Madeleine Ashby has a piece on the Tor website entitled A Moral Argument for Hard Science Fiction. The main take-out quote:

All too often in fiction, we choose to batter our science and technology in a thick coating of McGuffin and then deep-fry it in a vat of boiling handwavium. But just as we should avoid an ignorant depiction of human beings whenever possible, we should also avoid ignorant depictions of science and technology — because how we discuss science and technology is inherently political.

And she has a point. In a lot of popular fiction - in print as well as on screens - science is this miracle… stuff… that is either inherently Bad or is only understood by a few Nerds Gone Bad.

He’s only mad because it’s all Mary Shelley’s fault.

Now, it has to be said that from a visual standpoint real science is B-O-R-I-N-G. It’s slow. It’s subject to review, to the mercies of failed replication of experiment… you get the idea. (Indeed, the same could be said for near-future space travel, except that failures tend to be more lethal.) At the same time, that’s what characterisation’s for.

Now, Ashby in particular nails Hackers as a culprit. I don’t remember seeing that movie, but I think I read a novelisation of it - which was pretty bad; my interpretation was that someone had heard of this ‘computer hacking’ thing and used the notion to flavour a chase movie, HollywoodOS and all. (The Wikipedia article has a synopsis that’s so cringeworthy that you don’t need to see the movie.)

But the problem she raises with depictions of this ilk is that they affect understanding - a major concern in a time when people are not taught how to tell the difference between fact and fiction. Presenting technology as mere magic isn’t good enough and, in her opinion, leads to bad policy and people being scared away from scientific disciplines.

Real science doesn’t involve sitting about in swim trunks (usually).

I’m not entirely convinced this is really the case. Yes, there’s a lot of science fiction that owes more to fairy tales than PHYS101.  But at the same time that more speculative or imaginative 'soft’ SF allows for exploring different avenues.

On the other hand, I feel a terrible dissonance when reading space operas where the characterisation doesn’t match the scale of the worlds built; lovely scenery but the actors ruin it, leaving, as Woollcott said, the taste of lukewarm parsnip juice.

SF has a difficult path to travel; to keep hope and interest in the future alive; to assure us that all our brains and our science and technology aren’t dead ends or lost causes; to assure us that even without wands or pixie dust, there is still magic in the universe, waiting in that terra incognita we know about but haven’t worked out how to reach yet.

This unfinished story will probably never be finished. It started out as an idea for a “dark science fiction” series, ripping off all manner of sources.

If anyone wants to throw large sums of money into putting this thing on screen (yeah, right), let me know.

Keep reading

This unfinished story will probably never be finished. It started out as an idea for a “dark science fiction” series, ripping off all manner of sources.

If anyone wants to throw large sums of money into putting this thing on screen (yeah, right), let me know.

Darkness gives way to tiny lights.

Not that it gives way all that far; just enough to reveal shape, distance, generalities. Rows of things, gleam of frost.

The things in rows look like carcasses in plastic bags, hanging on hooks from racks in the ceiling. From the floor, tubes and pipes and wires of many sorts wind up into ports and plugs in the ‘front’ of the baggy, upside down, all too human shapes; high-tech viscera in a frozen slaughterhouse. Presumably pumps are whirring and electronics hum and bleep. Not that one can hear; there is no atmosphere to carry sound to ears.

When atmosphere does arrive, it arrives in silence, too — a soundless bellow of fog from a hundred vents, racing down the racks, setting some contents swaying. At first, anyway. As the pressure rises, the sound becomes more audible, a life giving roaring. A roaring that swells and suddenly cuts out. Heating elements cut in, long hot glows, attempting to keep the newly released atmosphere from freezing to walls, racks, floors.

Now a new sound is heard: Crack of ice, shriek of unwilling hinges. Someone has opened an airlock.

Keep reading

(This was written about the time that I was studying The War of the Worlds in ENGL classes, and there was noise about a remake of the movie version of the story.)

People who have never seen these structures, and have only the ill-imagined efforts of artists or the imperfect descriptions of such eye-witnesses as myself to go on, scarcely realise [their] living quality.

And with this Wells, through his nameless Narrator, oddly predicts the trouble that artists would have to present the vital nature of the Martians’ devices in his classic The War of the Worlds.

Somewhere in my room -– where exactly I know not -– I have copious handouts depicting the tripods used by the Martians to lay waste to London, showing in at least two instances clumsy “boilers on stilts” and “pagodas on the rampage”. Roger Dean’s birdlike “terrorpods” (so called because they graced the box of said computer game) appear on the cover of my Signet Classic printing. Bulbous, pseudo-insect contraptions adorn the cover of Jeff Wayne’s musical version and lumber about in the computer game. George Pal wanted his “flying saucers” to hover on great pillars of electricity, but was thwarted for reasons of safety. And the less said about the Marvel comic book monstrosity, the better!

The “rampaging pagodas” perhaps come the closest to showing the “most awefull liveliness” of the machines as compared to the sluggishness of the naked Martian. More to the point, you would observe (if only I could find the blasted handouts!) a lack of swivels and pivots which abound in other renditions:

…[Among] all the things they brought to Earth there is no trace or suggestion of their use of wheels… singularly little use is made of the fixed pivot… with circular motions thereabout confined to one plane. Almost all the joints of the machinery present a complicated system of moving parts sliding over small but beautifully curved friction bearings.

The Narrator then goes on to observe about the electrically powered “muscles” that act as long linkages. One can imagine these “muscles” also doing duty as suspension components, and were undoubtedly used in their manipulating tentacles, probably in groups of three.

…[The] brazen hood that surmounted it moved to and fro with the inevitable suggestion of a head looking about. Behind the main body was a huge mass of white metal like a gigantic fisherman’s basket…

Since Martians did everything in threes, it makes sense that a fighting machine would be tripartite: The hood (or “cab” if you prefer) housing the Martian driver would be separate from the machinery driving the legs, and no doubt the power plant was mounted behind the hood section, or between the hood on top and the legs on the bottom.

The gait of the machine is described as being like “a [three-legged] milking stool tilted and bowled violently along the ground”, but I suspect this is inaccurate. Some sort of swivel would be required for the leg assembly to rotate through 360°; and swivels were unknown to the Martians.

It is more likely that one leg was used as a pivot, with the rearmost leg propelling and the foremost swinging around and forward to a landing place. The legs would be most certainly telescopic, if not blessed with some form of knee joint cum shock absorbers, with whatever suspension elements used to keep the power plant and Martian on a relatively even keel and possibly acting as a counterbalance.

However, this does not mean that the leg assembly rotated around a central pivot point. This would involve a swivel or ball and socket joint, which the Martians lacked. Also, there is the matter of connecting the legs to a power supply without having cables and pipes eventually tearing from stress. Therefore, one can imagine a rapid swivelling of the machine’s “hips” as the leg assembly was rotated first one way, then the other, the foremost leg becoming the pivot point each time.

The exact mechanism for allowing the leg to “swing” would probably involve use of the marvelous mechanical muscles described by the narrator. Recently I saw a program segment depicting the antics of machines using polymers that almost exactly fit Well’s descriptions of the Martian machine musculature: plastics that, on application of an electric current, changed shape. One can envisage the tops of the “legs” being pulled hither and yon by a set of muscles, while further down another set of linkages endeavors to keep the leg in the center of a mounting ring, thus acting as shock absorbers and pivots.