Have Lasers Fallen By The Way Side In Popular Sci-Fi?

[NecronLord]

Which, I suppose makes an economical sense, why make energy weapons when ballistics kill meat-bags just as well.
Still, it was unfortunate.

There was one of the SM Stirling novels (I think) that claimed that equipping the terminators with phased plasma rifles was the biggest mistake skynet ever made, and that if it had its time again, it'd not have done that, because with a phased plasma rifle, a terminator dies just as quick to a center of mass shot as a human does - and allowing those weapons to be captured and reverse engineered was a mistake. In that sense, using ballistics makes substantially more sense.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Which, I suppose makes an economical sense, why make energy weapons when ballistics kill meat-bags just as well.
Still, it was unfortunate.

There was one of the SM Stirling novels (I think) that claimed that equipping the terminators with phased plasma rifles was the biggest mistake skynet ever made, and that if it had its time again, it'd not have done that, because with a phased plasma rifle, a terminator dies just as quick to a center of mass shot as a human does - and allowing those weapons to be captured and reverse engineered was a mistake. In that sense, using ballistics makes substantially more sense.

This makes a great deal of sense if the T-X told the earlier version of Skynet this in T3.

[edaw1982]

SM Sterling's Novels? Weren't they the ones with the Terminator 'Ahnuld' skin based on some GSG-9 Kommando called Dieter, and it has the human with the augs trying yet again to kill off the Connors (and see to it that Skynet is 'born'?) and a vat-clone of herself taking over the mission when she gets killed?

[AMT]

SM Sterling's Novels? Weren't they the ones with the Terminator 'Ahnuld' skin based on some GSG-9 Kommando called Dieter, and it has the human with the augs trying yet again to kill off the Connors (and see to it that Skynet is 'born'?) and a vat-clone of herself taking over the mission when she gets killed?

Yup!

And it wasn't Skynet who thought that, it was actually Kyle Reese's dad during a raid on some slave farm. As in a farm run by slaves with AI overseers to feed other slaves, not breeding pens or anything like that.

[edaw1982]

Yup!

And it wasn't Skynet who thought that, it was actually Kyle Reese's dad during a raid on some slave farm. As in a farm run by slaves with AI overseers to feed other slaves, not breeding pens or anything like that.

I remember it now. And the war happens, and there's the fat I.T. guy who's dragged out from the proverbial basement into the sunlight to get his hands dirty fighting the real war with the rest of the Tech-Com lads and lassies.

Damn you Hollywood. It's not like you're lacking in materials! I'm sure an author would happily come up with some sort of deal so that their novel(s) end up in moving-picture-format as the best way to reach the greater number of people.

I mean seriously; how many people started reading Lord of the Rings, Narnia or Harry Potter after the respective movies came out? Hell I'm sure True Blood has generated many new Sookie Stackhouse fans.

[Stark]

There was one of the SM Stirling novels (I think) that claimed that equipping the terminators with phased plasma rifles was the biggest mistake skynet ever made, and that if it had its time again, it'd not have done that, because with a phased plasma rifle, a terminator dies just as quick to a center of mass shot as a human does - and allowing those weapons to be captured and reverse engineered was a mistake. In that sense, using ballistics makes substantially more sense.

Not only is this a pretty funny idea of 'biggest mistake', you have to hand it to EU authors to just make shit up.

[Sarevok]

Were plasma rifles shown to one shot kill Terminators in the movies ? I don't remember so. They just hit with the force of a grenade launcher while maintaining hire ROF. It's only in later materials that plasma guns are magical armor ignoring weapons that makes a terminator just as mortal as human infantry. I would have preferred plasmas to be hard hitting weapons that can bring down a Termie with sustained fire. Termies can sit in the passenger compartment of a fuel tanker that exploded and come out relatively unscathed. Any "plasma" weapon that one shots a termie by melting through that armor is going to cause some epic explosions when it hits - basically a handheld small directed nuclear weapon.

