Science Fiction Plots That Don't Work Anymore

[Wolf Larsen]

For no reason I can spot, a science fiction story* that ran in Analog in the late 60's popped into my mind after not having thought about it for decades. And my immediate response was that it couldn't happen due to the twist ending: Earth Humans were from the same species as the aliens and didn't evolve here on Earth at all. But now that we have looked at DNA, we are very closely related to all the great apes and have DNA in common with stuff all the way down to the single celled level. So like it or not, we evolved here.

And this got me to thinking about how many SF plots just don't work any more. Any of the "Life On Venus" ones don't work because the surface is hot enough to melt lead and at about 90 atm of pressure with sulfuric acid clouds. Also all the "Life On Mars" plots. It's way too dry and atmospheric pressure is about 1% of Earth sea level. Anything that involved blockading a star system. (Space is just too damn big to blockade.) Same with the "space mine field" plot in the original Battlestar Galactica tv show. All the "the aliens are just like us except with green skin but they still want to fuck" plots loved by Star Trek. Aliens would be well, alien and would be remarkably unlikely to push the "let's fuck" buttons. (How many people want to fuck Sea Anemones? (How many try it twice??))

All the plots about how difficult it is to navigate through the asteroid belt. Actually the asteroids are far apart in it and it takes work to get close to one. The ones about landing on Jupiter. It doesn't actually have a surface, the atmosphere goes smoothly to a liquid (with no real surface) and it is really hot by the time you get that deep into the atmosphere.

Finally, interstellar travel looks unlikely. Baring genuinely new physics, we can't go faster than light and getting something up to 1/10 C looks very tough, so we have a 40 year trip to Alpha Centauri. And at 1/10 C, you don't even get much time dilation, so it is 40 years for the crew as well.

And this kinda gets to an answer to the famous question "Where are they". We are learning more about planets around other stars as new big telescopes get built. And it looks like habitable planets are few and far between. If civilizations are as close as 10 light years apart, they still probably can't visit each other and it looks like there is nothing habitable that close. So they may be aliens out there, maybe even lots of them, but too far away to visit.

Another plot that doesn't seem to work very well is terraforming. This involves changing the climate of a planet to make it suitable for us. Usually the plot start by planting specially taylored organisms to change the atmosphere and build up from there. It turns out that it took 1 billion years for single celled plants to create enough oxygen to change the Earth's atmosphere from a reducing one (hydrogen and methane and ammonia) to an oxidizing one like now. That's a hell of a long time and I don't think intelligent species last that long. So we might start terraforming, but our species won't be around long enough to benefit from it.

So what other plots don't work any more?



*Wolfling by Gordon R. Dickinson for those who care.

[Tamerlane]

Originally Posted by Wolf Larsen

(How many people want to fuck Sea Anemones? (How many try it twice??))

Hmmm...

[Parthenokinesis]

Oh, pretty! Sea cunt!

[Tamerlane]

Originally Posted by Wolf Larsen

Finally, interstellar travel looks unlikely. Baring genuinely new physics, we can't go faster than light and getting something up to 1/10 C looks very tough, so we have a 40 year trip to Alpha Centauri.

More seriously I'm pretty tolerant of deviations from known science in areas like these. Things like Cherryh's "jump drives" and the like may be fantasy ( probably are, barring some unfathomable breakthrough with wormholes ), but I can take a little "fantasy" in my sf for the sake of setting and plot. I enjoy space opera too much to give that up and truly I've never been a hardcore hard sf sort of guy. So I suspend belief with nary a twitch.

Now I agree that something like Heinlein's Between Planets with its depiction of Venus probably wouldn't work for me in a modern work. But I can still re-read that one and pretend it is a parallel universe and everything is just fine .

I guess it just comes down to how much you're willing to tolerate. Given I'm a big fan of fantasy as well, I suspect I'm rather less rigorous than some. For me story and characters trump the science in sf, but I know for many that is not the case.

[Hunter Hawk]

To take Tamerlane's comment one step farther, science fiction has almost never actually been about science. (Except for Hal Clement and a very few others.)

What I personally find more jarring is dated stylistic conventions, such as the godawful stuff from the '70s.

[Fenris]

Anything with a slide rule--and most stuff from the '40s mentioned 'em kind of makes me blink. I actually bought a slide-rule and I'll be damned if I could figure out how to use the thing. I get abacuses and mechanical calculators (where you rotate dials to do basic math functions) but slide rules are incomprehensible to me. I just read "slide rulepocket calculator" and carry on.

And yeah, for me the "stupid prose tricks are more important than the story" fad of the "New Wave" of the mid-60s through early-70s is completely unreadable today (and it was back then, too. ).

[Wolf Larsen]

Doc Smith is particularly bad in that while he had great technical changes, Earth culture didn't change at all in the Lensman series.

