Howlers (was Suggestion for hard SF short submission?)

In article <461932b9$0$269$8046368a@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Dan Goodman"
<dsgood@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Rich Weyand wrote:

In article <46183aa7$0$278$8046368a@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Dan
Goodman" <dsgood@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Note: I'm assuming that by "hard SF" you mean "science and
technology not ridiculous enough to make someone who's taken high
school physics laugh." Rather than the stuff Hal Clement used to
write.

I've taught both high school and university physics, so that's a safe
assumption.

Well, maybe not. I've read some howlers from people who should have
known better.

Such as?

I should have known someone would ask....

OK, here's one. I re-read Laumer's "A Trace of Memory" again this week. It
is a book I first read on loan from my older sister. Publication date is
1963, and Laumer is hardly a hard SF writer, but still. In the book, the Rthr
of the Two Worlds, having regained access to the starship, lets his friend
from Earth, the 1st person POV protag, use a lifeboat/landing boat to return
to Earth, since he doesn't want to go along with him back to the Two Worlds.

OK, fine. FTL and a lot of other stuff. But the thing that always gets me is
that, once Earth gets a little hot for the protag, who has made a fortune
leaking high-tech into the economy for profit, he gets into the lifeboat and
sets course for the Two Worlds, which he reaches in the course of a week or
two, and adventures ensue to build the conflict and resolve the story arc.

Now that always bothers me. Imagine being let off with a motor launch from
the QE2, in New York, say, and then deciding you really wanted to go back to
London after all. So you get in the motor launch and drive it across the
Atlantic to London, right?

1963 or not, sorry, a star drive in a shuttle craft doesn't work for me. And
in 1963, at age 10, which is before any hard science for me, before BS and MS
degrees in physics, before 30 years in engineering, it still didn't work for
me.

Further, when he gets to the Two Worlds, the society has slid into medieval
feudalism without the Rthr (King, basically). OK. The cities are abandoned,
considered haunted by the people who no longer understand their own
technology. OK. And after they've been abandoned for 3000 years, everything
in the cities is clean and spotless and all the neat techie stuff still works,
even the transport.

Say what? Doesn't work for me. Didn't work for me then.

Things that bother me the most are: FTL flight in something tiny, sort of an
interstellar station wagon (Heechee for example); magic superweapons made from
a hairpin and a button (just to concentrate the mental powers or some
such)(that's in an old classic); people living inside of black holes (same
book/series); people who take some piece of super high-tech alien or advanced
technology, and, having stolen/been given/acquired a single copy, make a bunch
of them -- or even worse, improve on them -- in the garage/basement with
current tech infrastructure; super advanced stuff that doesn't wear out or
need maintenance over thousands of years and still works great; skies that
aren't blue, or at least a bluer tinge of the incident sunlight; spaceships
that fly like airplanes, banking and swooping and making noise, instead of
building momentum vectors; in movies, things that explode and create an oval
ring (a real explosion in space will always look like a circle, because the
debris/particles/energy on the edges tangent to your vision are thicker -- ie
you are looking through a lot of stuff -- than the side toward you that you
are looking through at its thinnest) because the visual effects guy thought,
"Instead of a boring circle, we're looking at the circle from an angle" even
though it's a sphere, dummy. I mean, this is all pretty basic stuff.

Stuff I don't mind: FTL flight (or apparent FTL flight) based on some
tech/science we haven't figured out yet; some level of psi powers in aliens,
or in humans with the aid of some enhancement technology; mental computer
interfaces; anti-gravity in limited doses (i.e. it's expensive and
energy-intensive and requires big machinery) as opposed to having a zero-g
or adjustable-gravity room in the average house or having artificial gravity
in a space station rather than just spinning the darned thing for free; cures
or treatments for aging, cancer, etc. These don't bother me. To my mind, any
of them *might* be possible.

--
Rich Weyand
WIS: "Message Received" - 110 kwords
WIS: "Hero of the Captaincy" - 2300 words
WIP: untitled sequel to "Message Received"
.

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