[jollyreaper]

Theoretically, there's some sort of upper limit on just how good of armor you can make out of science-based materials for a given volume. What makes a Terminator so deadly in the past is that civilians and law enforcement have weapons meant for tackling squishy humans. I don't think that a Terminator could plausibly shrug off rounds from a .50 cal, for example. And we did see it get blown apart with a homemade pipe bomb. Therefore an RPG could probably do a number on it, too. Hitting it would be the tough part, of course.

Future humans are already at a disadvantage versus a machine mind that never rests, never sleeps, and has no fatigue. Their weapons would have to even the odds a lot or else there's no reason why they could possibly survive, let alone win.

Frankly, the whole Terminator future history never quite held together for me because it seems like it should be a war of attrition and machines would have to be easier to build than humans are to raise, especially given the dicey food situation. The Taliban in Afghanistan have it nice compared to humans in the Termieverse and they're still looking at any assault on Western bases being a suicide mission. The only reason why they have a chance at victory is because the West isn't changing the operations plan to straight out genocide. They just hunker down until we give up and that's a win Skynet doesn't have any rules of engagement.

[Zaune]

Same reason you don't see any more straight sci-fi about the jungles of Venus, or food pills, or anything else real scientists have actually tested and received negative results for: Science fiction fans tend to know a bit about actual science, and will be unable to take you seriously.

[Ford Prefect]

Science fiction fans tend to know a bit about actual science

It's more like science fiction fans tend to have a number of dogmatic preconceptions and are largely quite rigid in how they respond to things which fall outside those preconceptions. This is dressed up in rhetoric about 'knowing science', but ninety nine times out of a hundred the average science fiction fan knows as much science as the average bucket of tepid water.

[Zaune]

Depends on the science fiction fan, I suppose. But I stand by my central point: It's pretty much impossible to write straight science-fiction, however hard or soft, using concepts and ideas that are widely known to be either horribly impractical or just flat-out wrong. People with the relevant knowledge tend to notice, and find it rather distracting.
You can get away with this if it's some really obscure piece of scientific theory that only someone with at least a bachelor's degree in a relevant field would understand well enough to spot the error, but you can read about directed-energy weapons research anywhere from Scientific American to Aviation Week; anyone with greater understanding of science than the aforementioned bucket of tepid water knows laser cannons aren't all they're cracked up to be.

[Ford Prefect]

Dude the new Doctor Who is wildly popular and has less to do with science than the Chronicles of fucking Narnia.

[Stofsk]

Zaune, your point is ultimately specious; you're right that things like 'ray guns' aren't scientifically plausible, but at the same time Ford's point is that the vast majority of fans, simply, don't care. I'm not quite sure what Frod's beef with sci-fi fans is, because I wouldn't go so far as to say they're scientifically illiterate. Sci-fi fans, I would imagine, would at least be intelligent enough to follow some scientific concepts even if they don't fully understand them. While the average TV viewer would watch, I dunno, Masterchef or something.

[Havok]

Depends on the science fiction fan, I suppose. But I stand by my central point: It's pretty much impossible to write straight science-fiction, however hard or soft, using concepts and ideas that are widely known to be either horribly impractical or just flat-out wrong. People with the relevant knowledge tend to notice, and find it rather distracting.
You can get away with this if it's some really obscure piece of scientific theory that only someone with at least a bachelor's degree in a relevant field would understand well enough to spot the error, but you can read about directed-energy weapons research anywhere from Scientific American to Aviation Week; anyone with greater understanding of science than the aforementioned bucket of tepid water knows laser cannons aren't all they're cracked up to be.

What a bunch of fucking bullshit. Knowing science doesn't make anything but the hardest sci-fi suck... so pretty much nothing on TV or in movies... ever.

Are you sitting there telling me that people with scientific knowledge can't watch Star Trek or Star Wars because they know you can't go faster than the speed of light and that will make it too distracting to make the show good or from them liking it?

And do you know what us NORMAL, non-over analyzing, non-fucking fattynerd, buckets of tepid water think when they see really efficient and effective laser cannons? Or even those with a mild to perfect understanding of lasers... "Hey, they must have made some improvements over the years."

[Simon_Jester]

Over-analyzers are overrepresented here, and probably in similar communities (Spacebattles? I don't know, I don't go to Spacebattles). If you spend a lot of time here, it's easy to forget how small a fraction of SF fans actually care about "laser guns are scientifically improbable this article I found online proves it!"

