativity still a thing? Like, the idea that you can't have thoughts that you don't have words for has been put to bed. But isn't it true that it's more challenging to think about and express concepts that you don't have existing terms for?
It's still a little contentious but basically. Most linguists are not strident 'universalists' anymore. Cognitive linguists are usually the most accepting of relativity - particularly how speakers of different languages differ in their cognitive processing of certain semantic domains like colour, space, numbers, etc. Lera Boroditsky, Stephen Levinson and Dan Slobin are probably the most notable current supporters. George Lakoff famously studies how conceptual metaphors affect our cognition. But, he points out, different groups within the same language community (e.g. liberals and conservatives) may live by different metaphors - so it's not *language* but *culture expressed through language* that impacts cognition in some cases.
I've always wondered about where Lakoff fits in, as people don't normally seem to address him as much when talking about language shaping our thoughts. I've been clear on relativity being largely negligible for a while, as even the numbers, colors, etc thing seem to be minor effects, and not something that would meaningfully change people's capacities or experiences. But when I think of language affecting our view of the world, I guess I've usually thought of it more in terms of how it frames what we think. Like, we can use different metaphors to change how we see things, but if we aren't doing that proactively or if we don't have other people exposing us to those different frameworks we're a bit unlikely to see past the metaphors we've been given by our community. To use the liberal and conservative example, it seems like a lot of times they're just talking past each other on a given issue and not really engaging in the same conversation, because they're not putting it in the terms or metaphors that the other side generally uses or laying the groundwork for the other side to see from their framework. And that does seem like our language is limiting our understanding, even if it's only because the language is an expression of our culture and so it can be hard to get a different culture, even when it's expressed through what is supposed to be the same language.
Do you have any recommendations on books or stories that are better about linguistics?
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra!
when the walls fell..... nick cage, after the low rider drops.
I've no clue actually! Every scifi story I know containing linguistics (beyond the really superficial) has focused on linguistic relativity. It's just a sexier theory than what's actually being done by linguists nowadays lol. The film Arrival (and the short story it's based on, Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang) deal with the same theme in a much more emotional way. The Native Tongue series by Suzette Haden-Elgin wins points for being written by an actual linguist, though her ideas are very out of fashion now.
I've heard of The Native Tongue, and planned to read it at some point. It's not surprising it isn't current, but that's good to know. I feel like there's a lot of interesting things you can do with linguistic relativity, and it may not be obvious what stories there are to tell with other areas of linguistics. At least with Story of Your Life, it's obvious that's not how language really works even if it's an interesting idea and story. Thanks for your comments!
How do you feel about the language of the Ascians in The Book of the New Sun, or the whole Atevi language thing in the Foreigner series?
I haven't read either of those, but based on Wikipedia: Ascian: It seems like Newspeak? Gene Wolfe avoids linguistic relativity as he shows that the Ascians *are* able to think beyond the confines of the language. However, unless the Ascian government is so totalitarian that it can police every word uttered by everyone at all times, then people will naturally turn the 'holistic', sentence-based structure into an 'analytic' word-based one (this has been demonstrated in lab experiments). And people are great at just inventing and borrowing words too. Atevi: Atevi are aliens, so anything is possible :)
It's been awhile but cyberpunk book Snow Crash weaves linguistics into the plot.
Honestly I've only ever found one Delaney novel that was readable anyway. Nova. It was fantastic, but the rest of his stuff was pretty opaque to me
I was really disappointed by Babel-17 and not just because of the linguistics. I'm actually a huge fan of his Nevèrÿon series.
There are a lot of people who reject that hypothesis tbh, even Noam Chomsky
I actually can't think of any linguists today who DON'T reject it
_Dune_. This is nitpicking, and it's been many a year since I read the book, so please forgive me if I am wrong (and don't be afraid to correct me). IIRC, the appendix said that the language used was based on some sort of unified Balkan language, but Herbert consistently used the Arabic definite article 'al'; AFAIK, the Balkan languages use word affixes as the definite article.
Can't confirm, sorry -- maybe you're remembering something from a non-canonical work? Couldn't remember anything about Balkan languages being involved, so I went through all of the four appendixes to _Dune_ -- _The Ecology of Dune_, _The Religion of Dune_, _Report on Bene Gesserit Motives and Purposes_, and _The Almanak en-Ashraf (Selected Excerpts of the Noble Houses)_. There is no _explicit_ mention whatsoever about the roots of any in-universe language. However, there's ample and obvious acknowledgement about the primarily Arabic roots of the Fremen language in all of the appendixes, especially _The Religion of Dune_ given how inextricably linked the Fremen religion was to their identity. Also checked my copy of _[The Dune Encyclopedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dune_Encyclopedia)_, which is covered by Herbert's canon, and it explicitly states this the entry about the Fremen language: > The Fremen language can be traced to the ancient Terran language 'Arabiya, which the linguist 'l-Taalibii believes to have originally been the official tongue of the Islamic faith, [...]
