The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon... Read More.
Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin
"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine
"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review
"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly
"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
The actual answer is probably “a bit of both”. Even today it is easy to find an SF author who apparently has no idea about the lifespans of high mass stars – Eric Brown comes to mind – but as someone points out, at least one TV show recommended using named stars in episodes and named stars are almost always high mass/short life stars.
One subthread rapidly turns into “Well, maybe the mass-luminousity relationship is wrong!” argument, which nicely encapsulates something in SF that I will call the SFnal Lysenkoist Tendency: when actual, tested science contradicts some detail in an SF story, attack the science.
Go over there for the discussion. I find this question fascinating, too, and realize that before college-level astronomy I could have been guilty of this error. Natural plug for Launch Pad, of course! When I get next year’s guest instructor lined up the website will get an update with new dates and an application deadline (Feb. or March). Anyway, you can go here — my online resources for writers using astronomy — to get my slides on stars among other things.
And it’s a pet peeve of mine, too, that I hate when people attack pretty good science just because they think it could be wrong even though they have little or no evidence to suggest it. The big bang is an easy target this way, but is an incredibley well supported theory at this point, but I’ve come across quite a few people who reject it out of hand based on nothing. James P. Hogan, for one, if I recall correctly. He’s a smart guy and a capable writer, but seems to have jumped off the cliff of reason into the sea of credulity in recent years. Thinking outside the box is a good thing, but not if that’s all you do all the time.
I think this heretical science phenomenon is interesting and worth more discussion, but perhaps more on a sociological level rather than a scientific one.
James Harris calls for more real science in science fiction, and discusses how there’s science as fantastic as science fiction already out there to inspire and to steal from. Steal is my word, not his, but it’s a time-honored tradition in the fiction business and the sincerest form of flattery.
I remember reading about how Isaac Asimov wrote a non-fiction article about neutron stars way back when, then Larry Niven wrote “Neutron Star” fictionalizing all the cool science Asimov had written about, and went on to win a Hugo award.
You can write a story about almost anything if you take your time, find the right angle, the right character, the right problem. An easy way to get science into a story is to start with the science.
When I went to Clarion West back in 1994, one of my outstanding teachers was Michael Swanwick during week 4. He’d read our stories at the workshop so far, and noticed the same thing that James Harris writes about and many editors complain about: precious little science in our science fiction. He brought in a pile of back issues of Science News, a weekly magazine covering all fields of science. He asked us to pick three articles and pitch story ideas based on them. I didn’t agree with all his assessments of the story potential in each, but I did agree with the value of the experiment.
Today, it’s easy enough to scan the science news online and find featured article with more detail at places like Scientific American and Discover.
The easy thing to do to develop a story is to take a classic formula. With new technology, who gets hurt or marginalized? What are the unintended consequences of the new discovery? Can you make the new findings part of the story setting and make the plot depend on understanding their significance? Usually the easy path produces a competent story, but more interesting work relies on inverting expectations, so look to see if you can find the silver lining in the unintended consequences.
And here’s a trick to remember. SCIENCE IS FREAKING AWESOME! We figure out the coolest shit with science. If you’ve picked an article or topic that fascinates you, get that fascination into your story! If it’s about the methodology, focus there. Or the technology, or the potential, or the insight, or the dedication. Whatever you think is the coolest thing, that should be your focus.
For myself, I’ve always loved astronomy. Basic physics, much less, but their application in space brings up the coolness factor by a million. My first novel Star Dragon involves an interstellar trip to a particular type of binary star called a cataclysmic variable that explodes in “dwarf novas” — way cool! I wanted to write about what it would be like to go to such a place. My second novel Spider Star was sparked about the idea of what a dark matter planet might be like and why it might be of interest. Different kind of places and physics than I’d seen in any science fiction I’d read before. That was what I thought would be cool to write about.
Anyone can do it. Read with your eyes open for things that seem cool. Figure out the essence of that coolness. Develop a story around it. Maybe it fits in with a character or plot that’s been floating in your imagination waiting for a setting or a plot device.
There’s a seldom-used form of science fiction that I don’t see a lot of, but I think I would like to. I’m going to call it “subtle” here for the sake of discussion, but that’s the wrong word. It’s more profound than subtle. I’d love to get to some pointers about examples. Anyway, let me explain what it is.
