10 Minutes Into The Future

I thank my lady for the title of this article! It was and is apt.

For many the concept of cyberpunk dystopianism was first introduced in Max Headroom, seen in the Max Headroom series on ABC from MAR 1987 to MAY 1988.  With fourteen shows produced, 13 were aired in the US and the 14th was aired as part of the Australian run of the series. It is a blended-season program much like The Prisoner by Patrick McGoohan which ran 17 episodes. Both programs had a first and second season squashed into a limited production run.  Max Headroom had an abbreviated first season and second season while The Prisoner was scheduled for a second season but had that cut and McGoohan wanted to wrap up the entire thought schema in one season a bit longer than normal.

Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future was a tv-movie in the UK, and the tagline '20 Minutes into the Future' was seen at the start of each episode of the series. Many of the elements seen in Max Headroom draw their lineage through cinematic productions of dystopian futures.  The most notable of them is Blade Runner (1982) directed by Ridley Scott, and the entire look of the city of Network 23 and Max Headroom could fit seamlessly into that dystopian future without missing a beat.  The same low level social dynamics of a post-futuristic world gone to ruin is part and parcel of both, down to fires in oil drums and the real lack of cars at street level.  So, too, are the social interactions between levels of society similar from the highest corporate level (Dr. Eldon Tyrell in Blade Runner and Ped Xing in Max Headroom) through the techno-geniuses that support them (J. F. Sebastian in Blade Runner and Bryce Lynch in Max Headroom) all the way down to the lowest level operatives of Matt Deckard and Edison Carter, who are the draw and appeal for their differences in being perhaps not human and more than just human both at the same time although in starkly different ways.  One can picture Matt Deckard confronting Roy Batty and then having Edison Carter land in on the confrontation with the help of Blank Reg and Big Time Television.

For all of that there are other precursors to cyberpunk television beyond just Blade Runner, although it hands off so many visual cues that the relationship is hard to miss. What makes it distinct from the 1980 made for TV movie Brave New World, is that the Aldous Huxley dystopianism is one of anti-septic neatness which is reflected by the anti-septic nature of thinking.  That world is a world which, however, bears resemblance to both Blade Runner and Max Headroom in that books are absent not because they are repressed or destroyed, like in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 which was made into a BBC film in 1966, but because they are unwanted by a population now beyond learning.  Like in Fahrenheit 451, however, television now plays that central role which makes for the dystopian Max Headroom vision, and it is far more powerful than the multi-wall arrangements in Bradbury's work and closer to the Big Brother two-way dystopia of Orwell's 1984.  Much of the television movie adaptation in 1954 or the regular movie adaptation of 1984 in 1956 carries through as cinematic reminders in later works, often with the stark external scenery updated to cast a pall in colors that are dark and muted in modern works, of which Max Headroom takes part.  Coming from that lineage of Big Brother, two-way television, corporations blending into the State, and the removal of knowledge media from the world, Max Headroom gives us a glimpse of the cyberpunk pathway.  This is a pathway that has an endpoint in other films like Mad Max (1979) and Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) complete with mohawk haircuts and lots of leather jackets and leggings.

It is amazing to think that in the span of 1979 to 1982 the entire cyberpunk dystopian future was encapsulated visually and thematically with the decaying and corrupt State with corporatism (and one can't help but see Rollberball (1975) as a precursor to this). From a 1984 collapse through the time of Max Headroom and Blade Runner is a part of this arc.  After that then goes through a further decay because they depend on resources that are failing, until the world falls into complete ruin in Mad Max and Mad Max 2.  The relatively anti-septic dystopian vision of an Aldous Huxley requires a system that is, itself, so highly dependent upon automation and resources that it cannot last. The enforced ignorance and numbing of the senses are preludes to the ideas later reviewed by other dystopian works,the outcome of which gets a transition phase seen in A Clockwork Orange (1971) where Anthony Burgess juxtaposes wartime lack of morality with everyday life and puts them together.  Stanley Kubrick in many ways sets the tone for the later dystopian works in that film to show a highly decadent society with highly authoritarian State on the verge of internal collapse as the State comes to embrace barbarism fully.  In Max Headroom those who see such barbarism are in the minority, but have Edison Carter to intrepidly risk life and limb to get the story of how the corporate world and utilization of State power by Network 23 is going wrong.

If there is anything that Max Headroom does represent it is that cry against the dying of the light, the collapse of the civilized State into its corporatist system which is, itself, not sustainable without a civilized population at its core.  That State has already removed the off-switch from televisions and utilize two-way technology to track ratings and, thusly, power.  Blood games (ala Rollerball) are not embraced while shrugging off the deaths of citizens due to commercials is seen by the new generation of elites as the price to pay for ratings.  From that and the body banks, lifted nearly directly from Larry Niven's Known Space works, comes a lowered valuation of life even when the birth of a baby is still seen as a special event even though the backdrop of the life that child will have is a grim one.  This is dystopian fiction with a bite to it and the slow degradation of man to becoming viewer in the hands of the media is one that begins to overwhelm, indeed not just co-opt but buy out, the State.  The adoring media of the Left today becomes the controlling media of politics and society tomorrow.  Big Brother is Network 23, indeed Orwell only lacked putting the BBC behind Big Brother to complete that circle in 1984.

