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

[TimTamTerrier]

For instance in Station Eleven the author had clearly thought about how society and the economy might function after a sudden and massive drop in population and what she came up with was a version of medieval society with small towns, agricultural based economy, peddlers going from town to town and wandering actors/minstrals. It seemed sustainable and logical.

One of the most annoying stories was Wayward Pines. It just seemed completely unsustainable to me. There was no explanation of where food came from, and people had weird jobs allocated to them that didn't seem to contribute to the economy. There was also no explanation of what the genetic mutation was that caused humanity to rapidly devolve, nor any explanation of why the same thing wouldn't happen to the recently revived human population. And he seemed to have a huge technical team that knew what was going on and had volunteered to be frozen and revived in the future, so why didn't he just go with volunteers instead of kidnapping random people?

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 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.

Yes, Star Trek never handled time travel very well. Or black holes. I may not know much about car engines or agriculture, but compared to the writers of Star Trek I know loads about black holes.

"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 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.

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...

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

Have you considered trying books written for adults?

"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

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?

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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