TTFeb: STEM depictions in fiction

[superborb]

cortue prompted: Do you have any feelings about sci-fi as a person working in STEM? Do you want things to make actual sense or prefer they don't even try? Is there any way you'd like STEM stuff to be depicted differently in fiction?

I think my main feeling about sci-fi is that it ought to be internally consistent. So, I can roll with soft sci-fi or hard sci-fi as long as it doesn't ret-con how technology works in universe. (If your explody improv weapon could not explode earlier, it is not nice to have it be so when plot convenient.) I have higher standards for hard sci-fi though, I want it to follow through and be correct. Otherwise, what was the point? For soft sci-fi, I prefer no gibberish, just take the fantasy 'this is how it works' matter of fact approach.

Of course, the works that really try to imagine the world within the bounds of science, either of the future or of the 'one thing is different' version, deserve extra praise for the attention to detail and research, but I guess it's not really what I'm reading fiction for, you know? I'm here for the story.

It does annoy me when basic things are wrong and it's clearly the author / producer / whoever not paying enough attention. Most commonly physics because it's the one most likely to be violated in this way-- when the ship loses propulsion or stops spinning or whatever and then it abruptly comes to a complete stop and slams people into walls, that sort of thing. But I guess this does tend to be more common in movies, probably because books have different sets of fact checking norms?

The 'internally consistent' preference also extends to other forms of fiction; it doesn't bother me that much when they're like, doing the enhance on four pixels or getting results from forensics ridiculously fast because it's blatantly for the plot. It does pose a problem when people think that science works that way IRL, but I think most people understand that it's fiction, and the science is just as much fiction as the characters. Though I do think it's funny when e.g. in ReGenesis, which had pretty good fact checking, a work is so focused on being accurate for that time period that it becomes obsolete as technology improves.

I guess I don't really have that many broader thoughts on this! I mostly get annoyed at one-off inaccuracies hahaha. 

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Comments

[superborb]

Hah, on rereading, maybe I shouldn't have put that bit about physics being most violated-- but I guess the difference for biology is that it mostly falls under the gibberish science problem, which hits differently to me! In a still annoying, but easier to tune out as gibberish way...