![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Trekkies want to know all the technical details of warp drives and phasers, but are content to accept a universe full of humanoid aliens with various shades of wrinkly foreheads. Odd, then, how rarely we pay the same amount of attention to biology. The most esteemed SF novels are those written by actual scientists and engineers (or those who could fake it well enough, like Heinlein, who had his starship pilots working out interstellar routes with slide rules.) Larry Niven's Ringworld is a classic because while a ring around a star is probably not something that an advanced alien race could actually build (or would want to, if they could), he at least made it appear achievable, with the proverbial "sufficiently advanced technology." (And then he wrote The Ringworld Engineers when his fans corrected his math.) Usually "hard SF" refers to physics and engineering - crunchy orbital mechanics and interplanetary travel with terms like "delta-v," weapons and other technology that at least has some plausible physics behind it. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |