First Post!

OK, this blog is the result of some serious insomnia, but I'm following the popular advice such that when you can't sleep you should get up and do something. Like blog about nothing really that important. I already have a personal blog, but the ideas flitting through my sleep-deprived brain have convinced me that they need their own special place on the interwebs.

So I got to thinking about science fiction in pop culture and began to think "what if..." when it came to key ideas in these stories. There are lots of things in popular sci-fi movies and books that when closely examined are just silly. And there are lots of blogs and web sites committed to pointing out the scientific fallacies of said ideas, but this is not that kind of a blog. I'm a bit of a nerd, but I'm not keen on explaining why, in great scientific detail, time travel is impossible or the viability of transporters. I'll leave that stuff to the hard-core nerds. What is stuck in my brain at the moment are key ideas in pop sci-fi that don't make sense even when you do suspend some disbelief about the validity of the proposed technology of the future. I'm talking about the things that should be obvious to sci-fi authors when they create some kind of futuristic thingamajig to make their story cool, then put it in the hands of their characters only to use the technowidget in a rather mundane fashion.

Let me give you a brief example of what I'm talking about here. Star Trek: The Next Generation dealt often with the concept of a holodeck on the Enterprise. A holodeck is the ultimate virtual reality environment. Anything you can imagine can be done, and as far as the participant is concerned it is completely real to the point where one could risk personal injury or even death. Now assuming one could create such a wonderfully powerful device, would you really use it in the ways portrayed on the show. Lazy sci-fi writers often used it as a plot device to write a story that didn't involve expensive to produce space battles. Lazier still, they often used it to allow their characters to interact with 20th century periods of "history". Lame. Do you really think anyone use a holodeck to play billiards (several episodes of ST:Voyager contain scenes of billiards on the holodeck) or are people in the future really that unimaginative? Riiiiiight. If you could give people the power to live out any fantasy, you'd have trouble getting them back out into the real world. I can only shudder to think of the absolutely depraved and perverse things people would try knowing it's "not real".

This is what I call Stupid Science Fiction. There are a few ways we can clearly define this term.

a) Imposing a contemporary mindset upon a futuristic technology such that said technology is squandered or misused. A classic example is a flying car. If your car can fly, do you really need a car?

b) Defining a future technology for no other reason than to propel a plot point in a story, and then omitting the idea when it is no longer convenient. ST:TNG was good at this. They'd come up with all sorts of groundbreaking technology to get out of a jam and then later forget about it in other episodes.

c) Defining a future technology while placing artificial limits upon its use. This is done sometimes out of sheer lack of imagination, but sometimes it is done to create a plot point. If you have the ability to communicate in real-time across the reaches of space, will you really have trouble getting audio AND video, as seen in numerous Star Trek episodes? If Luke Skywalker has a hovering land speeder, why do so many of the vehicles have wheels?

These definitions may grow, but this should be enough to get me started. Have fun reading!