It’s a form of alternate history, of deep world building, in which the only difference from our world is that the nature of humanity is changed.
Fiction to me is about showing the truth about ourselves, who we are, what it means to be human. Science fiction lets us see more clearly in some cases because the contrast is turned up by holding up the mirror of aliens, or giving us new powers and seeing how real people would use them.
But in art, there are a lot of ways of showing the truth.
Conventional science fiction uses aliens a lot for the sort of purpose I’m talking about. Aliens who can’t lie, or who are ultra rational, or who have a more limited spectrum, or more extreme spectrum, of emotions.
But what about keeping it a little more human?
What would the world look like if humans didn’t lie? Or didn’t create art? Or didn’t have a sense of humor? Or didn’t have the ability to suspend disbelief? Or easily set aside beliefs? Or didn’t have religion or a concept of god? Or had sexual activity like bonobos? Or in which females were physical larger than males? Or mated for life from childhood? Or didn’t seek revenge? Or were all more optimistic? Or all more pessimistic? Or there was a different distribution of intelligence, with everyone being smart, or everyone being average with a tiny dispersion.
The negative space can draw a true picture, too. There are so many things we take for granted about the world, sometimes the only way to see how things work is to take something away and see what stands and what falls.
I first had an idea for a story like this years ago, but never could figure out how to pull it off effectively. The conceit that interested me was what if people could only identify with an actor once. That is, once you saw someone in that role, they were typecast, totally, to all viewers. There are a lot of obvious changes this would make in the world, like how theater and movies would change. But there would also be a lot of implications for how first impressions would stick, and how consistent human behavior would have to be to get people to evolve this way. My first thought was to write a story about someone like Dustin Hoffman or another actor who could take on a wide arrange of roles, convincingly, and how they might know their ability and hold out for the role of a lifetime. Seemed mildly interesting, but not quite compelling enough for a great story.
Do these kind of stories exist? Have I missed them? Or failed to notice and remember them? Maybe they’re out there, and just too subtle for the likes of me. I’m a smart guy, but sometimes I read a story and feel like I’ve missed the point.
Dune, the 1984 film directed by David Lynch, must rank as one of the most unsuccessful adaptations of all time, at least according to New Scientist staffers: the novel by Frank Herbert on which it was based was voted one of the best books in the in-house poll.
Most gratuitously scantily-clad female character:
The gold went to The Fifth Element‘s Leeloo, played by Milla Jovovitch, for her half-unwrapped-mummy outfit. Silver went to Jane Fonda’s Barbarella, heroine of the eponymous film – although one editor defended her negligible outfits: “Barbarella is actually about sex and love and all that, so it makes sense that she hardly wears anything.” Bronze went to Jeri Ryan, she of the nothing-to-the-imagination catsuit featured in Star Trek: Voyager.
Most incomprehensible:
Primer, the 2004 low-budget film directed by Shane Carruth. “Well worth watching,” said one of our editors, “though you might be excused for wondering if it makes any sense at all.”
Both ardently loved and fervently loathed:
The New Scientist staff are a contradictory bunch: Dune, The Matrix, Blade Runner and Event Horizon all featured on both the most loved and most hated lists.
They’ve got open voting for both films and books. Check it out and weigh in.
A few comments. I need to watch Primer again. I liked it, but was drinking and the ending got…confusing. I’m sure I can sort it out, but I should be totally sober at the time. I like a smart movie.
I also like a little cheesecake. Leeloo and Barbarella were sexy and had style.
I kind of like the Dune movie, too, if only for the look. The sandworms looked like sandworms.
I also love The Blob. When you see a movie when you’re eight or nine and love it, it’s hard to shake.
How I Think We’ll Discover Alien Life on Other Planets
September 25th, 2008
This is my opinion. I like to think it’s well-informed as an astronomer and science fiction novelist who spends way too much time thinking about such issues, but the fact is we’re too ignorant on this topic to speak with a lot of authority.
If nothing is there, we won’t find anything, for instance.
But let me tell you how we can be pretty sure of identifying life-bearing worlds if they’re not too uncommon, and how we can do it within our lifetimes, or sooner.
Life changes things. Oxygen in atmospheres should not be common without life. It may or may not be life as we know it, but oxygen is a pretty handy molecule for life to exploit and produce, even if it’s poison to creatures that develop in reducing atmospheres. Change the environment, life evolves.