That can manifest in two ways, depending on whether you were an overanalyzer to start with. Either way, it isn't pretty.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Avoiding the greater debate for a moment, think about what you can do with a laser.

Assume fairly serious computer power behind it, frequency tunable and intensity controllable beam. You have a;

range and angle measuring device.
Topographic sensor.
Ladar detector.
Spectrograph.
Communications device.
Welder.
Cutting torch.
Heater.
Freeze ray.
Media player.

Probably more I'm not thinking of- all of that besides the fact that it's an almost perfectly accurate and potentially very long ranged direct fire weapon. A decent plausible-midfuture laser longarm would be much more than just a weapon, it would be a multitool with an enormously diverse range of functions and abilities; and blowing things up possibly the least of them.


There is at least a case to be made that what's holding them back from reality is not so much the impracticality of laser weapons as the impracticality of the very largely FUBAR procurement system trying and failing to develop them, in America at least. Difficulties exist- but the organisation trying to overcome them is hideously wasteful and shambolic.


On the larger issue, remember when science fiction was supposed to be "a rehearsal of the future"? Scientific knowledge mattered to that zeitgeist, because it was supposed to be hovering on the fringes of potentially actually happening, there might actually be a future that looked like this. Hard SF that stands up to analysis is mostly a literature of optimism.

Soft SF- or science fantasy- isn't about a reality that needs to be taken seriously because it might be round the corner, and that can actually be quite depressing at times.
Probably closer to the civilisational truth, though- the metaargument here is that we don't need to care because we don't have any say in the future, it isn't just around the corner, and we don't own the corner anyway. We don't need to understand it, it'll just come washing over us like more of the present, and we can't do anything about it.

That is outright nihilism; and I refuse to embrace it, because life's already shit enough without giving up.

[Simon_Jester]

I don't think it's that simple, because there's another meta-argument running in parallel when it comes to soft SF: "The sky is ultimately not the limit; what we now consider impossible isn't necessarily, and we can- likely will- live in a world that works very differently from the one we live in now in almost every relevant physical and social detail."

Think about it- to the average man in the country lane from the time of the Napoleonic Wars, we're already living soft science fiction, and have been for fifty to a hundred years. So there's at least precedent.

Institutions that loomed large to that man are now seen as irrelevant, the social equivalent of an appendix: 'Church? Crown? Haven't you had yours removed yet?' The technological possibilities changed the way we live, then did it again, and again and again; that man would recognize why we do most of the things we do, but not how, or the way changing possibilities have changed our priorities. We worry a lot less about starvation, and probably a lot more about getting sick, for example. Because the former is now practically impossible, and the latter is something we could credibly hope to avoid.

He took for granted a world in which monarchies and churches ruled the roost, and most people lived their lives in a very narrow realm of territory. Within his children's lifetime that was obviously starting to change; by now it's almost laughable- you couldn't live that lifestyle if you wanted to without being seen as something of a joke.

A lot of soft SF is about taking the 'essential verities' of modern life and walking away from them, technologically or socially. Usually it only manages to succeed at one or the other, mind you, and not always even then. But the attempt is there; it's not simply a fantasist's exercise in "imagining the future is a pointless exercise in entertainment." Any more than it was in the Golden Age, when people were writing stories about heroic astronauts conquering the galaxy with ray-gun and slide rule and regular cigarette breaks.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Some soft SF, yes- you could argue that Star Wars falls into that category come to think of it. Although mostly unintentionally. Not the entire category. Not the laser six shooters in space and Asteroid Gold Rush types. Not most of it, even.

What I'm objecting to isn't that, isn't imagining the future- another one from Ted Sturgeon, incidentally; "Science Fiction writers don't try to predict the future. they're usually trying to prevent it."
Lawrence Krauss' The Physics of Star Trek is actually a perfect illustration of

Are you sitting there telling me that people with scientific knowledge can't watch Star Trek or Star Wars because they know you can't go faster than the speed of light and that will make it too distracting to make the show good or from them liking it?