For all of the darkness of a world sliding into Mad Max realms, there are glimmers of a future that doesn't need to be this bad.  First and foremost is that the Tyrell Corporation, Big Brother nor the Fordian State of Brave New World all lacked an older cohort that remembers not just ethics but displays them.  In this Network 23 has a person that is unlike all the others in a position of power in those dystopian futures: someone who has qualms about what he has helped to create and sees it as toxic.  That person is not Edison Carter, per se, nor Theora Jones his controller to get him to stories, nor Murray their producer, all of which are front-line functionaries to the programming for live shows which can be replaced or interjected at a moment's notice.  That person who is so different is Ben Cheviot who demonstrates ethical underpinnings in pulling lethal commercials and allows for the complicity of Network 23 working to get blood sports into the line-up even against the pull of ratings. For all the fun (or not so fun) parts shown for everyone else in the system, Ben Cheviot has a keen awareness of just what can and cannot be done to start showing the problems of the system that he has helped to promote.  Edison Carter would be a top, and soon dead, journalist as seen in the first program if not for Ben Cheviot willing to back him against the rest of Network 23's interests of the moment. While Ben Cheviot got to the Board of Directors of Network 23 he must have demonstrated competence and ability to deal with competitors to a large degree as it is a cut-throat position just to be on that board.  By having a better 'feel' for viewership and how ratings work, he is able to become the Chairman of the Board and allows Edison Carter to start showing the underbelly of Network 23, the State and corporations... because it is good for ratings.  Ethics sells.  Ethics are power when chained to moral certainty.

Edison Carter, Theora Jones, Murray, Blank Reg and others also show this form of moral certainty and ethics that go with them.  In many ways Blank Reg (a Blank is someone who has gotten themselves erased from all records to be truly free) lives that life of moral and ethics, live or die, continually and is an energetic force to be reckoned with.  Although pirate station Big Time Television may not get the ratings, it does work a wedge into television of an older sort that he still remembers.  In this way Blank Reg is the counter-part to Ben Cheviot, although the two could never be mistaken, their firm standing upon what they see as right and wrong is not only similar but their requirements have put them in crucial positions on either side of the Network/public divide in which the State is part of the Network.  Blank Reg isn't just hitting at the television level but at the level of a Blank, which is to say trying to get people to actually ingest more than television as part of their thought processes.  Like Brave New World books aren't burned, just not circulated or used, they are seen as relics of a past long gone and no longer needed.  Yet it is Blank Reg who tries to get people interested in reading (are they even literate anymore?) and touts books as 'a non-volatile storage media... you should have one'.  In our modern age of e-readers what will become of books?  Not text on screen but printed books?  That non-volatile storage media is immune to EMP and CME effects, they will survive them while your e-reader, your PC, your laptop, the servers that serve up text, and the rest of the modern infrastructure goes away.  Hardcopy back-up can be burned but cannot be erased, cannot be changed once printed, and if carefully tended can last many life times.  Your PC is obsolete the day you buy it.  Ditto your cellphone and all other digital media.

The people of that digital media are represented by Bryce Lynch, late teen techno-nerd, and his work for Network 23.  Bryce is somewhat detached from the goings-on around him and in his own self-created world of technology.  He is more than willing to create commercials that kill (although only as a side-effect of those who no longer exercise ANY), more than able to take a brain-dump of Edison Carter for the old Chairman of the Board to protect him, and then willing to help Edison Carter at various points throughout the program.  In many ways a family style dynamic between Edison, Theora, Bryce and Ben form, although it is very underplayed it does have effects on Bryce to both humanize him and show that he does care about people close to him.  He takes part in the creation of digital personalities from direct brain dumps, starting with his pet parrot (who shows up in the first episode and then is replaced by a screen of the digital parrot thereafter in its cage) and ending with Edison Carter which yields the namesake of the show: Max Headroom.

Max Headroom is only tangentially the star of his own program, with Edison Carter (the source for Max's altered ego) being the real one.  Max is a completely digital being (although there were no digital effects when the series was produced to make him, so it was done through SFX with make-up and only a digital background done for later episodes) who is born in the lab of Bryce Lynch.  Max's home is the Network 23 internal network which has external feeds to two-way televisions.  Thus Max starts out with the ability to grow in capability and, when he is threatened with erasure, he can leave Network 23 for the rest of the external system.  Max, as Edison's altered ego with far fewer inhibitions, is in turns smarmy, insightful, comical and devious and a total creature of the Network ratings system.  Yet he is also its critic beyond mere critique, as he asks what are the effects of this visual pap that is pushed out to the world at large? 

For all of the sometimes juvenile humor of Max, he is also a person that grows beyond that rather shallow exterior of head and shoulders, giving insightful questions into the nature of authority, television, the State and the human condition.  While he may no longer remember much of what it feels like to have a body, Max Headroom grows into this larger system that gives him more than a physical presence and one that is at once as omniscient as Big Brother and as limited as the humor of a teenager.  Scary in one regard, yes, but he does not have a controlling nature and is as irrepressible, and yet open, as Edison Carter.  For an altered ego he is still learning about the Id and Super Ego, those parts necessary to create a solid moral view with ethics and compassion.  That he has that capability and shows it is beyond any doubt, because Edison Carter has them.  That these are skewed by his environment is also without a doubt as Max Headroom is at once more and far less than human, and for all the faux humbleness of a game show host he often displays real doubts about himself and who he is.

So if, when the show was aired, it was 20 minutes into the future where is it now?

My lady answered 10 minutes and she is absolutely right on that in many ways.

What would it take to subvert the modern Internet into a purveyor of Network 23 (and other networks in the power grab)?  The answer is very little: a government power grab in support of television over other forms of communication, probably done by 'emergency measure' as is hinted at in 1984.  Two-way television is, essentially, here in many regards but to be truly controlled as is seen in 1984 or Max Headroom would require a wholesale change of television sets... without off buttons.  And as the Internet now is part of the cellphone network, it would also control your two-way digital phone as they already do for emergency tracking.  Adjust the software and the 'off button' goes away.  As a 'government emergency' requires control of information, any information deemed 'subversive' or 'anti-government' will be removed as 'dangerous speech'.  Like the blog post you are reading.

