Science in my Science Fiction: Books vs. Movies

January 9th, 2008

So yesterday I had a post about what I thought were the ten best science fiction movies in terms of the physical science.   I’ve been convinced to make a couple of substitutions and will do that over at www.sfnovelists.com tomorrow with a link from here.   One reaction I often get when I become critical about the science in a science fiction movie is, “Lighten up, it’s only a movie!”

Well, to me one of the things I love about a story, whether it’s written or a movie, is being able to lose myself in it and enjoy vicariously another time and place through the actions of characters I grow to care about.   In order to “lose myself” in a story, I require the “suspension of disbelief.”   That is, even though I know the story isn’t real, I can ignore that fact as long as the story is either internally self-consistent with it’s laws (e.g., vampires can’t abide the sun) or the laws match those of the physical universe that I know.   If they don’t, the story had better be a fantasy with quick indications for me to set aside my understanding of physics and replace it with an openness to magic with its own rules.   The difficulty with science fiction is that the amazing speculative stuff is predicated, usually, on technology based on physical laws that we know today — or at least on science that doesn’t violate our current understanding of those laws.   So that means for me to keep my suspension of disbelief and hang in there with the story, the science can’t be too wrong or I’ll lose my ability to lose myself in the story.

Then I just get pissy and rant about it and my friends tell me to lighten up, and ask if they should invite me next time or not.   (Actually most of my friends are cool and have science-heavy backgrounds so it turns into a rantfest more often than not when we catch a real stinker.)

But this is all a long-winded introduction to this issue, keeping a science fiction story real, and how that’s different in movies and books.

First off, let me pass on what little I’ve learned about how movies are made and what typically directors and producers care about.   I’ve had some friends in Hollywood and some who have written scripts, both produced and not, and here’s what I know from them.   They don’t care about the science and they don’t care about getting things right.   They care about audience reaction and box office, and the details of getting things right are not worth that hassle if it costs time or money.   This leads to one immediate difference between books and movies.

Movies are looking for audiences in the millions — hundreds of millions worldwide in the best case scenario.   Scientific literacy is just not that high in the U.S. population let alone most other countries.   So what if Mike Brotherton gets annoyed and doesn’t put the movie on his list?   For every viewer like me there are ten that didn’t even realize there was a problem.   And as far as moviemakers are concerned, minor problems, what they call “Refrigerator door” problems, are okay.   These are problems viewers only realize when they’re getting a midnight snack as they’re opening the refrigerator door, hours after the movie is over.   If it doesn’t affect the immediate experience, it isn’t worth worrying about, especially if it’ll cost money to fix.   Movies also must show everything happening, and audiences will not suffer through lectures, so why bother with an elaborate justification for something unusual if there isn’t room in the movie to explain it?   Why not just make it happen, if it’s at least the second-cousin of plausible in the director’s scientifically illiterate head?

Now, books are a different issue.   There are a lot more books out every year than movies, and they’re a lot cheaper to produce.   A bad movie gets a million viewers, while a good one a hundred times that.   A bad book (or just an overlooked one) gets thousands, maybe ten thousand readers, while a popular one maybe a hundred times that — to the level of the audience of a bad movie.   And book readers are picky because they have so many books to choose from.   Most science fiction fans see most science fiction movies that come out, but even a voracious science fiction reader can only read maybe ten percent of the books coming out.   Moreover, the “refrigerator door” problem can hit a book hard, coming in the middle of the experience, souring the rest.   And if you have to, you can take the time for an explanation (what’s called an “info dump”) — readers have a lot more patience for those than movie-goers.

So most readers are niche readers, working hard to find exactly what they like, and then repeating with the same authors and the same genres.   The niche of “hard science fiction,” that I like and write, is really for the picky reader who wants the science to be right to avoid the loss of the suspension of disbelief.   It’s stories that have a lot of science and depend on the science as more than window dressing.    Silly tropes like universal translators, magical spaceship gravity, and human-impersonating robots in the present are things to be avoided, because they’re things that hard sf readers will think about and reject as implausible or unexplained.

I find enough good hard science fiction out there to keep me happy.   Writers I enjoy at novel length for hard science fcition include Joe Haldeman, Gregory Benford, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Greg Bear, Alastair Reynolds, Greg Egan, Larry Niven, Wil McCarthy, Robert Reed, Robert Sawyer, and many others.   I’d love to make a list of the top ten science-based science fiction books, but I’d have the opposite problem from movies.   Too many choices, and not enough time to read all the worthy candidates.

Movies, not so tough.   I’m going to watch Primer tonight, but otherwise haven’t seen a good new science-based science fiction movie come out in close to ten years.   Does anyone know any?

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