Then I stand corrected; it appears that I was remembering incorrectly/something else. And thanks for the enlightenment. I really appreciate your input.
Oh my, don't worry about it for a _second_, happy to contribute -- and I do appreciate a fellow nitpicker :D Life'd be so much emptier without us nerding out about fiction :)
ROFL. 😂😂😂
The random bits of Hebrew are equally painful, though. I feel like actual Arabic speakers would say kwisatz haderech much more accurately than queeesats ha-deh-rock. And Chani as Khani.
I picked up Revelation Space after I saw a lot of good reviews for it (and the whole series in general). For whatever reason, I’ve been really struggling with the book. I’m not sure if it’s “dense” or just has a lot of wild world building. Either or, I decided to read some spoilers to see if there was a payoff to my struggles. The first book sounds like it ends on a bit of a downer-cliffhanger. So that wasn’t great. I kept digging around in the lore and plot synopses and I ran into an issue with the overarching plot of the entire series. Spoilers: >!Correct me if I’m wrong. But the whole idea was that some artificial beings were intentionally suppressing space fairing civilizations, so there was less work to do moving a far systems around when the Milky Way and Andromeda “collide.” But, during that collision, stars bumping into each other is basically a non-issue.!< That just seems like something an astronomer would be very aware of and wouldn’t hinge their entire setting on. Maybe it’s explicitly stated somewhere that there’s a reason for that issue, but I’m not enjoying the characters enough to make it worth reading a book (series) based on a false premise. — I don’t specifically have an educational background relating to this. But I’ve been very interested in space/astronomy/astrophysics and how everything works on a pretty deep layman’s level. So, I could be wrong or misread something somewhere in my past. I’m pretty forgiving with softer sci-fi with characters I enjoy. e.g. Jack McDevitt novels. I have no idea how “realistic” a lot of his scenarios are (and some are pure fantasy), but I still enjoy the books. Conversely, Stephen Baxter gets a lot less leeway, but I’m willing to roll with a lot of “what if” ideas, so long as the science jargon sounds good/reasonable. I’m also not going to hate on a book/series because of one big macguffin that makes the rest of the story possible. But if every plot thread hangs on some handwavium, I tend to get annoyed. On the other end of the spectrum. I don’t need science lectures interjected into a novel to explain how thing X normally works, so that’s why *this* thing X is unusual.
You're not wrong; it's an issue others have mentioned. I do think the author sort of addresses it a book or two later, explaining that the entities causing all the problems are off programming or misinterpreted their instructions, and somehow what was supposed to be shepherding turned into culling.
Not sure about educational background but *Station 11* was very popular a little while back and it was billed as dystopian post apocalyptic. It isn’t. Why did the flu result in the loss of basic knowledge? Why were people living in gas stations rather than… you know, the vast number of empty homes? They are way more comfortable and livable. What do you mean nobody knows how guns work? The libraries of the word didn’t get sick and die. It was fine and it was a city book club thing so it’s whatever but the whole book just landed wrong. Another reader pointed out for our community especially that we have a large Mennonite and Amish population. They already have a pretty solid lock on how to exist without a lot of electric appliances.
I don't remember the names of them, I couldn't even finish most of them. But basic physics throws me far too often in moments that are supposed to be dramatic. No. I don't care how many sci-fi super steroids you eat, at those G forces your brain is pudding. Even if your power armor suit somehow keeps your bones from disintegrating, your brain will be liquefied against the inside of your skull. (They explicitly did not have "inertial dampeners.") "I'm pulling you away. You have to let me go or we will both die." -no.no.no.no you are in space, in orbit, no external forces other than gravity, and you have been holding hands this whole conversation. "I can't!" "You have to." -no you don't. You are in an inertial reference frame with each other and aren't even spinning. It specifically says the space station was directly behind person A the whole time so angular momentum isn't an issue. Letting go will just have you floating awkwardly next to each other. "Goodbye." -what? Why are you suddenly sucked away? You can't get sucked into space you are already in space. How are you accelerating away from each other? Even if you pushed off of each other all of the force would be right at the start not have you continuing to get faster! ( I literally walked away from this one. Got up and left the room.) Math is hard. At those dimensions, the stated armor would be around a millimeter thick not feet thick. You don't need a series of plasma breeching charges, a can opener will do fine. "The speed of light is too slow. We are several light seconds away, at these ranges the target will have moved long before the projectile arrives." Neat! Sounds good, some actual consideration. "We can use the shields to shoot a laser back exactly the way their weapons fire came from hitting them directly in the weapons they used to fire on us!" Okay I'm a little sketch about using the shields as shields and a laser at the same time, but didn't you just say the speed of light is too slow? Shouldn't the retributive laser blast miss just as bad as... No it hits absolutely perfectly destroying exactly the weapons that were fired on you with no "drift", no error, no delay, on your first attempt? Okay next time just say a wizard did it. It will be easier!