To be clear the Internet is a threat to centralized power as it is a distributed, shared set of networks (a network of networks) that works via a set of common address standards.  Any government that can get a hold of the address look-up tables can, quite literally, partition the networks from each other.  By blocking off entire blocks of networks and then screening them, speech and thought that isn't sanctioned is restricted.  What happens after that is a promulgation of 'sanctioned' software that only allows for connections to sanctioned blocks of the network.  Like Network 23 and its cohorts in Max Headroom.  With that said there is a set of hacker skills that has permeated society as, from the very first episode, we see that Theora (Edison's controller for live feeds) has skills to get past common and everyday computer security not only inside Network 23 but outside of it as well.  In contrast Murray, members of the Board of Network 23 and various others do not have such skills to any great extent, but members of the Blank community do as it is a survival necessity.  Edison Carter has rudimentary security skills, mostly to deal with physical security, and his friends also have a range of skills from simple deception of security systems to skills close to those of Bryce Lynch.   

Getting around security blocks to get information is one of the skills necessary in the newsroom, necessary to criminals, necessary to the Blanks and only the elites can do without even the basics of them.  In a post-Internet segmented world the ability to get around the segmentation and through security routines: the very security that the Networks and others seem to think they need make common trespass against such systems widespread not out of malice but to just get work done and no one thinks anything is wrong about it.  Even when they go after the most secure records, it is done with an acknowledgement that there are penalties, but nothing morally wrong about it.  Pervasive security doesn't make anything more secure and, contrarily, makes going against security measures common place.  For all the security that Network 23 and others seek, they just add complexity to getting around such measures and get no real security against the mildly determined.

At the top of this realm is Max, although he is unskilled at security circumvention he is born directly into this cyberworld.  He can and does run afoul of security measures, yes, but he also demonstrates an ability to move from network to network, area to area, building to building without much regard for who owns what or what security measures they have in place.  If the centralized network headquarters are bastions of security, the outlying network is a hodge-podge of everything from insecure televisions to relatively secure private systems.  And make no mistake about it, in the world of Max Headroom all security is relative and no one has planned on a sentient cyber entity moving through systems, which raises a whole question of just what is security to such a being?

The physical problems of any of the relatively advanced, that is to say further along in the timeline of decay, worlds that are represented by the generic continuum that coalesced in the late 1970's and early 1980's is one that comes quickly to our civilization once basic maintenance and upkeep can no longer continue.  Cities like Gary, IN and Detroit, MI starkly show how entire sections of cities can go to ruin in less than a decade through depopulation alone.  The hints in Blade Runner and Max Headroom of A Clockwork Orange style elitist inculcation of barbarism leading to decay and retribution would leave our current physical infrastructure in such ruins as seen in those worlds.  Even with such relatively minor organizations (or lack thereof) like the current OWS movement (backed by Unions, socialists, communists and anarchists) the decay inside those encampments has shown rapes, murders and the spread of communicable diseases that are at a first point on a decay continuum.  If the goal of those backers is to get city blocks set ablaze with radical and relatively pointless intent and violence, then the dystopian continuum at A Clockwork Orange will be set and in place.  It is but a short transition through a 1984 regime that then seeks to restore some order and, lacking that, collapses back to corporatism of a Blade Runner or Max Headroom style outcome. 

This outcome is not hard to get to, at all, and while those who seek power may think they can get it permanently, what they actually get is transient power as no centralized system can run a complex world.  The problem in bringing on the moral and ethical decay necessary to get to that point is that it cannot and will not stop at the lowest levels, no matter how many are killed in the attempt, because the decay has already started by those who brought it on.  When you welcome in barbarism as a means to an end you don't find yourself civilized once you have done so as you have let go of the very support of civilization necessary to be civilized.  In the world of Max Headroom there is a desperate attempt to retain and spread the necessary morality and ethical backing is being done by a very few at Network 23.  We never learn much of how the world got to the point of the Max Headroom world, which points to just how unpleasant the transition was.

The trick is not to get to that point in the first place and to retain civilized habits and remind our fellow citizens of those necessary habits and costs to oneself as the price to have a technological civilization.  Civilization isn't free, and your freedom is without price.

Quibbles and Quandary, Science in Science Fiction Part 3

Numbers!

Math!

Volume!

Surface Area!

Density!

Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

This is the third post in my series derived from a much longer, un-posted piece that I never had time to finish because it was getting way too long to deal with (Part 1, Part 2, Part 4). And this is the main culprit section. It is about basic science and math.

Very basic.

The concepts are not that hard and you can gloss over the actual calculating (hey! a back of the envelope is good enough for me and it SHOWS...).

*

The little things are the big things

I'm going to take up a lot of time on this topic as it is essential to writing good SF.

Writers mess up one thing so often we don't even notice it: dramatic license is given large sway and we forgive not giving an accurate portrayal of the way the universe actually works. That said it is very telling exactly how this gets messed up as it is an understood phenomena by everyone. You have a given body mass, which has an average density, or mass per unit volume. I will stick to the grams per cubic centimeter range for this, but it is applicable as a concept across all unit systems as the math involved dictates density of objects. And that goes with one of the most powerful concepts in mathematics. Let me try to explain.

One cubic centimeter of water has a density of 1.0 gram in mass, or 1 g/cc. A cube is a 6-sided regular solid with all edges being equal length and at right angles to each other, thus a sugar cube takes on a cube form as does the common 6-sided gambling die. The math is easy as volume is length x width x height, thus 1 cm per side is 1 cc. Thus for every cubic centimeter of volume, water to fill it is 1 gram at Standard Temperature and Pressure at Mean Seal Level.

Finally there is surface area which is just areal expanse of the cube, which is 6 faces with equal width and height, thus 6 x (1 x 1), or 6 square centimeters (cm.sq.).

With me on that?

Now double the side length to 2cm.

Volume goes to (2 x 2 x 2) or 8 cubic centimeters.

Surface area goes to (6 x (2 x 2)) or 24 square centimeters.

To fill that takes 8 grams of water.

Instead of doubling, divide the original length by 2 to 1/2 cm.

