10-07-2019, 06:40 AM | #21 | |
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Earth, mostly
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Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?
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10-07-2019, 06:56 AM | #22 | |
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
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Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?
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Writers like Isaac Asimov had to work very fast and please their markets, and they did not have the benefit of 80 years of fandom joyfully criticizing things, just friends at parties and the few fanzines and science fact columns they had time to read.
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10-07-2019, 09:08 AM | #23 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?
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While Arrakis IS a cool and exotic setting, it was not purely rule of cool. Frank Herbert was admired when he wrote it for his efforts at creating a detailed planetary ecology, and he really was trying to address things realistically, as can be seen in the storyline about the Fremen painstakingly harvesting and accumulating water to transform their planet, and the discussion of the role of sandtrout in maintaining its desert climate. Even Burroughs was not going purely off of "rule of cool"; he was working from Lowellian Mars, a model published by a professional astronomer (if a somewhat uncritical one). I'd also note that Asimov didn't just read science fact columns. He had a degree in chemistry, specializing in biochemistry, and he got his master's in 1941 and his doctorate in 1948.
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10-07-2019, 09:52 AM | #24 | |
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
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Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?
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Writers like Asimov and Herbert put a lot of thought into making some parts of their settings scientifically plausible (which George Lucas certainly did not), but I am not sure they spent time thinking about the logistics of Trantor or oxygen atmospheres. At the time, these were just not yet generally accepted by fans and writers as things which needed justification. Presented with good arguments that desert-planets or city-planets are bad planet science, Asimov and Herbert would probably have corrected or hand-waved things, while Lucas would have looked at you like you were speaking Swahili.
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"It is easier to banish a habit of thought than a piece of knowledge." H. Beam Piper This forum got less aggravating when I started using the ignore feature Last edited by Polydamas; 10-07-2019 at 09:59 AM. |
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10-07-2019, 10:44 AM | #25 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?
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In other words, I don't think that "oxygen atmospheres need to be constantly restored by photosynthesis" was that big a part of scientific thinking when those stories were written. Of course Burroughs had an oxygen plant on Mars (just one for the entire planet, I think!), but he seems to have been concerned with leakage of oxygen into space, not with chemical processes.
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10-07-2019, 11:44 AM | #26 | |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?
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FtL is necessary plotwise. It is only needed for the desert to be anywhere on the planet that is relevant to the plot.
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10-07-2019, 12:12 PM | #27 | |
Join Date: Dec 2007
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Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?
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10-07-2019, 12:26 PM | #28 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?
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I'm thinking of Kingsbury's Geta, which is portrayed as a harsh desert planet, but has something close to a dozen small seas here and there. It's still possible to walk around the planet, though, with a few detours.
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10-07-2019, 04:08 PM | #29 |
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
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Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?
Also, I am sorry I implied that the Star Wars universe, Dune, and the Foundation are all the kind of carelessly-built setting. My point was that not every aspect of these settings got close attention, because writers are human and the body of professional knowledge for worldbuilders was smaller then.
I have no idea whether Isaac Asimov or Frank Herbert could have known that they needed photosynthetic life for an oxygen atmosphere if they had looked at that aspect, and I have no idea where Arrakis fits on the rational-to-rule-of-cool spectrum (I read one of the books but it did not grab me).
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10-07-2019, 07:07 PM | #30 | |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?
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science fiction, science!, star wars, technology, technology level |
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