So, an oxygen atmosphere is a sign of life. Not necessarily intelligent life.
Next step is to continue finding exoplanets, especially eclipsing exoplanets. Surveys are underway. The signal from an Earthlike body will be less than a percent, and it would be nice to identify some systems having larger planets eclipsing, too, first.
Then we make a more difficult observation: spectroscopy. Molecular oxygen has very strong absorption at around 582 nm and 786 nm (I’ve even seen it in spectra taken inside a telescope dome looking through very little air).
If we see those absorption bands, which we seen in ground-based spectra and label “telluric” (from the Earth), then we know we’ve found something. I bet the next step is a giant interferometer in space to image the sucker. Lights on the nightside would be likely proof of intelligent/civilized life.
This technology and plan is all feasible and the timescale is decades, given the will and the money.
If Earthlike planets with life are common enough, it will even work, although it will take some luck to find observable systems and pull it off.
And I remember not so long ago when I was in grad school that the existence of exoplanets was a big question mark. I may live long enough to have this fundamental question, is there alien life in the universe, answered.
One Reason Science Fiction Sucks more on TV and in Movies
September 24th, 2008
Mass audiences.
There is a belief, apparently, among producers that to have mass appeal a story has to adhere to some societal message that isn’t offensive. This is true of more than just science fiction, and applies to more than just the message (remember the white-washed version of LeGuin’s A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA on the Scifi channel?). This can ruin a great, unique story, and launch it into the realm of the mediocre rather than having the desired effect.
There are exceptions, of course, both among producers and TV shows and movies that have fared well, but I want to point out a few exceptions I came across while teaching my Science and Science Fiction class at the University of Wyoming.
Arthur C. Clark wrote a terrific little short story called “The Star” that I’ve blogged about before in this context, with the 1980s incarnation of the Twilight Zone changing its ending to make it a happy-happy Christmas tale, intentionally diminishing the powerful ending of the original. The other case is “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin, and I’ve also blogged about this story. Ironically, the 1980s Twilight Zone did this story straight up and it was a pretty good episode, while a padded version from the Scifi channel copped out to do a misdirected but politically correct version (which has some pedagogical value, but misses the author’s intent with the original).
With the stakes lower in some sense in short stories, there’s more risk taken. You can write the disturbing ending. With movies and TV, unless you’re dealing with the horror genre, the mega happy ending generally gets tagged even if it wasn’t in the original. Or, if not the happy ending, the politically correct one that is believed to offend fewer people and not posses forbidden story themes.
Anyway, I guess this is part rant, part call for purity of the orginal vision. If a story is so compelling as to be made into a tv show or movie, why change the defining elements that made it so good?
Please, don’t do it!
Anyone know any exceptions about this last point? Battlestar Galactica is one possibility that comes to mind, a darker remake that improves on the original, but I don’t know if the change is fundamental enough or mostly just a matter of style and skill.
And let me just conclude with Han shot first, George Lucas, you story-changing bastard. We all liked it just fine that way. He was a scoundral needing redemption, and smart enough to know the score.
4. Inconsistent or illogical time travel. It seems like writers just make up rules for time travel that make no sense a lot more often than other types of stories. I mean, WTF was with that fading photograph in Back to the Future? Don’t try to make too much sense of it, please, or your brain will hurt. And while I’m talking about this, bad history or irrational projection of today’s morals/beliefs on other peoples.
I stand by that (and I understand that while it made no sense, the photograph was an effective storytelling device for most viewers).
While I’m a bit of a time travel grinch because it’s done so illogically in so much science fiction, there are a number of ways that science is open and supportive of real time travel.
And I just took a moment to see what wikipedia says about time travel. It’s pretty good, actually. I recommend it for people interested in more details and links. I’ll continue with a brief summary from the point of view of a hard science guy.
First of all, relativity already allows for “easy” travel into the future through time dilation effects. Fly around at close to light speed and when you return to Earth much more time has passed. Or, hang out near the event horizon, as close as you can manage without getting torn apart (supermassive black holes have minimal tidal effects near their event horizons and are suggested), and when you climb out of the gravity well again much more time has passed.
But what about the past? How do you make a time machine in physics?
You need wormholes, which might or might not be feasible in practice, but are an allowed solution to the equations of general relativity. Then you put one end of the worm hole someplace, and the other deep in the gravity well of a black hole where time moves more slowly. You can get the two ends to exist at different times.