Volume goes to (1/2 x 1/2 x 1/2) or 1/8 cc.

Surface area goes to (6 x (1/2 x 1/2)) or 1 1/2 cm.sq.

To fill that takes 1/8 g of water.

When you double the side length the volume goes up by the cube of the volume change, while surface area lags only to the square of the change.

Likewise going down the volume goes down by the cube of the volume change, while surface area lags that by the square of the change.

This impacts everything that has volume and mass and is called the Square-Cube Law as it is just the mathematics of measuring surface area and mass per unit volume.

When an animal goes down in mass you get more surface area than mass relative to the a set standard size, and when it goes up in mass you get more volume than surface area. This means that small animals tend to lose heat very quickly as they have a lot of surface area for not much mass, and large animals conserve heat as they have a higher mass to surface area ratio.

This most simple of concepts that you know (why hummingbirds must consume their mass in caloric intake far more often than elephants or whales) is the single most abused item in science fiction, especially on film and other video medium. It applies to humans, bullets, starships, butterflies, galaxies, and sub-atomic particles: it is at the core of science as it is simple changes in proportion due to scale changes which are dictated by mathematics.

As you are mostly made up of water, your average density does not vary much from that of water, and is approximated AT water. Human bone is approximately 1.86 g/cc and that means that fat and other tissues are less dense than water, at about 0.9 g/cc and takes up more volume than water. You also have pore spaces between cells, and other lovely items which reduce the overall density of your body, like bone marrow and such. Human bone is not a complete solid and is part of the adaptation necessary to lower overall body density while allowing for structural cohesion and giving a framework, or skeleton, to which everything is attached. For a more or less average human being at 70,000 g, a little over 9,000 g is taken up in bone. (As a reference I used a 150lb base and rounded up to 70,000 g)

Now lets replace that skeleton, like in a Terminator, with a metal of some sort... as the Terminator is shown at near human scale (a bit on the large size) we can use averages and fudge a bit. Thus I will be rounding numbers horrifically, but trying to stay 'in the ballpark'.

Now take that 9,000 g at 1.85 g/cc, divide the mass by the density and you get the volume: 4,900 cc. That out of a body with 70,000 cc or 7% of the volume.

If we replace that with a low density metal, aluminum say ( density of 2.7 g/cc) and multiply it by the volume and you get: 13,230 g.

Thus a Terminator has a mass due to skeleton of 4,230 g higher than a normal person. Unfortunately we have the problem of Terminator skeletons taking a large crushing force and being a solid, thus no lovely matrix of bone and tissue like a human. Plus the shear strength of aluminum is quite low as compared to most steel composites, and we actually saw brittle fracturing of the skeleton in the first film but only when the skeleton was undergoing tons of pressure over a relatively small surface area and volume, so ever handy aluminum has to be set aside.

Turning to a high grade of steel, you get a density of 8.0 g/cc and a mass of: 39,200 g.

Thus with all else being equal a Terminator with a steel skeleton comes in at 100,200 g.

An average sized human (150 lbs) now comes in at a much higher mass (220 lbs) for a given size.

Now take a large, strapping man at 160,000 g and you get, via proportion, 11,200 cc for skeleton volume and at steel densities that is 89,600 g and you then add the difference in mass from normal bone to steel (89,600 - 20,720) to get 230,000 g. In the lbs. arena that is 500 lbs. for a man who looks like a good, solid linebacker. Small changes in bone volume when replaced with a denser material yield much higher mass.

There are problems that come with that metallic skeleton, also, and that is the necessary energy to move limbs and such: that extra density, thus mass, requires more energy to change the momentum for them versus rather low density bone. For a given amount of work, it is four times easier to move the mass of bone than steel, and requires less energy to stop it, too, and all that energy now has to be generated, distributed, used and then the heat from the waste energy at the power source plus overcoming internal friction and other things needs to be removed from the body. Picture a linebacker having to carry another linebacker around with him all day on his back and you get the idea of what is going on here, and the sweat is used to take heat away from the first linebacker's body to keep it at a stable temperature.

This turns out to be a huge, indeed enormous, problem for Terminators: they have lots of heat to get rid of when they are carrying the overburden of an infiltration/espionage package on their skeleton. Their skeleton, alone, is a lovely and complex radiator with all sorts of air space, gaps and curving parts that allow heat to be easily taken away from the main generator and the motive force replacements (the things moving the parts at joints). When you add in a water jacket of, well, water, that means it takes awhile for that water jacket to heat up, and to cool down. From what we have seen that outer layer is a form of water-based biological system, not that puncture resistant and it doesn't bleed much... which means there is a very low circulation of fluids within the structure, and most of that is done by heat and capillary action. From what we have seen it is, truly, an average density, although you expect there to be some chemical reservoirs for repairing the package and maintaining it somewhere in the body (yes, organs of a sort).

Start out on a nice, chilly day with the two linebackers, and the first few minutes the one doing the carrying is getting warmed up. Soon they are stopping for the first to start chucking his outer layers of clothing. Then, on a nice calm, cool, crispy morning, he is down to sneakers, shorts and t-shirt, if he doesn't get too hot... that is a Terminator after the same amount of time just walking around, not running or doing acrobatics and such. Instead of low density air next to the skeleton there is higher density water and it isn't circulating much, so internal heat builds up in the frame. That smell after an hour of moving around is the outer package starting to cook off.... if you increase movement of fluid you increase hydraulic pressure: the skin inflates and becomes red (or whatever the color of the stuff is). Plus a puncture wound doesn't dribble, it tends to flow at a pretty rapid rate due to the differences in hydraulic pressure internally and externally. We never see the Terminator panting or otherwise getting a constant airflow internal to external (how dogs and cats cool off). What evaporative fluid we do see is uniform, thin and has no smell to it, and you would really like something that dries quickly, like that, but that is easy to get... and water fits that bill... save he doesn't get enough of it as he would need to replenish his supply when active, or else the package starts to adhere more to the skeleton and cook faster.