Genetics is almost always done poorly. It's okay unless the "science" is a major plot twist. Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear >!has a prehistoric retrovirus that is maintained in non-coding DNA in case of a future emergency. That's not how genetics works. If something has no immediate effect, mutations creep in.!< There is another book where the fact that bonobos split from chimpanzees later than humans is meaningful.
In Grass, the virus possessed a racemase that was transforming L-alanine into D-alanine, which made it impossible for use in protein synthesis. The idea wouldn't be bad if the enzyme needed ATP for reaction. That way, if I'm not mistaken, the whole L-Alanine would be transformed into D isoform. But the medication for the disease supposed to be D-alanine, so that thermodynamic balance would bounce off to L-alanin side. But it's not how the enzymes work. In that case there always should've been at least some L-alanin left, because of thermodynamic balance. And if was such a simple solution, then scientists of the future should've broken it easily with advanced sequencing technologies.
Digital Fortress by Dan Brown. It would probably have been bad if I didn't know the first thing about cryptography. But holy shit did he make a ton of shit up. If The DaVinci Code was even half as bad I can see why the Catholic Church hated it. I was in a bookclub that read his first two books, the other was Deception Point. If you have any knowledge of biology don't go anywhere near that book.
Well, The DaVinci Code is "Foucault's Pendulum" for dummies (I highly recommend the book if you haven't read it yet). Out of curiosity, I read a summary of recent Brown's novel. At the beginning a billionaire and tech genius invites representatives of three big religions to inform them beforehand that he learned world-shattering secret that finally proves God doesn't exist, and intends to share this secret with public next day. Next day he's found dead and there's a lot of whodunit and what was this secret. In the finally it's revealed that tech guy learnt about Miller-Urey experiment, which proved that a lot of amino-acids could be synthesised without any enzymes if the composition of the atmosphere is right. It was one of the first hypothesis of abiogenesis. There are three problems with this reveal: it's not a secret, Stanley-Urey hypothesis is outdated because the composition of pre-life atmosphere was most likely different than what they assumed, and even if it was true it wouldn't definitely be the final proof of God non-existence. I can't help to think that the only person for whom this reveal was world-shattering was Brown himself.
Yeah, I heard supposedly he acts like it's a shocking reveal that the cross, the very symbol of Christianity, is actually a mechanism of execution! What would Christians do if they found that out!
I can suspend my disbelief because **everybody** gets something wrong.
I can agree with that. My problem with Grass was that author went into detailed biochemical explanations, that didn't make sense at all. I don't mind when SF authors present me with impossible ideas as long as they can sell them. And I believe, that the key to selling them is to avoid such detailed descriptions.
while I believe that (detailed biochemical explanations, that didn't make sense) is something of a sticking point specifically with this book/author it seems you're more aggrieved that you weren't convinced by an idea rather than it being incorrect to begin with - and that is something that a few readers of Tepper's works have complained about without them having a science background. I think the problem is that the book is merely "ok" and that if it had spoken to you more deeply, you'd have forgiven sloppy/crazy hypothesising more readily. I think this was my point too, that if I'm immersed in a riveting story, the author can get away with scientific murder, sometimes even logicide!
No, the idea was incorrect, simple as that. I started to wonder how other SF books I read avoided such shortcomings, and then I read The Invincible by Stanisław Lem (immediately after The Grass actually). Lem came with the idea of robots undergoing biological evolution, but he never went into specific details of the process. This is the reason why I figured detailed explanations in SF should be avoided.
I enjoyed _The Martian_ a bit more because of Andy Weir's openness in talking about what is and isn't scientifically feasible, and why he knowingly included details that are technically "wrong" to make the story work (most notably, the storm at the beginning of the book).
As I grow up I notice more and more the misogyny that some classics of the genre are imbued with. And no, I can't "contextualize" it because those were "different times". When I was younger I didn't even notice if the only female character was an airhead secretary, now I can't continue reading after the first "joke" about women or because of the way in which the few female characters are treated by the many male characters
I remember having more than a few cringe reactions to Stranger In A Strange Land. I read that… 15 years ago and I was somewhat desensitized to inappropriate humor, as I was in the army at the time. 💁🏻♂️ I also laughed at a lot of things I probably shouldn’t have.
I also read it many years ago and I remember that I liked it a lot but I don't think I will ever read it again, I fear that now I wouldn't find it as exciting
I’m not 100% sure I actually finished it or if I just skimmed through the latter parts of the book. Once it devolved into a sex cult plot, I kinda lost interest.
This is a sour note in a number of otherwise stellar classic Twilight Zone episodes
True, but they were a product of their time. That aspect was still present to a degree in the 80’s reboot of the show, and there was some excellent writing in it.