So then, how do physicists deal with the paradoxes?
Easy. They don’t have them.
Only self-consistent solutions are allowed, and there are plenty of them. You treat time as another variable like space and find the consistent solution. Any attempt to create a paradox, by shooting your grandfather, perhaps, cannot happen. Related to this idea of a self-consistent solution is that you have only one possible set of events that occur and they never change, and, in fact, cannot be changed. No free will in effect.
Like your freewill or like your time travel then. Not so easy to have both and have things make sense. See Heinlein’s By Your Bootstraps for a nice example of how this can work and work well in science fiction.
Keep in mind that faster than light travel is the same as traveling into the past. G. David Nordley has a nice article explaining this (doc file, some math required). If you use FTL, you really should have time travel and deal with the paradoxes in some consistent way.
There might be one way to give yourself some wiggle room on this issue: multiverses. This is what John Scalzi invokes for his FTL in his very entertaining debut novel Old Man’s War, although I’m not sure it’s entirely self-consistent.
If you accept a contentious interpretation of quantum mechanics, that an infinite number of universes exist branching apart every moment, then you just skip out on all the paradoxes and you’re really not traveling into your own history at all. I personally think this is kind of cheating on the whole time travel thing myself, but it would irritate me less than things that don’t make sense.
Anyway, that’s my take on rational, physics-based time travel in science/science fiction. There may be some variations of these I’ve skipped here, but I don’t generally think some popular types of time travel make any sense whatsoever (sorry, Back to the Future) even if they make for fun, entertaining stories. I classify them as fantasy.
Addition: There’s a new documentary from National Geographic on Time Travel that may be of interest. I’m not sure that there’s often a lot of useful information in these things, but this one is new and seems to have some awesome videos that could be inspirational.
There’s a basic misconception floating around out there about the size of the universe. Astronomers trying to be accurate are probably guilty for some of this because we always hedge our bets.
We know that the universe is big, really big, from Douglas Adams.
He’s right, but there’s a difference between infinitely large and really big, and the fact is that we don’t know for certain which term applies for sure to our universe.
People talk about the entire universe starting in a singularity, a single point, with infinite density. This is WRONG.
The entire observable universe today, previous to a period of inflation, was “infinitely small” in some sense to the limits of our physical understanding (it is possible to put some quantitative numbers on this, but it doesn’t help this discussion too much). The truth is that the big bang is consistent with being an infinitely large, infinitely dense space. As time goes on we can see farther away and see a larger universe out there (at least until some point where an accelerating expansion puts the distant universe beyond the limits of our vision).
OK, I’m not sure I’m not being confusing here. The issues ARE confusing. It’s understandable to be confused. I have been on these issues before, and probably will get confused again about them when I think too seriously about the issues.
Oh, and about the issue of size of our universe, this is hard to even define. The observable universe is the part we can see, which light has had time to cross, but keep in mind that the universe has been expanding while that light has been coming to us and has gotten bigger since then.
There are also some artifacts that might be expected if we lived in a finite universe, which is not favored, and the fact that we don’t see these features in the microwave background radiation lets cosmologists put some limits on the size of the universe.
So, let me finally put some numbers on this stuff:
We can see back to some few hundred thousand years after the big bang, about 13.7 billion light-years away. Double that for about 27 billion light-years across.
The universe has continued to expand over that time, and if we could put up a ruler “now” between us and those distant parts of space, it would measure something like three times the above answer for a simple, closed universe model. That would make it 79 billion light-years across.
However, for the preferred benchmark model we think is likely, that includes dark energy, it’s more like six times and the answer is 156 billion light-years across. And that’s just the part we can see and how big it is today some 14 billion years after the big bang. There’s more universe out there as far as we can tell.
OK, I’ve given out a list of ten things I hate about science fiction. I love more than I hate, so time to even up the score. I doubt this post will be as popular as that post, however. We love to hate more than we love to love it seems. Anyway, onward:
1. Something New. When I pick up a book or put in a DVD that’s science fiction, I expect to something new. It won’t be the world as I know it, and it won’t be a world I’ve seen before. I’m disappointed with some bad science fiction that’s just World War II in space, or cowboys and indians in space, or similar, but when I get that hint of the new, bam, I love it.