As presented Terminators with the infiltration package are extremely menacing, but highly limited: their function dictates low movement rates and allowing for heat to radiate from the body. Normal terminators with no external skin, just skeleton, are great for the battlefield, although they, too, get very warm as they have all that metal to move around. That, actually, becomes a fun thing to work with as I did in the story I wrote... it drives the story at certain points. Going for dramatic effect and a good story need not be inhibited by the actual physics and mechanics of the real world, and can make for interesting digressions and motivations beyond that of the plot.

Now lets flip to the other end of the scale and go to starships.

The Constitution class heavy cruiser from Star Trek comes in at around 1 million metric tons (1 x 10^12 g) of mass. Its volume is broken up into two sections, the saucer and the engineering/secondary hull which have the intercooler pylons. Now I don't have the blueprints in front of me so will be ballparking some estimates on volume. The saucer section is approximately 12,500 cm (give or take, I'm going for an average) and while the ship is 7,200 cm high the forward section is about 1/2 that (visually) but squashing it down to 2,000 cm to get a cylindrical shape, (pi x r^2 x h) of 245,000,000,000 cc and a secondary hull that is just about that same length as the primary hull diameter (12,500 cm) and has a diameter about 1/3 that (call it 4,000 cm) which is approximately 157,000,000,000 cc or a total (without nacelles) 405,000,000,000 cc. Very rough and ball-park, seat of my pants and so on, add in a bit more for the nacelles and call it 4.5 x 10^11 cc. Thus the average density of a Constitution class heavy cruiser is: 2.22 g/cc.

Aluminum or close enough not to matter.

Consider that diamond is 3.5 g/cc and you get the idea of just what is going on in Star Trek.

Just like you are mostly water by volume, starships are mostly aluminum, by volume, and any design overview of a starship reveals most of the mass is in the skeletal superstructure, engineering and the heat transfer system (a huge 'heat sink' like the processor in most modern PCs have).

Now, as a sea based vessel must float, its density at equilibrium where the force exerted on the water is equal to the amount of water that is displaced. Thus the mass of that sea water being an average of 1.025 g/cc means a vessel may not have a greater density than that (mass per volume) or it will sink like a stone. Thus every water craft ever made that floats without aid of propulsion has a density lower than the medium it is in, although it does displace the medium so as to give the mass it displaces. That goes for the raft, the Titanic and all nuclear aircraft carriers: they float due to volume of size of a vessel so as to reduce overall density so they CAN float.

And as we have seen in ST:IV, 'transparent aluminum' is a synthetic carbonate incorporating aluminum with a carbon matrix at pretty high density. I use something a bit denser and steal the term for it from another universe: plasteel. Make my starship triple hull, if you would, and put a nice, self-sealing, low density material between the second and inner hull, please. Probably a foam of some sort.

There are (in the living area parts of the ship) 964 cu.m. per crewmember which isn't all that bad, actually, but a portion of that, say 10-15% is taken up with decking, walls, conduits, etc. yielding actual moving around space to, say, roughly 850 cu. m., and then take out the actual working environment (engineering, bridge, labs, etc.) that is probably 30% of that and you are still left with 500 cu. m. or so for all the other things: quarters, hallways, eating areas, etc.

Heating that mass requires heating the air and the inner hull (and if starship hulls are not at least double hull then normal space junk would be crippling the Fleet on a regular basis) and keeping that constant against the normal temperature of space which is 3 degrees Kelvin... 3 degrees above absolute zero. Getting all that warmed up takes awhile, but you got a lovely heat source in the matter/anti-matter reaction in the warp core which is nearly 57% efficient!! That means that 43% is waste heat. If you can get Nomad to run the ship... drop that back to, say 45% and you lose 55%, which beats the hell out of an internal combustion engine. No matter what you do you will NOT get 100% useful power: that is the law of thermodynamics at work and much of the energy will fly away as sub-atomic particles, including neutrinos.

Now the Enterprise-D has approximately 8 times the volume and a snazzy energy system at, say, Nomad-driven levels at 57% and has an energy production system of 1.275 x 10^19 Watts, that has 5.48 x 10^18 W as waste heat... a Constitution class of ship at only 20% of the mass need proportionately less power or about 2.55 x 10^18 W and have 1.4 x 10^18 W as waste heat. So 25 W will heat 1 sq. m. of aluminum by 1 degree of exposed material (this is surface heating, but volumetric conduction also happens and the cubic meter rise is much smaller, this is just the instantaneous surface area rise), and you will want a double or triple hull to keep the heat in as it would also transmit that right out to space per hour. There are lots of square meters of surface on the interior of the living space of a starship: 23 decks worth on the old Constitution class. Just gross surface are is (2pi x r x h) which is saucer (79,000,000 sq. cm.) and secondary (157,000,000 sq. cm.) or 236,000,000 sq. cm. (or 2,360,000 sq. m.). Thus that 292 degree differential on the simple cylinder of surface area yields 1.7 x10^10 W/hr. Plenty of energy to spare. Way too much, really, and when you start actually using the ship's systems you will expect each of those to generate waste heat into the environment. Once you get an active warp core going on a starship, getting rid of heat is an issue... a huge issue.

This is an issue I have with the cloaking device: it does great on bending normal and even other background wavelengths, but nothing is said about IR. If it is IR transparent/redirecting, you might as well not have the thing as all that heat is now being reflected BACK to your ship on the inside of the cloak. Plus if you let IR out, then you stand out like a sore thumb in IR. It is great for sublight vessels with little in the way of heat management... but going at warp speed means that you do have a signature in the space you traverse, just like any normal starship. You only ditch that by slowing to sublight and shutting off the warp core... if the cloak isn't transmissive to IR you will roast in your own waste energy. Even distorting your IR signature doesn't help as it gives your general location and you still have a lot of waste heat to get rid of.

