Quote:
Originally Posted by Agemegos
Right! The oxygen and moisture in the air on Tatooine and Hoth (and Arrakis), and the urbanisation of Coruscant (and Trantor) are impossibilities but they are not errors. They are genre conventions, no better to be "corrected" than FTL travel.
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I don't think that Frank Herbert thought of it as a convention, and I'm fairly sure that Isaac Asimov and John W. Campbell did not. I think the hard science of the era had not figured out the harsh realities of planetary atmospheric chemistry fully, and what they did know had not gotten as far as the Astounding stable of writers, not even the ones with a scientific education. It's like E.E. Smith giving us planets with chlorine atmospheres, which goes flat against the cosmic abundance of the elements. Of course for writers who do them now they're a genre convention.
Certainly past writers have often disregarded scientific issues, though. I've read a passage from one of H.G. Wells's letters where he discussed handwaving the issue of "how does he see?" to write The Invisible Man.