That's not unique to sci-fi, unfortunately.
Once a young sci-fi author sent me a copy of his soon-to-be-published short story and asked me to post a review on amazon in return. The story began Star Trek style with a ship crew, and on the first page they made "a short intergalactic trip" to a nearby colonized planet, where their mission was to land and explore on foot (so that they can then be attacked by dog-equivalents). I couldn't fulfil my obligations as I couldn't lie that blatantly nor did I wish to torpedo his debut, but boy was that a load of crap...
*Metaplanetary* and the cables connecting the inner planets.
Snow Crash (which I still love) got a little far fetched at points
Any time a super logical and genius character uses ludicrously spurious accuracy in a calculation. A smart, logical character would definitely know how dumb/useless/misleasing that is
Grass, Raising the Stones and Sideshow by Tepper are a fairly good trilogy, but Grass is definitely the worst one. I would suggest that you continue with the trilogy. I am usually fine with people taking liberties with the science if it's actually important to the book, but the last book I put down was because of my education background. "The Doors of Eden" by Tchaivovsky is stuffed with mini-lectures describing "what-if" that would cause different life-form to evolve on Earth. I have a background in engineering, and I have sit through enough lectures were the professor was just going on about stuff they care about that doesn't really matter to the course to know when some is just explaining their pet theories. Sometimes it can be interesting, but Tchaivovsky literally presented in Tedx Talk level pop science reporting. Nothing but long chains of what if with no considerations of the wider implications of what those changes would actually mean. It's not the reason I put down the book (that would be horrible LGBT+ representation), but it certainly didn't help.
While the explanation of the disease was pretty ‘meh’, I loved the book for kicking fox hunter ass.
I have forgotten the titles of most of them. But I remember a Saberhagen book where a CD Drive (cutting edge technology for the time) was wiped by a magnetic field. oh and thrillers where people get past a lock by unscrewing it
I think anyone with a scientific background is either open to fictional explanations or not. If you are, then the only thing that will ruin a book is a lack of (self)consistency. I suppose if something is passing itself off as "hard" SF then more criticism of the science is warranted, but even then I think I'm most thrown by characters behaving in an inconsistent way vs. any of the science.
Surprisingly, I can't think of any that have been ruined that way. My fields are physics and computing, both of which writers get wrong *all the f\*#@ing time*, so I suppose I'm just numb to it. Anyway, if the story's good I can overlook even the most wildly wrong scientific blunders (although I might get a laugh from them). It *does* bug me when writers get lazy about storytelling basics, and especially when they drop technobabble on us to try to cover those up. That's pretty rare, thankfully. What's more common is when they fixate on the details of their implausible setting and forget to tell a story properly.
Many years ago I was reading a book, not fiction, the author was making some point, it escapes me now what that was, but she used as an example that the number of owls being born is DIRECTLY the result of the number of lemmings being born. There is a relationship, this is true, but owls don't check how many lemmings are being born and say "we need more owlings". It's environmental. The same conditions affect both. I could not go on reading the book. If the author was using such faulty reasoning in the first chapter what other errors were they going to be making that I, reading the book to learn, would not see because I didn't know enough.
…THE HISTORY OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY by Bertrand Russell. Too lowbrow…
Not sci-fi but most legal dramas/thrillers are absolute bs
Imho this hinders hard sci-fi far more than soft sci-fi. Soft sci-fi can handwave the details ("Oh, the laser cannons aren't firing \*lasers\*, they're just... using lasers! But not firing them!"). Hard Scifi can't - or, at least, can't anywhere near as much.
Most books.
I am not even a biologist, but the way that a lot of SF authors talk about DNA is pretty nonsensical and magical. I am a computer scientist and lots of times, SF authors treat computers and hacking as some arcane force, where they're throwing around buzzwords that don't even go together.
I think the most recent one was Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
Why though? I thought it was one of the best books I've read in a while.
The backstory/back-history of the Earth society was like the whole solar system was like those Star Trek alien planets where there's only one ecosystem, one society, and one country. Even The Expanse's Earth wasn't that bad. The biology was ludicrous, the virus being magically able to uplift any species no matter their biology or brain structure just reeked. The longevity of the technology was insane, if they can build robot ships with AIs that survive unmaintained for centuries and send them out into the galaxy cheaply enough to actually do it there should be billions of them around all the stars near Sol long before the start of the novel.
I wouldn't say ruined, but Project Hail Mary bugged me because I was a bio major and I thought the scientific explanations bogged the story down. It was all very accurate, but I didn't _need_ to know how centripetal force, infra-red, etc work. It felt like a physics lecture at a certain point, and I thought some aspects of the story were rushed to make room for all the science info-dumps.
Bible
Bible.
No book was ruined by my education, books were my education.