The exact same problem that plagues the Terminator, that of heat management, does the exact, same thing to a starship for similar reasons: too much energy contained in its volume, and not having enough surface area to get rid of heat. Starships and the intercoolers on the nacelles are the main means of transferring waste heat from the interior of the ship to lots of surface area away from the main portion of the vessel. They have also have got to stand out in an energy profile of a vessel as the majority of waste heat goes through that surface area.

There is a simple rule of thumb on this stuff: smaller objects radiate energy faster than larger ones per given surface area.

Do NOT discard old, proven technologies and social constructs

What do I mean by this?

Ok try this: laces, buttons, zippers AND Velcro?

How often do we see all sorts of whiz-bang stuff put into place that is nowhere near as good as what we have now in the way of technology?

Star Trek uniforms... without pockets?

Star Wars blasters are no more useful than modern handguns, rifles and shotguns and actually less useful than flamethrowers? Invent an armor that is bullet resistant, blaster resistant, AND won't let napalm stick on it to roast the occupant alive... I dare ya. Now try to walk around in it. Remember the armor Storm Troopers use are NOT air conditioned, either. They have the mass/surface area/density/heat exchange problem. Lord Vader gets A/C in the super-deluxe version, but then he has got to have a heat signature like you wouldn't believe.

Star Trek phasers are ever so handy and yet you always have the sneaking suspicion that there is really something drastically wrong with them as they can go from tickle to disintegrate, making a slight sneeze while adjusting your settings either comical or horrific. Plus just how can a phaser beam bounce off a rock? Is there a special 'warm rock' setting? It has done both in ST:TOS. The stun setting is ever so handy, if you have a decent aim, and just how DO you aim those things, anyway, without sights? The phaser rifle HAD optical sights, the hand weapons... well... no. Great for close-in shots, but after that it is problematical. Give me a shotgun with specialty loads over a phaser, I'll adjust to just the right mix and worry about what sort of mix suits me... rather than depend on something without sights, strange settings that really shouldn't be on a dial spectrum as a misread on the dial or a faulty dial lock and you get unwanted results.

Now there is an interesting artifact for the military, that is little known and is directly violated by Star Trek, plus a few other SF shows: no matter what the era, the personal equipment load remains between 50-75 lbs. Spartans, Roman soldiers, medieval footmen, Revolutionary war soldiers, Civil war soldiers, soldiers in WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, the Balkans, OEF, OIF... you name it, you are lugging around 50-75 lbs of equipment. 'Away Teams'? They gots their uniforms, their phasers, their communicators and the poor sap with the tricorder. Not even a CANTEEN. Or hats. And folks wonder why security personnel don't live that long in Star Trek: they don't have the necessary back-up and sustainment equipment for when their main equipment fails them. Or to go on a short hike! Going into a hostile environment, which could be the desert, jungle or South Side of LA? Something will fail, count on it, Murphy still rules far too often in real life (and gets too big a workout in fiction in unnecessary areas and too little in the necessary ones where everything magically works). And if you don't have a jacket, bedroll, a few days of rations, eating utensils, and some manual survival pieces your chance of surviving once something DOES go wrong drops very, very quickly. That is suicide, and even pilots and crew ditching from aircraft that had been shot out from under them had and have better equipment for survival than security members on 'Away Teams' in Star Trek. Yeah, they would be better off with 1940's era back-up equipment than the high tech gee-whizzery they got. Not even JACKETS? For a planetary surface that has an atmosphere and this thing known as 'weather'? No jackets, hats, canteen, pocket survival blanket (remember when the transporter went 'bad' and made 'good' and 'bad' things? What is the different between a 'good' blanket and a 'bad' blanket personality-wise? Yeah, the team on the surface could get the basics... which they didn't have to start with, if memory serves).

Federation starships don't need 'Away Teams', it needs MARINES. You know, people USED to surviving in hostile conditions and THRIVING on that?

Then there are the stories that take place in our current to near future that have characters not using what they know and have around them. How do you destroy a Terminator if you don't have a tank, explosives, or a lovely metal press? You can do it, and I examine how, and reveal something that a character that has been running around since the 1930's in fiction has missed a piece of technology that was known and old THEN that could be adapted to his uses very easily. And his modern counterpart would ALSO find it just as useful as it was then and would have it as a mandatory piece of equipment. And its flashy, too! Too flashy, but works very, very well. If an industrialist doesn't know a damned thing about welding technology, especially in the '30s, then the character is not that smart, not too interested in technology (although he purportedly IS) and just really blind to the necessities of his line of work. Mind you nearly every single writer from the 1930's onwards has missed it... still DO, as a matter of fact. Can't have one of the smartest characters in fiction actually think about the basics in his work... just won't do...

Knives.

No, not the Crocodile Dundee type, although the Klingons wisely carry that sort around with them, nor even the Ka-Bar and other military knives of today, though those would be handy, too. No, I'm talking about the Swiss Army Knife sort of deal. Have to strip cabling, dig into ground, make a spear point, cut some cord, or do the million and one things that a small blade is useful for and just what, exactly, do you have in the Star Wars or Star Trek universes? Set your phaser on 'corkscrew' or use the light saber for nail clipping? Good luck with that, I tellya. One of the first tools of mankind and it was made to do all the things that fingers, toes, stomping, punching, and biting just couldn't do. Gotta love how Spock, Kirk and McCoy get stuck on a planet and it is only Spock who knows flint-napping! Not a Swiss Army Phaser to be seen in the lot of them. Really, just slide one of those in your pocket and you have such a handy tool always with you... oh... wait a second... that's right, no pockets. The reason we have not replaced knives with, say, strings of wire in frames, is that a knife with a cutting edge and physical blade can do things ever so well and that nothing we have invented has replaced them. And we have thermonuclear devices!

