#salty sf writer

[tlaquetzqui]

You would think the sense-of-scale issue in Gundam would relate to the mobile suits, but no, for the most part those are relatively grounded. Where they fuck up, though?

Colony drops.

Indirectly, the most famous one: because Zeon kills 90% of humanity (not just with that drop of course), and then, after they lose the war where they did that, any of them survive. They would all be killed. Every single man, woman, and child in Side 3 would be radioactive ash; the Feddies would be very sure to make that happen. I’m not saying that would be a good thing, but it would be an inevitable one.

And then directly, in Gundam X, when they drop a whole Side worth of O’Neill cylinders on Earth, leaving giant craters everywhere. Two things: the Chicxulub impact left one itsy-bitsy crater you have to look really carefully to see; and that one itsy-bitsy impact was enough all by itself to kill 70% of life on Earth.

Enough orbital drops to visibly change the landscape like in the show, and we’re talking levels of destruction somewhere between “not even your Demon will live to creep, blackened, from its hole to mar the reflection of our passage” and “those who truly understand know I have no right to let them live”.

[tlaquetzqui]

Kinda wanna make a sideblog where I shred faux profundity quoted from bad science fiction. I don’t know why it’s so goddamn ubiquitous in stuff by people who think Star Trek is hard SF, but so much of that tier of speculative fiction has these lines that try to sound deep and just achieve the most risible bathos known to man.

I guess that could actually combine with the one where I mock “humans are weird” bullshit by people who don’t know they’re Young Earth Creationists. Can you people all go suck in someone else’s genre?

[tlaquetzqui]

“You can’t travel between star systems in Starfield in real time, you have to use the jump system!”

And this in your view is a problem with the game?

Look if you’re complaining about that I’m taking your scifi-fan card away and then I’m burning it.

Also my dude there are way bigger problems with that game.

[tlaquetzqui]

Whoever decided to steal the name “xenofiction” from science fiction from the alien perspective, and misapply it to stuff like Watership Down or Raptor Red, should have their stupid illiterate face stomped in. Ξένος means “stranger, foreigner”—not animal.

[tlaquetzqui]

I just saw someone ask a writing blog for original cyberpunk prompts.

All you need to know about cyberpunk is that the CRPG based on the TTRPG that defined a lot of the genre, has people moving physically to another city for work. Because the assumptions of the genre date to an age when touchtone phones and CDs were cutting edge. At this point cyberpunk is just edgelord cassette futurism.

Cyberpunk was played out before Google was founded. I mean that literally, that is a verbatim description of facts: the Usenet post often considered to be foundational to cyberprep/postcyberpunk was from 1998. That’s the year Larry Page and Sergey Brin got together in Menlo, California, and decided to set the world upon the path to ruin.

[tlaquetzqui]

Have I mentioned how funny it is that Star Trek fans think the shows from before the Bad Robot takeover were cerebral science fiction?

It was a children’s show and it got more and more childish as it went on, though Deep Space Nine and Enterprise bucked the trend (by being the least like Star Trek of any pre-Abrams series…). I mean it’s hardly the only space opera that’s true of; Firefly is a Disney tween sitcom with hookers and cannibalism, and Farscape is a children’s show that understands how to be watchable by adults too. Babylon 5 is actually the only adult space opera.

[tlaquetzqui]

I’m this close to starting a side blog where I do nothing but mock people’s shit speculative biology where they demonstrate they are incapable of considering why things evolve. Think I’ll call it “When De Facto Young Earth Creationists Try Science Fiction” and it’ll involve the image of a hand holding a snake with an apple in its teeth (evoking both Genesis and snake handlers).

The two I just saw: no, aliens would not find sneezing strange. Fucking sea sponges sneeze, it’s for expelling foreign matter from the body. Please explain why alien biology would never have to do that. And no, even aliens evolved from prey animals would not be freaked out by you killing mosquitos. Do you think herbivores don’t kill insect pests?

[tlaquetzqui]

“Man imagine having to explain something about humans that would absolutely happen to any other organism, to aliens. I don’t understand that every single thing in biology is ultimately a special case of thermodynamics and that the laws of thermodynamics are the same everywhere. But I am bothering the grownups with my opinions about speculative biology.”

[tlaquetzqui]

“Oh if you say Pacific Rim is stupid you just hate fun!”

Problem with your theory there chief, Gurren Lagan is one of my all-time favorite shows. And in terms of “it’s cool so just run with it” that show makes Pacific Rim look like The Longest Day.

What I dislike in Pacific Rim is that you would never design the Jaeger interface unless you wanted to incapacitate two pilots instead of only one; and they arbitrarily decided that, rather than coming out in random spots, kaiju should come out in one place which can be blocked with a giant Salad Shooter head.

Being a broken, despairing person like Kamina and Rossiu’s village chiefs, the Helix King, or the Anti-Spirals, is an issue without an engineering solution. The only problem in Pacific Rim that wouldn’t have been wholly prevented if they just made better design decisions, is the fact of kaiju attacks itself—but how the attacks always happen, does have an engineering solution.

[tlaquetzqui]

“This planet in my scifi has a drastically different orbit than Earth, so its climate is [basically the Colorado Plateau].”

Google the setups you describe, so someone from a different terrain on Earth (hola) does not point and laugh at you for trying to pass off their routine existence as shockingly alien. (Also people do have speculations about orbital arrangements that are completely different from anything on Earth. Research them.)

[tlaquetzqui]

The best response to people writing smut about your characters remains, as I may have said before, Larry Niven’s: “Kzinti don’t have external genitalia.”

[tlaquetzqui]

It is long past time that scifi art got over the fucking plug suit. And maybe figure out powered armor without just doing a riff on MJOLNIR Mk. V.

A good starting point is to look at stuff like real militaries’ powered armor projects, and designs for future improvements to spacesuits.

[tlaquetzqui]

You might eventually get laser weapons, since at some point something like composite metal foam armor will get too good for mere kinetic weapons (packing that amount of energy into a laser dot a millimeter wide is always better than hoping a bullet can do it).

But you’ll never get particle beam weapons, at least not in atmosphere, because of the radioactive backscatter. Particle weapons have been compared to shooting off a flare gun inside a fireworks factory, except the fireworks give you lethal radiation poisoning on the offchance they don’t instantly burn you to death.

[tlaquetzqui]

Can you believe some people want to copy China’s social credit system, when we could be copying their bans on depicting time travel and zombies?

[tlaquetzqui]

Ray Bradbury had an excuse not to know, but you don’t: Mars’s moons both just look like very bright stars from the surface. Phobos is just barely large enough that you can tell it’s not perfectly round, but you can’t make out any surface details; neither of them provides much more light at night than Venus does on Earth.

[tlaquetzqui]

I keep seeing people say they hate the genres they write. My dude, you are not dependent on writing to put food on the table, it is not the golden age of the pulps nor can a writer’s fees support even a single-occupant household.

Nobody is forcing you to write a genre you hate. Go write whatever turgid boring crap you do like, and stop trying to make genre fiction less interesting because you’d rather be doing something else.