If you enjoy sci-fi do you need it to be a logical society/situation?

Ooh that's very careless of them and very observant of you slightly. Any other howlers you've noticed in Sherlock?

Hopelesslydevoted - the first episode, they zoom in on departing taxi. You can very clearly read number plate. It's on screen for several seconds. Then later on, taxi driver turns up and again, several second loving close up of his badge, which has a totally different number plate. Obviously not the same guy, and so much fuss, must be significant?

No. Actually what they are trying to say is TAXI. Cos London only has one cab driver right?

Actually maybe it's just me

I like some level of rational world building but I'm OK with things not making total sense if it's obviously beneficial to good story telling.

For example - though TV rather than books - in the series "Humans" it makes no sense at all for chemical waste processing plants or packing warehouses to be using synths for tasks that could just as easily and much much more cheaply be carried out by robots that don't look like humans. But obviously that detracts from the overall story about the nature of humanity and consciousness so I can overlook it.

On the other hand I get terribly bored by hard SF that spends three chapters explaining in great detail how ftl travel between stars became possible with lots of technical details when they could just say "after ftl travel was invented" and get on with the story.

slightlyglitterbrained what are the continuity errors/ mistakes in Sherlock? I've always thought it was well plotted

Running cares on vegetable oil is not really sustainable - from what I understand it requires more gasoline to grow all the plants for the oil than you get gasoline out of the oil.

True but you would use the oil in cooking first so there will be some fuel and food, maybe it would be rationed or just very expensive.

You know, I'm going to modify my earlier statement somewhat: actually I can enjoy stuff that has the shiny gewgaws/"look & feel" of science fiction (FTL travel, space colonies etc) but not the actual worldbuilding.

I just think of it as a different genre - space opera? Light undemanding reads that take well known science fictional tropes as a backdrop but don't really do much more worldbuilding than something set in modern day London.

If it is science fiction though - then inconsistencies grate. It's like the BBC Sherlock - a series based around the exceptional observation and deduction skills of the main character, where plots hinge on the tiniest of details - but it's absolutely packed with continuity errors, and lazy attention to detail. The reason this makes it annoying is that part of the point is to watch, looking out for details that might be clues. If you're sitting there thinking "so hang on, when does x get explained? Oh wait, no it's just a continuity goof despite a big dramatic close up shot and dramatic music Argh!" then it takes away some of the enjoyment of watching a detective series, because any figuring out that you do yourself is built on shifting sands.

I also tend to think of "ideas" fiction that sets up e.g. a society like our own but flips something in order to investigate the effects as "speculative fiction" - e g. Bareback aka Benighted which sets up a society where werewolves are the majority, and being born lycanthrope or human is down to an accident of birth, and then builds a consistent society around that. Or the matriarchal society (Egalia?) referenced by a pp. That also needs to be consistent or it's not enjoyable - the main "flip" may not hold up, but the consequences have to be played out honestly or IMO it's not true to the genre.

Does that make sense?

There should be an "I read 'Stranger in a Strange Land' when I was, in retrospect, a little too young" support group.

I'm guessing you grew up in a house like mine (ceiling-height bookshelves the length of the walls, in several rooms of the house, mostly filled with SF) Cote?

"If you were to identify with Heinlein's characters there'd probably be something very very wrong with you."

Erm I kind of did, but I was very young.

I wanted to be a Fair Witness for the longest time (as in Stranger In A Strange Land) and then found out that it is not a real profession

Yeah well, it might seem great after Divergent. That doesn't mean much, though.

Have you considered trying books written for adults?

Everyone STOP PISSING on my bonfire!!

I love Station 11. After the god-awful Divergent it's a bloody treatise on logical world-building. My standards have always been fairly low...

I never liked Heinlein much, there was always something quite odd about the people in his books, as though I had a personality clash with almost all of his leading characters.

If you were to identify with Heinlein's characters there'd probably be something very very wrong with you.

"Star Trek never handled time travel very well. Or black holes."

Or gravity. Or exobiology. Or anything, really.

Especially the whooshing sounds in space make me .

Star Wars is not much better than Station 11 et al.

I saw a lot of reruns of the original Star Trek series as a child so did feel quite nostalgic about it.

Until some of the freeview channels started running repeats recently. I gave up on watching those after an episode where the Enterprise accidentally time travels back to the 20th century, accidentally destroys a fighter plane and rescues the pilot - and then they give the pilot a completely unnecessary guided tour of the starship, chat on and on about their advanced technology, future events and so on - before going, ooh, now you know too much about the future, we can't ever let you go home, hope this doesn't screw up the time line and it just got more and more ridiculous from there.

I was never much into Star Trek for this very reason.

Babylon 5 was the first time anything remotely interesting started happening on TV in SF genre. Star Wars was juvenile crap, too.

I don't feel like that, personally. Plot has to be believable in a book or film.

If not totally believable, at least internally consistent. Complicated is fine, as long as the author makes an effort to tie up the loose ends and build an internally consistent world. Unlike in Station 11 and Wool

I fall somewhere in the middle regarding the need for logicality. If there's a good story, and the conceptual holes aren't too great, I'm ok with that. But I do prefer that the author has at least attempted to think things through.

But for sure in this day and age someone would hack together the many, many photovoltaic systems with car batteries and a home-made charger and have usable electricity. Frankly, I suspect given time and the motivation my 14 y/o dd could and would do so.

I'm not going to argue in any way for the logicality of Station Eleven, but actually, non-animal fat is one of the hardest things to produce as an amateur certainly in the UK climate. Rapeseed and sunflower oil need a certain amount of technology and know-how to extract. Olive oil is fine - if you can't find an old animal powered olive mill just crush the olives in water and float off the oil, you won't get a huge yield but you will get something.

But actually the simple answer for home produced fat is lard or keep geese (latter obviously come in more conveniently sized packages). I don't think you can run a car on goosefat!

However, I think John Wyndam (sp?) did a much more convincing job in the Triffids of showing a society with only a small %ge of survivors.

Running cares on vegetable oil is not really sustainable - from what I understand it requires more gasoline to grow all the plants for the oil than you get gasoline out of the oil. So it only really works out if you use oil that is left over from frying potato chips or something.
(We could be well away from mineral oil if we could just use vegetable oil instead.)

So people might still use cars, but would use them only for emergencies, and not for agriculture, and not for everyday transport.

About the original question ... it needs to be logical only insofar as it should not be obvious to me that it makes no sense.

And some premises only work if one accepts something rather unlikely to be fact. (Like, "Egalia's Daughters" is a novel that just flips patriarchy on its head and makes men the oppressed class. That does not make much sense as women have no need to exploit men for childbearing.) If the ideas explored are worthwhile, I will read it in spite of that.

If the illogical thing is not needed for the plot to work, and is just kind of there for no reason, I am more likely to be annoyed.

Has anyone read Brian Lumley's books? His Vampire series is incredible but just as good are his others, excellent sci-fi.
What about Philip Pullman? I loved Northern Lights, the Amber Spyglass and the Subtle Knife but thought the film, The Golden Compass, was an abomination.