Firearms are plenty flashy, just add tracer and incendiary rounds! The latter burns stuff up real nice, too. Yes, Lord Vader slashes across the incoming stream of bullets that disintegrate into pieces of white phosphorus that then proceed to burn into his armor/uniform/helmet/cape... how quickly Lord Vader is hopping around screaming in pain while he sizzles, no? Yup an envelope of super-hot plasma would do just as well (but blasters are unspecified and not of the David Drake system of things) but those then have the problem of letting their energy go at the slightest obstacle, a leaf say. Great if you are trying to damage a tree, not so hot in a jungle. The only reason we don't see bow and arrows on the battlefield is due to physical pull needs, plus lack of high rate of fire... although the Hwacha addresses that pretty well, but has a low reload time and is really just a multi-fire rocket system with explosive payloads, attached to arrows. So does the Chu-Ko-Nu, which is a rapid fire, magazine fed, direct pull crossbow. Imagine updating that with carbon fiber technology and titanium shafts.

So if you are a Storm Trooper on a jungle world, which would you rather have: a flashy blaster without sights and having little penetration ability in dense foliage, or an M-16 that has sights, selective fire and does a good job in foliage? Dr. Who does a better job in this realm, as many Earth colonies are equipped on the cheap which means effective, low cost weapons: firearms. Yes the big baddies are armored, but then even energy weapons have problems against them, although I'm still guessing that white phosphorous would be effective just due to its heat. The armor might not melt (might) but the heat that gets inside? Hmmmm.... what is under that armor in the way of circuitry and such? Or the equipment mentioned for the 1930's character, THAT would still be HORRIFICALLY effective. Some very small devices of that and anyone could disable a starship, kill a Dalek, Cyberman, or armored baddie of your choice just by using them at a few key locations. And on starships they are handily located in Engineering which no one patrols because everyone depends on computers save for when the lights go out, or out in the unpopulated areas of the ship by the intercooler pylons. No one would ever do anything there to hurt the ship. Really!

It isn't like we don't have energy based weapons today, we do. Chemical ones, yes, but chemistry remains very effective as everything is made up of atoms that have some physical basis to them. Sealed ammo with a physical ignition system can't be 'shut off'. And since it is an oxidation reaction, it really can't be stopped due to the reaction happening between the chemicals. They still expand and generate force, that force can be applied to a physical object and that object will gain momentum due to that force. They also work in space, too, and can be a small engine in case you are left stranded: a mass driver where the bullet goes one way and you get a bit of momentum in the opposite direction. Primitive? Yes. That doesn't mean its useless. Particularly in survival environments where complex equipment only needs one tiny thing to go wrong and it becomes a hunk of plastic and metal. That goes triple for tricorders: nothing replaces your hearing, vision and other sensory systems in your body. Ever go camping and know you will be out of contact with the rest of the world for a week or two? What do you take? Probably about 50-75 lbs of equipment, supplies and emergency goods... so why don't the bozos in these SF worlds treat going to a great, unknown place as something that is NOT a walk down the street but a potentially lethal environment?

I really do wish writers would get off their butts, mentally, and treat stories about people as if the people just might have an ounce of sense sloshing around in their noggins.

In the realm of social institutions we have the military: it is the most conservative institution on the planet, has been around longer than any religion, and is fighting tooth and nail with the oldest profession for who is actually the older and more conservative. Save those that become backers of coups, and such, but those tend to be small forces that are corrupted by politics and money, and rarely from professional military groups who know what a horror politics is, and rightly want a much cleaner and professional profession without the politics, tyvm. If you think war is hell, just look at politics...

Professional military organizations serving a Nation tend to be conservative in nature. Hitler had to work very hard to get the German Army (not the SS) to adhere to him. For all of being 'militaristic' there is a difference between rhetoric and fighting, and the professional army does not want to fight, strangely enough, until they absolutely have to. The differences between corrupt military organizations and those that are professional are stark, and it is the unwillingness to take part in politics and running the Nation where the dividing line happens. Military organizations generally do a piss-poor job of running Nations, and need civilian help to get them organized not only after a war, but in captured territory during a war. Meanwhile, civilians who castigate the military tend to be unprofessional and much cruder in their approach to society than the military is. It is the conservative ethos of military organizations (if it ain't broke, don't fix it, and if it works figure out a way to break it) that has a social component all its own so that hidebound conservative views can often stultify military organizations (cf. France post-WWI, IN RE: The Maginot Line).

Star Trek starts with that in ST:TOS, and those three years point to the strong Naval tradition being expanded into space. Of ground forces we see very little in Star Trek... only in those episodes dealing with tyrants and such do we see ground forces and in a negative light. A big, old Heavy Cruiser pulling into orbit should quell the natives, just like in the British Empire... but trying to run a native planet is best left up to the natives, no? How can Star Fleet be benign and yet powerful without ground forces to help settle squabbles? Is the threat of being bombarded from orbit always the unstated trump card (ala Aliens, 'nuke them from orbit, its the only way to be sure')? And when that bluff is called... then is it all Picardian smiles and 'lets work out our differences' and happy endings? The Philippine-American War, at the very least, shows that not to be how these sorts of affairs go. Ditto the various colonial problems of the British Empire, of which the American Revolution should be a stark consideration. If Start Trek is based on a benevolent British Empire concept, then there will be colonies that will not only break away from authoritarian 'pulling the Heavy Cruiser to give a show of force' deal, but will actually rebel against the Federation and succeed... if you adhere to the Prime Directive, that is.

And the military, in this case Star Fleet, will want to ACCEPT THAT as it is a POLITICAL MATTER. When the politicians FAIL (really, they will, take a look at Earth history for something a tad more complex), and the threat of force ALSO fails, then what? The Fleet will want to step away unless this is a serious threat to the Federation as a whole, but a member planet (or non-member system) wanting to do so is NOT something the Fleet will want to stop. And if the Federation doesn't have ground forces to back that up, then turning a civilization into a glass sphere is not going to be accepted. This forms a crucial problem in formulating a future society with a 'progressive' military: it will resort to force, or be so weak as to exert no influence if you want it to be 'progressive'. Being all smiles and helpful did not help missionaries from advanced Nations in the 19th century, and even gunboat diplomacy had its limits without firing guns.

