Planets galore
October 2nd, 2005
Wil McCarthy contemplates the vexed question of how exactly Joss Whedon crammed so many seemingly Earthlike planets into one solar system in Firefly and Serenity.
McCarthy’s conclusion that the entire system is a Nivenesque artificial construct is most likely correct, but also deeply worrying insofar as it opens up all sorts of possibilities for really horrible crossover fanfic. The last thing Mal Reynolds needs is for Teela Brown to show up anywhere in the vicinity of the Serenity.
[Via Amygdala]
October 4th, 2005 at 04:56
I’ve reached a level of faint irritation with Joss’s desire to completely ignore science, I have to confess.
I understand the impulse completely. I’ve dealt with umpty-thousand wannabe-writers with little or no talent who feel the same way. And I’d never argue that all sf has to be hard sf, or that there wasn’t room for endless amounts of the very best work that goes in other directions.
It’s just that every wannabe skiffy writer who isn’t up to coping with any science seizes onto any excuse not to. Really. And that’s a major, ever-ongoing, problem of crap wannabe skiffy writers, if slush over the decades has anything to say. And any encouragement towatds that has a nasty affect upon any slush reader for any producer-of-sf that desires to be somewhat scientifically accurate.
It’s rare that I’ll counsel someone whose manuscript I’ve read, and rarer that I’d try not to try to counsel them along the lines they’re trying for. But there’s no shortage of wannabe sf writers trying to get by without the painful thing of actually trying to know science, alas. And I hate to encourage that, too.
I say this through personal painful experience of dealing with all of it.
October 4th, 2005 at 23:57
I have to give Joss a bit of leeway because he’s working in television and film: has there actually been a genuine hard-SF TV series? (I suppose that Babylon 5 would qualify, if it weren’t for the psi powers and the psuedo-mystical bollocks about premonitions and Sheridan coming back from the dead and so on.)
Also, it’s not as if Whedon is making no effort at all; he’s not got his spacecraft banking when they turn, or having ludicrously huge interior spaces, or possessing immensely powerful energy shields. The crew don’t fire phasers that can easily pack enough energy to punch through steel or put a human to sleep for five minutes. When it comes down to it, is Whedon really doing anything more than using the accepted tropes of space opera: unreasonably powerful drives allowing vessels to go from ground to orbit, artificial gravity, ships with horriby vulnerable windows instead of cameras showing them what’s going on outside the hull?
Even on the issue of the configuration of the planetary system, I can’t help but think that as we only got half a season of shows it’s not surprising that Joss didn’t make the time to bring to the foreground details of the configuration of the planetary system. For all we know the length of time it would take to make it to another star system might have been a plot point somewhere along the way. Perhaps the Serenity’s crew would have finally made the entire system too dangerous for them to stick around, so that they’d be faced with going to ground for a good long time or else setting out on a multi-year voyage to the next solar system. Who knows?
October 13th, 2005 at 04:23
“I have to give Joss a bit of leeway because he’s working in television and film: has there actually been a genuine hard-SF TV series?”
Not that I can think of. Other than Quark, of course.
Oh, and Starlost.
:-)