2. Sense of Wonder. Great science fiction makes me sit back in my chair and go, “whoa.” I love that feeling. It doesn’t have to be from something new, and many new things alone won’t do it, but an idea, or image, or something amazing that’s unique in my experience. Whoa. Love it.
3. Learning things. You can learn stuff from any genre — MacGyver comes to mind — and it could be argued that non-fiction is the first place to go. I have to say though that we learn through story easily and quickly. My introduction to special relativity came in Joe Haldeman’s excellent novel The Forever War. Todal forces from Larry Niven’s “Neutron Star.” And I hope that readers have learned something about novas and binary stars from my novel Star Dragon and something about dark matter from Spider Star.
4. Seeing sides of humanity possible in no other way. How would we react to the discovery of aliens? Or aliens much smarter than us? Aliens with different belief systems and good reasons for having them? Or technology that gives us opportunities and challenges we’ve never had before? Or we will have, but not yet?
5. Cool special effects. OK, I have to admit I love the spectacle. Seeing fantastic mind-blowing images on the big screen is awesome. I still remember the chill I had watching the opening of Star Wars and seeing the Imperial Destroyer, that giant ship, sliding up behind the rebel ship like some primeval space shark. Then the light sabers coming on, the holographic chess game, the whole damn movie. For 1977 it was absolutely amazing. I wish George Lucas hadn’t touched it. (Han shot first.)
6. Alien aliens. Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris is one good example. I hate the humans dressed up in costumes with funny noses posing as aliens, but give me something that acts and thinks differently, but intelligently and self-consistently, and I’m hooked. I try to do this in my own work, and have only partially succeeded in my opinion.
7. Thinking. Now, there are a lot of genres in which intellectualism can be found, but for me science fiction is always the first and best. You get puzzles dealing with aliens. You get science puzzles. You get abstract ideas. Really good science fiction makes you think.
8. Scientists portrayed as heroes, at least sometimes. I first saw Star Trek when I was six, and Mr. Spock was, for better or worse, a role model for me. He prized logic above all else. Unfortunately Kirk had to use his bravery to save the day in the end most of the time, but Spock was a leading character, super competent, strong, brave, and more, and his guiding principle was logic. And yes, he got to be the hero often enough. Star Trek II The Wrath of Kahn was great. They should have probably stopped the series there.
9. Scary monsters. I mean, surprisingly scary in ways never before conceived. Alien scared the crap out of me as a kid, just reading Alan Dean Foster’s novelization. When I actually got to see the “John Hurt” moment years later in all it’s gory glory, it was still damn scary.
10. World-building. I love really great world-building, in which a writer has created an entire environment and it feels real, and presents me with consistencies that aren’t obvious at first, but fit together wonderfully. David Brin’s Kiln People is one recent example I think is great. Ringworld by Larry Niven, and his Known Space stories, is an older one.
There’s a long tradition of writing about utopias, or, conversely, dystopias. Societies in which everything is perfect, or perfectly awful, due to some experiment in how to live, some new technologies, or a new religion or philosophy. The purpose in writing the utopia story is often to describe how the author thinks people could get along better and live in peace and harmony. Sometimes it’s more pointed, as a contrast to some particular regime in power, or satirical, and actually subtly poking holes in someone else’s ideas.
But taken at face value, a utopia is a place of peace and harmony where everybody is happy — at least as happy as possible as a group.
We were discussing these ideas on an email list I’m on for my old Austin, Texas writing group the Slugtribe. I want to recount part of the exchange I found particularly insightful about the power of story and the diversity of writing.
One member opined that he didn’t like utopia stories because they tended to be boring. Perfect society, no conflict, hence boring.
Another, Russ Williams, made a really insightful response:
In the spirit of philosophizing:
> Perfect societies have no conflict.
Depends on the definition of perfect… For a Klingon, a perfect society would surely include conflict! The more, the better! In the real world, for most libertarians and capitalists, for instance, a perfect society would include economic conflict. A perfect society could also include “low stakes” conflict, e.g. games, which could be interesting. Gamers would not find a society perfect if it literally had no conflict.
> No conflict means no drama.
Well… drama can come from other sources besides conflict. Problems with nature (“To Build a Fire”, speaking of Jack London), solving a mystery (not all mysteries involve crime/conflict) or historical riddle, psychological self-discovery, personal development and striving for excellence in some skill, voyages and exploration, scientific and technological research and development and problem solving, etc.