[running coach]

Originally Posted by Fenris

Anything with a slide rule--and most stuff from the '40s mentioned 'em kind of makes me blink. I actually bought a slide-rule and I'll be damned if I could figure out how to use the thing. I get abacuses and mechanical calculators (where you rotate dials to do basic math functions) but slide rules are incomprehensible to me. I just read "slide rulepocket calculator" and carry on.

And it comes full circle with "The Feeling Of Power" by Isaac Asimov.

Manual calculation is re-discovered.

[Fenris]

I just got done rereading some Heinlein and the reason (for me) that his stuff is timeless is best shown in a scene from "Space Cadet". Ok, it's got a habitable swampy Venus, a hot, old, habitable Mars, and that just makes you blink a little.

But his characters and their casual reactions to technology is so damned real. At the very beginning, Matt and Tex are in line, chatting, getting to know each other...and

Matt dug a candy bar out of his pouch, split it and gave half to Jarman, who accepted it gratefully. "You're a pal, Matt, I've been living on my own fat ever since breakfast- and that's risky. Say, your telephone is sounding."
"Oh!" Matt fumbled in his pouch and got out his phone. "Hello?"
"That you, son?" came his father's voice.
"Yes, Dad."
"Did you get there all right?"
"Sure, I'm about to report in."
"How's your leg?"
"Leg's all right, Dad." His answer was not frank; his right leg, fresh from a corrective operation for a short Achilles' tendon, was aching as he spoke.
"That's good. Now see here, Matt-if it should work out that you aren't selected, don't let it get you down. You call me at once and-"
"Sure, sure, Dad," Matt broke in. "I'll have to sign off-I'm in a crowd. Good-by. Thanks for calling."
"Good-by, son. Good luck."
Tex Jarman looked at him understandingly. "Your folks always worry, don't they? I fooled mine-packed my phone in my bag."

It's irrelevant that he got cell-phones, it's impressive to me that he got the human response to cell-phones which is that you're instantly reachable even when you kinda don't want to be.

[NoClueBoy]

About 10 years ago, I started a thread on another site about casual racism in earlier sci-fi. Seems appropriate to mention it here. The world is multi-cultural, not all white, European descent males.

[Wolf Larsen]

True Names by Venor Vinge is one of the few stories that got the "reaction to technology" right in that he predicted really early that people would want anonymity online.

Writes the man who's name is not actually Wolf Larsen.

[Tuckerfan]

I would say a world where women utterly rule over men, then I think of that Futurama episode. . .

[Fenris]

A creepily super-accurate story that got the tech and the reactions to tech correct is Murray Leinster's "A Logic Named Joe".

Other than the fact that he thinks there'd be a few central servers and everyone taps into them with dumb-terminals, he nails the internet....in ~1955. And moreso: he predicts, spam, kids trying to view porn, porn-filters, illegal content, privacy violations, etc. The premise of the story is twofold.
1) What if everyone's (hospitals, government, personal) firewalls vanished 100%?
2) What if the internet was able to synthesize/combine data and answer questions ("How do I kill my wife and get away with it?" / "Your wife is a redhead, but she dyes her hair. Per this info on this website plus that info on that website, if you mix chemicals x and y together and put it in her drink, the red dye in her hair will react with the liquid to make an undetectable poison").

[Fenris]

Originally Posted by Tuckerfan

I would say a world where women utterly rule over men, then I think of that Futurama episode. . .

Not want snoo-snoo?

[Tuckerfan]

Originally Posted by Fenris

Not want snoo-snoo?

Death by snoo-snoo!

[SisterCoyote]

Originally Posted by Tuckerfan

I would say a world where women utterly rule over men, then I think of that Futurama episode. . .

Herland in which there are NO men until some crash-land nearby.

[Baldwin]

Originally Posted by Wolf Larsen

*Wolfling by Gordon R. Dickinson for those who care.

That's Gordon R. Dickson.

Originally Posted by Wolf Larsen

And this got me to thinking about how many SF plots just don't work any more. Any of the "Life On Venus" ones don't work because the surface is hot enough to melt lead and at about 90 atm of pressure with sulfuric acid clouds. Also all the "Life On Mars" plots. It's way too dry and atmospheric pressure is about 1% of Earth sea level.

So what? There are Earth organisms that could live on Mars. With a little imagination, it's easy to posit life on Mars and even on Venus. (Get me Hal Clement on the line. Died in '03? Well, somebody else must be writing like that.)

Originally Posted by Wolf Larsen

The ones about landing on Jupiter. It doesn't actually have a surface, the atmosphere goes smoothly to a liquid (with no real surface) and it is really hot by the time you get that deep into the atmosphere.

Jupiter probably has a solid, dense core covered with metallic liquid hydrogen. But, no, a story like Clifford Simak's classic "Desertion" wouldn't work anymore (at least not with Jupiter as the setting).

Originally Posted by Wolf Larsen

Finally, interstellar travel looks unlikely. Barring genuinely new physics, we can't go faster than light and getting something up to 1/10 C looks very tough, so we have a 40 year trip to Alpha Centauri. And at 1/10 C, you don't even get much time dilation, so it is 40 years for the crew as well.

