wmartin@BRL-TGR.ARPA (05/22/84)
From: Will Martin <wmartin@BRL-TGR.ARPA>
(Opening trumpet fanfare...)
Regarding the comment by dartvax!johnc that "V" should be treated as
entertainment and we shouldn't complain about the goofs, flaws, and
defects, or pick at it: Since I was one of the earlier submitters
of criticisms of "V", I shall take up this hurled gauntlet and fire
it back...
1) It is also "entertaining" to mock and jeer at drivel. Talking
back to the characters, catching the writers or producers in a flub,
or otherwise picking at a show is about the same as yelling at the
umpire. A grand American tradition which we have a duty to uphold.
If you do it to the TV screen at home, or to a community of like-minded
people on the net, this is totally harmless, as you bother no one else
(unlike heckling at a movie showing).
2) {IMPORTANT POINT} It is just as easy to do something RIGHT as it is
to do it WRONG. TV people just don't care! (Also some moviemakers.)
This was explicitly discussed by several commentors. "V" could have been made
with exactly the same cast, at exactly the same cost, employing exactly
the same staff, and come out to be even more entertaining, if the
science had been right, the motives valid, the characters believeable,
and the plot logical. All it would have took for this to be the case is for
the writer(s) to be more knowledgeable and better skilled, and the other
personnel involved to have CARED if things were right!
(Of course, this doesn't mean we have to explain FTL travel or get
into elaborate technical detail. We can accept certain pseudoscientific
elements as axioms to make SF possible, like interstellar travel,
matter transmission, telepathy, or other SF standard features. But
it doesn't cost anything to make better choices of plot elements
that can have either rational explanations or good-sounding pseudo-reasoning
behind them. For example, in "V", the aliens could have been grabbing
some complex biological compound secreted in human pituitaries which
could not be produced with recombinant DNA techniques, instead of water.
Sure, we could probably poke holes in that idea (so what do you expect
for off the top of my head, already?), but it isn't so OBVIOUSLY SILLY
as interstellar water rustling! That would justify them grabbing and
preserving humans as cargo, which could be an important plot element.)
The problem is that having obvious stupidity presented as important-to-
the-story justification spoils the entertainment value for people
who have the training/intelligence/common sense to instantly recognize
such nonsense as the crap it is. If you have to think about it, and then
later realize that it just isn't right, that isn't so bad. A lot of fiction
falls in that category. You can be entertained by it for the time being,
because you are not doing deep analysis of the details.
When you get something as blatantly incorrect as "the moon is made of
green cheese" presented as something you have to accept in order to
be entertained in continuing to watch or read the rest of the story,
the writer has failed to do his job. If he presents something false as true
which only one viewer in a thousand will catch, he's done a much better
job. And if he presents something false as true, but you can only figure
that out after taking a graduate course in astrophysics, he's done a
pretty damn good job!
"V" fell in category one. It is intuitively obvious to anyone with
enough intelligence to balance a checkbook that a number of the basic
premises upon which the structure of the story was based were nonsense.
This required no training or advanced education on the part of the viewer.
Yet this was not necessarily the case! It would not have taken much
revision to move it to category two. If it had, it would have been a
landmark in TV SF. It could have been just as much a soap opera in character
development and behavior, and that wouldn't have mattered. (After all,
all characters in drama, literature, or tv behave in an unreal manner --
if they didn't, there wouldn't be a story in most cases. We are used to
this in everything from "I Love Lucy" to "Masterpiece Theatre".)
There are serious objections to bad programming with an "SF" label, as it
degrades the reputation of a field which we admire. But those are minor,
as we don't really care too much what "they" think, anyway. Probably,
we mainly hack at "V" out of disappointment. All that effort, money, and
time could have been used to make something we would have liked a lot
better. As soon as I rule the world, I'll see that it's done right...
Willsteven@qubix.UUCP (Steven Maurer) (05/25/84)
[grrr] >> > What Einstein discovered, is a new (UNBREAKABLE) law: much like >> > the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And ALL THE FUTURE SCIENCE IN >> > THE WORLD, will not change it, or allow one to get around it >> > somehow. >> This unfortunalely is not the case. What Einstein did was create >> a new formulation of mechanics that works better than Newtonian >> Mechanics in some situations. When you don't fool around with >> velocities close to the speed of light old Newton is fine. When >> tested in areas, for example: the mass increase of electrons at >> SLAC, Einsteins calculations prove very good. However, no how >> many experiments confirm a law it only takes one differing >> experiment to invalidate this law for those areas. Science >> dosen't make the universe what it is. Science is an attempt to >> predict what will happen based on previous observations of the >> universe. Remember Clarke's law. You never know. Alas, Einstein discovered much more than that. He discovered that the very nature of the Universe, is considerably different than what we imagine. Travelling FTL, is absurd, because the entire concept of "faster" depends upon what frame of reference you are in. Speed, in and of itself, does not exist -- thus, one cannot be travelling "close to the speed of light", one can only be almost C out of synch with another object. The universe is warped in the fourth dimension, so that everything, at every velocity, is in the exact center of the universe. There are a lot more discoveries than this, but I won't bother to go into detail. Suffice it to say, that space empires, and FTL drives, derive their origin from the refusal to believe in a non-NEWTONIAN universe. But again, not all the future science in the world, is going to change the univewrse back to a newtonian one. Steven Maurer
guy@rlgvax.UUCP (Guy Harris) (06/01/84)
> Alas, Einstein discovered much more than that. He discovered > that the very nature of the Universe, is considerably different > than what we imagine. Travelling FTL, is absurd, because the > entire concept of "faster" depends upon what frame of reference you > are in. Speed, in and of itself, does not exist -- thus, one > cannot be travelling "close to the speed of light", one can only > be almost C out of synch with another object. The universe is > warped in the fourth dimension, so that everything, at every > velocity, is in the exact center of the universe. > There are a lot more discoveries than this, but I won't bother > to go into detail. Suffice it to say, that space empires, and > FTL drives, derive their origin from the refusal to believe in > a non-NEWTONIAN universe. But again, not all the future science > in the world, is going to change the univewrse back to a newtonian > one. The most one can say is "FTL travel is ruled out by Einsteinian mechanics"; Einsteinian mechanics will never be "proven" (nor will the Second Law of Thermodynamics) correct and unbreakable in a mathematical sense. It may be, however, that no theory permitting FTL travel which fits current observations can be constructed; it's already been shown (to take another example) that no "hidden variable" theories of a certain kind can be constructed that will exactly reproduce the predictions of quantum mechanics. No future theories that correctly describe the universe will describe a Newtonian one, to be sure. And frankly, if I were given the opportunity to bet a large sum of money that FTL won't be discovered within the next 1 million years, and offered the chance to collect on that bet, I'd make it. But I wouldn't claim it was absolutely a logical impossibility. It's just damn unlikely. Guy Harris {seismo,ihnp4,allegra}!rlgvax!guy