> No drama means it’s pretty boring.
A lot of hard SF is interesting to its readers because of the ideas more than the drama. There’s also Borges/etc-style meta-fiction that can be interesting due to clever ways of playing with writing and literature rather than any drama per se.
Anyway, I thought this was an interesting set of counterpoints to a narrower view, and a good reminder that there are ultimately no rules in writing other than that you write something interesting and worth reading. The perfect society need not be boring to read about.
Anyone have favorite utopian stories that worked well? Dystopias? I’ll toss out 1984 by Orwell as my favorite dystopia, and LeGuin’s The Dispossessed as my favorite utopian story.
Science Fiction in Science: Volcanism on Giant Earths
September 16th, 2008
It seems that massive Earth-like planets exist in other star systems, rocky bodies with masses several times higher than that of the Earth. Some scientists are trying to understand the geological structure, volcanism, outgassing, and plate tectonics. This is probably more detail than you might need to write a story, but thinking about these details and having the support for them can really deepen the world-building and the suspension of disbelief.
Anyway, interesting paper on the astro-physics preprint server today:
We provide estimates of volcanism versus time for planets with Earth-like composition and masses from 0.25 to 25 times Earth, as a step toward predicting atmospheric mass on extrasolar rocky planets. Volcanism requires melting of the silicate mantle. We use a thermal evolution model, calibrated against Earth, in combination with standard melting models, to explore the dependence of convection-driven decompression mantle melting on planet mass. Here we show that (1) volcanism is likely to proceed on massive planets with plate tectonics over the main-sequence lifetime of the parent star; (2) crustal thickness (and melting rate normalized to planet mass) is weakly dependent on planet mass; (3) stagnant lid planets can have higher rates of melting than their plate tectonic counterparts early in their thermal evolution, but melting shuts down after a few Gyr; (4) plate tectonics may not operate on high mass planets because of the production of buoyant crust which is difficult to subduct; and (5) melting is necessary but insufficient for efficient volcanic degassing – volatiles partition into the earliest, deepest melts, which may be denser than the residue and sink to the base of the mantle on young, massive planets. Magma must also crystallize at or near the surface, and the pressure of overlying volatiles must be fairly low, if volatiles are to reach the surface.
While there’s an argument to be made that the stupidest, most ridiculous clothes are those worn in real life, usually by clueless celebrities to red carpet events or the masses adopting some current short-lived fad (crocs, I’m taking about you!), it’s clear that we have it dumb in science fiction.
I’ve got no problem with odd but functional clothing (check out the link if only for the line “the underwear calls 911” — that’s sf, baby). Something like the stillsuits of Dune are pretty cool, whether or not they look good. The problem I more often have is with costuming for movies or TV, where it’s either like a flaming drag queen’s closet exploded all over everyone in sight, or everyone has on silver jumpsuits and looks seriously unhappy.
Blue jeans have been around for a hundred years, and I bet they’ll be around for a hundred more. Same with classic suits and dresses. If you throw in silly clothes into your future story, make them an integral point of the story (e.g., “super weevils ate all the cotton, so now we all wear tight black leather pants!”), or make them reflect silly fads that have always happened.
But here are my picks for the stupidest clothes in science fiction:
In this choppy clip from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (which I watched all the time as a kid, setting back my sf IQ by 20 points), we have space barbarian clothing (poor Pantherman, OMG!), outrageous shiny cocktail dresses for everyday wear, and the all important white/tron guy jump suit.
UFO was 60s inspired silliness, but if you’ve seen the cover to Charlie Stross’s new book, Saturn’s Children, it’s back with us.
And while I’m tempted for number three to go with something like Space: 1999, which had more tron-guy jumpsuits that were awful, I have to go with the campy Flash Gordon of the early 1980s. As bad as the overdone costuming is, I think it works and gives the movie some charm. It’s having fun with itself. Too many of the jumpsuit shows, from Babylon 5 to Buck Rogers to UFO to Star Trek, take themselves way too serious. The Babylon 5 outfits weren’t too bad usually, and similarly with Trek, but it’s a fine line when you’re playing serious.
I must have missed some worse ones though (and I intentionally avoided superheroes, where it can be too easy). What do you think?