So? What else is new? Einstein published on Special Relativity over a century ago. During all of modern science fiction, mainstream physics has not been friendly to the idea of FTL travel.

Some writers have stayed within contemporary physics and had generation ships, interstellar ramjets, or Pellegrino's Valkyrie design.

Others have used imaginary science -- posited future breakthroughs in physics that lead to FTL drives.

So what's changed? A plot with FTL travel works as well or as poorly as it ever did.

I like reading old science fiction. What always strikes me is how many writers had no trouble imagining all sorts of future science, alien species, artificial intelligence, godlike transformational experiences -- but were still stuck with the sexual stereotypes of their time.

[Fish]

Well, there's the "rush off to stop a deadly plague on an alien planet with our 1950s antibiotic technology" plot. Turns out, bacteria evolve and stuff, so that old penicillin ... well, it kinda doesn't always work against things it's never faced, and if you keep penicillin in a germ-free lab, it doesn't work against the things it does face either.

[Jaglavak]

Originally Posted by Wolf Larsen

Anything that involved blockading a star system. (Space is just too damn big to blockade.)

Gotta disagree. If you had a nuke powered ship that could maintain 1 gee of acceleration, you could blockade a planet. If you had a goodly supply of nuke powered cruise missiles, you could blockade a star system. But it would be ungodly expensive.

[Shot From Guns]

Originally Posted by Jaglavak

If you had a goodly supply of nuke powered cruise missiles, you could blockade a star system. But it would be ungodly expensive.

Let's use Pluto as our outer boundary. Pluto is, at the outside of its orbit, 7.4 billion kilometers from the sun. Assuming a sphere with a radius of 7.4 billion kilometers, that gives us a surface area of about 688 billion kilometers. By comparison, the entire Earth has a surface area of about 510 million square kilometers. Imagine having to account for every inch of the surface of our planet with some sort of way to detect an incursion--not just the borders between countries, which even now we can't do. Now multiply that by over 1,300. That's what you'd be dealing with if you wanted to blockade our solar system.

There's "can be done" from the sense of "if we had unlimited resources." But this is about feasibility.

[Glazer]

Originally Posted by Shot From Guns

Let's use Pluto as our outer boundary. Pluto is, at the outside of its orbit, 7.4 billion kilometers from the sun. Assuming a sphere with a radius of 7.4 billion kilometers, that gives us a surface area of about 688 billion kilometers. By comparison, the entire Earth has a surface area of about 510 million square kilometers. Imagine having to account for every inch of the surface of our planet with some sort of way to detect an incursion--not just the borders between countries, which even now we can't do. Now multiply that by over 1,300. That's what you'd be dealing with if you wanted to blockade our solar system.

There's "can be done" from the sense of "if we had unlimited resources." But this is about feasibility.

What about a Dyson sphere?

[Jaglavak]

Originally Posted by Shot From Guns

Let's use Pluto as our outer boundary...There's "can be done" from the sense of "if we had unlimited resources." But this is about feasibility.

First off, Pluto is the inner edge of the Oort cloud. I was thinking of the region from Jupiter inward. But let's not quibble.

In space there's nothing to hide behind. And if you want to get anywhere, you'll be blasting a 1000 ft long tail of plasma behind you or deploying a really big light sail. With those kind of targets you could cover the solar system with a couple dozen lookout stations.

To keep things simple, say you detect a blockade runner and you aren't shy about blowing him up. So you light off a nuke powered, nuke tipped cruise missle that can pull 10 gees continuously. It flies across the solar system more or less in a straight line and blows up the bad guys. A missile like that could get anywhere inboard of Jupiter in about 50 hours or less. Your main problem would be dealing with the return fire.

[Shot From Guns]

Originally Posted by F'ing New Guy

What about a Dyson sphere?

Well, are you talking about Dyson's actual design, which is a series of satellites (a Dyson swarm or bubble) or the solid surrounding design that he clarified would be impossible (a Dyson shell)? Either way, those aren't usually depicted even in fiction as covering an entire system the size of ours.

Originally Posted by Jaglavak

First off, Pluto is the inner edge of the Oort cloud. I was thinking of the region from Jupiter inward.

I decided to go with "farthest point the average person would consider to be the boundary of our solar system for defensive purposes." In reality, you'd probably want some sort of DEWS even farther out.

In space there's nothing to hide behind. And if you want to get anywhere, you'll be blasting a 1000 ft long tail of plasma behind you or deploying a really big light sail. With those kind of targets you could cover the solar system with a couple dozen lookout stations.

You're assuming means of propulsion that are currently considered feasible. Much of science fiction doesn't follow those conventions. So, how do you blockade a solar system where ships can travel faster than light?

[SoylentPopTart]

Originally Posted by Shot From Guns

So, how do you blockade a solar system where ships can travel faster than light?

Send in defenders that can also travel faster than light.