- because yes, it is really like that. Krauss rips into it, the number of times he says something like "Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the show, But-"- is at least once a chapter, into double figures at least. Praises it as entertainment, but goes about demolishing any claim it has to be humanly or technologically feasible.

What I object to is that modern popular SF and its' fans so often seem so gloom- laden and doom- laden that it's entirely lost sight of wanting to be about the future; wanting there to be a future that we actually have anything to do with.

[Simon_Jester]

Heck- Trek itself is very much about "a future we want to be in." There are things wrong with the future it portrays, but most of the things wrong with us aren't on the list. And half of them are at most subtextual, read-between-the-lines, often by observers who seem to take a perverse joy in imagining the future as a miserable place. You can find that on the main page, if you look.

What you describe is not, in my opinion, a problem with soft SF itself. It's a problem with the fanbase, and with living in a depressed society. One which in the West seems to be asking, half-mutely: "the Cold War's over; are you sure we won?"

Me, I think it'll pass.

[someone_else]

What I object to is that modern popular SF and its' fans so often seem so gloom- laden and doom- laden that it's entirely lost sight of wanting to be about the future; wanting there to be a future that we actually have anything to do with.

Fiction of any kind has always been about "see people do stuff you cannot do in real life". How it happens is and has always been... irrelevant .

I'm pretty damn sure it was flavoured as "tomorrow we will be like that" in the times of Cold War, more heavily in english-speaking countries (or at least much less so in Italy), but that was just smart propaganda. And even then it was mostly soft rubbish.

Now that it's over and the propaganda trumpets are rusting, it's back to its original role.

But don't feel bad, it's only those that lived in those years that will feel the difference (or nerds like us anyway ), new generations will eat up the latest fictional bullshit and feel fully entertained as nothing happened.
For example fantasy is going pretty damn strong again, regardless of how I FUCKING HATE ELVES.
And that's the form of fiction that ruled the day before SF was invented.

As long as I don't see westerns raised from the dead, I can survive it.

[Simon_Jester]

Science fiction predates the Cold War, you know.

And frankly I can't tell what you're talking about- "that was just smart propaganda." What do you mean? The notion of a better tomorrow is propaganda? For whom? If both sides create it (and there's some damn good science fiction from the Soviet bloc), is it really somehow an obsolete relic of the era?

Moreover I think this misses the point- one of the great gaps in modern civilization is that it changes so quickly, we have to think ahead or we risk losing everything. ECR's criticism is based on the idea that science fiction has a role to play, in encouraging us to think ahead. By ignoring that and saying fiction is only there for entertainment, you... really aren't answering his criticism at all.

[jollyreaper]

Over-analyzers are overrepresented here, and probably in similar communities (Spacebattles? I don't know, I don't go to Spacebattles). If you spend a lot of time here, it's easy to forget how small a fraction of SF fans actually care about "laser guns are scientifically improbable this article I found online proves it!"

That can manifest in two ways, depending on whether you were an overanalyzer to start with. Either way, it isn't pretty.

Yeah. Take whatever you think is the best, most awesome piece of SF ever with the writing and acting and big ideas and find someone else who says they like it. You're ready to start geeking out over all those deep things and they're like "Yeah, 'splosions!" His money's as green as yours; producers don't care.

[Stark]

There's nothing 'deep' about rejecting a film because it's not 'scientifically accurate'. Indeed, doing so is arguably very shallow as it devalues every other element of the work.

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah. Take whatever you think is the best, most awesome piece of SF ever with the writing and acting and big ideas and find someone else who says they like it. You're ready to start geeking out over all those deep things and they're like "Yeah, 'splosions!" His money's as green as yours; producers don't care.

...And your point is?

[jollyreaper]

Yeah. Take whatever you think is the best, most awesome piece of SF ever with the writing and acting and big ideas and find someone else who says they like it. You're ready to start geeking out over all those deep things and they're like "Yeah, 'splosions!" His money's as green as yours; producers don't care.

...And your point is?

Just amused at how vast the gulf can be between two people who nominally agree with each other. One person likes Game of Thrones for intrigue and characters, another appreciates the tits and gore but is bored by the talkie bits.