3 ms·
how dare you besmirch the Epstein drive
by wpasc 3y ago
how dare you besmirch the Epstein drive
- myrmidon 3y agoDon't get me wrong I obviously liked the books enough to read them, but I still firmly believe that it is vitally important for sci-fi authors to just shut up about scientific details that our current understanding is not equipped to provide. There are books that are WAYY farther from our current techlevel, like Murderbot Diaries or Ancillary Justice, which handle this much better. I just don't see how adding pseudoscience improves ANYTHING-- better to just gloss over it.
- fennecfoxy 3y agoAh, lovely to see Murderbot mentioned, I've just been re-reading it. I think it's fine to take scifi tech with a grain of salt; most authors skip the absolute technical details so we just have to assume that things work in some way we don't currently understand. Someone did the calculation for the Epstein and it doesn't look great: http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-expanses-epstein-drive.html http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-expanses-epstein-dri... but only based on the vague technical details provided in the books. The Jean Le Flambeur trilogy is one of my favourites, it does a LOT of quantum hand-waving but the price is worth it for all of the amazing things in that universe. "This sounds so fucking cool" > "That wouldn't work irl" for good sci-fi imo. As long as they don't mess with thoroughly understood concepts and rely on "things we don't know yet".