On Thu, 6 Jul 2023 07:48:57 +1200, Rupert Boleyn wrote:

>On 06Jul2023 0527, Jeffrey Schwartz - schwartz.jeffrey at gmail.com (via
>tml list) wrote:

>> Geeks gotta geek :)

>I think that's one reason there's such push-pack WRT to Virus. It's a
>problem many RPGs and SF stories run into, where the physicists yell
>about the spaceflight rules, the biologists scream about the
>impossibility of this or that species, the historians pull their hair
>out at the terrible history, and so on. Meanwhile, those of us who
>aren't experts on those fields shrug our shoulders, say "Close enough!"
>and move on.

I think that that really only happens when the author goes beyond
handwaving and tries to give a theoretical 'science' or 'technology' basis
for a specific technology that is 'layman-compatible' with existing 'common
knowledge' (that is, the author overspecifies). If you just say 'the effect
of the FTL drive is to get you from point A to point B, and the effective
speed is f^3 times c', you might get some grumbling from the pedants about
how 'relativity says you can't do that', but even they acknowledge that
there may be some edge cases that we haven't encountered yet, and which may
give us new information, just as relativity superceded Newtonian physics -
Newton's model works 'good enough' under 'ordinary day-to-day' conditions -
but we pushed the limits, found some discrepancies, and some guy named
after a rock came up with an explanation for them.

(Note: it's probably because I've never discussed relativity beyond the
layman's level, but I'm actually not entirely convinced that it necessarily
precludes FTL. That's not for this thread, however.)

The mistake that GDW made with Virus was overspecification, as above: they
tried to explain it in a way that was 'layman-compatible' with a 'USA
Today'-level explanation of How A Computer Virus Works - and got it wrong
enough that the professionals in the field (like Your Humble Editor) just
cringed. M-Drive, J-Drive, Grav tech, etc., weren't 'splainded to that
level, so the physicists looked, shrugged, and said 'It be technofantasy'.

Vernor Vinge didn't make that mistake in his 'Zones of Thought' universe
(_A Fire Upon The Deep_ et sequelae) - he limited his 'splains to the
minimum needed for the story, and provided no detail, technological or
sciency, that an expert could look at, cringe, and say 'Even if you assume
the Zones, that can't work that way because...'.

(Not overspecifying is a bit of advice that's often given to authors and
wanna-be authors on the Baen forums. Don't include data that the reader
doesn't need. You can _develop_ it, but it's notes for yourself so that you
can stay consistent across multiple stories, not for character exposition.)

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