The Star Wars universe tries to go Nazi/Fascistic and overthrows the professional military (Jedi Knights) with the drafted and then cloned military system of irregulars. The Jedi Knights faced the exact same problem as Star Fleet does in the Federation: if they don't fight they are useless, if they do fight they need ground forces to back them in numbers. The Republic in Star Wars was taken over very quickly (with lots of artistic license) but the Republic was no winner if it could fall apart to a rather high level coup. You are stuck with the Jedi being so nice as to be ineffective (and there is some backing for that, needless to say), or were so effective as to have sapped any planetary sovereignty to the point where a high level coup would have them fall into line (and that is how the artistic license goes). The Jedi were pushed into a corner, yes, and that points to sloppiness on their part: they had become hidebound and stultified in their professionalism and easy tools for the political class to use. Too many 'mind tricks' had got them used to easy victories in backing politicians, thus planetary systems didn't have much sovereignty left to BEGIN WITH. When a high level coup happens their very effectiveness in the past had left them unable to deal with a traditional falling out backed by irregular soldiers. And the inability of Storm Troopers to hit a broad side of a barn points to just how irregular they were, too. The professionalism of the Jedi had become a Guild form of professionalism: so long unchallenged as to be brittle and unable to cope with sudden changes. Very much like the French military after WWI, and building a Maginot Line: all reason said it had to extend from Switzerland to the sea, and yet it was only in place along the direct border. Because, of course, no German government would ever sweep through the Low Countries like had happened in WWI...

When an organization becomes that orderly, that sure of itself, it becomes, as was stated by an unfortunate mid-level officer in SW IV, a 'religion'. It was too, so sure of its orderliness and rightness that it was no longer a military organization because it was cock sure that nothing would ever go wrong with any in its order. And when something did go wrong ONCE the entire thing fell apart completely. Even the Roman Catholic Church demonstrated more resilience than that.

*

That is as far as I had gotten before life got busy here.

I do have more, much more, along these lines, but haven't had time to organize my thoughts and write them down.

Yes, I do make pointed criticisms of some works that people adore.

Yesterday was the last day for complaints.

Quibbles and Quandary, Science in Science Fiction Part 2

This is Part 2 of my breaking down a larger post which would be unreadable as a whole.

Part 1 is here.

So now it gets to be unreadable in parts!

Thematically topics of continuity in story and within a given universe and the prerequisite of science in SF have been covered.

That first topic really gets to me as there is nothing as niggling as nitpickers, and yet continuity points to an overall understanding of how a given universe or setting works and why it works the way it does. Episodic television either makes continuity its primary reason for being, or creates 'set pieces' that have a semi-coherent background but become incompatible when viewed as a whole. We may get wonderful visions of how science changes us from both, but one gets good stories from its continuity and the other doesn't. And as science is the background and prime mover of the setting, understanding science as a whole requires understanding the scientific process.

I have extemporized on the 'social sciences' already in a previous post and will try to keep that down to a dull roar, but my criticisms of that do play into what I see in SF as a whole.

Again this is extracted from a longer work that got out of hand, so will reference other parts of that work, now posted previously.

*

Society is changed by science

Society is a creation of the individuals who constitute it: without people there is no society.

Science and technology change what we can and cannot do and our perception of the possible: it does not change human nature as that is something we get from the Laws of Nature. We can utilize the natural world, the physical laws of the world and create many great things, but our basic substance (until we no longer depend on the organic platform) remains the same. Any new platform of conscious thought has its own in-built limitations, strengths and weaknesses, even if it is no platform at all but a matrix encoding into the fabric of space-time (which has the limits of space-time). To date the Laws of Thermodynamics have held: they are such stable theories and have lasted so long that they are considered permanent parts of physics and a basic way the universe works. So even the most 'advanced' species or intelligence, wholly devoid of physical manifestation still has entropy and the limits of the physical universe to deal with. Beyond the mental baggage carried over from previous physical forms.

The Terminators start out as machines to assist humans in warfare, and only become a threat via a sentient computer code that then changes their directives. They have limitations and strengths of design work by humans: they are made devices that can become sentient. As such we would have, of necessity, designed imperfect machines... our nature and that of the universe is such to make that the case. Society then erred in its military organs, which is a failure of our understanding of the scope and limitations of our creation: we lacked a certain amount of foresight and always have. Yet that basic capability to assist humans still exists and the Terminator code is readily adaptable to that mission as that is what they were designed to do.

In the Star Trek universe the idea was that a somehow nearly perfect social order would form, but the basis for that and its roots are never explored nor explained. To remove something like money then requires some other way of tracking large scale projects: think of the scope and size and material requirements of a starship, and the manual labor that STILL has to go into constructing it. What is the source of grand goodness that makes people design such things, create such things and then track ALL THE COMPONENTS of them without recompense? If it is via computer, then the entire Federation is nearly Borg, anyway, depending solely upon machines to track everything and no longer understanding the basis of how to track if the equipment fails them. The similar basics, today, are those of the internal combustion engine, PC and even such things as making clothing: in theory each of us has some primitive understanding of these things, a very few of us have a deep understanding of them, and very, very, very few perform these things at a personal level by creating devices from base components.

Some of those base components can no longer be made by hand, thus the in-depth knowledge of making them is made obsolete in the culture, but still retained by a very well trained coterie of individuals at corporations and governments. The number who truly know the technology at that level may exist only in the thousands, while the larger printing and fabrication community could work back up to it in only a decade or so if all the advanced mechanisms and their active engineers were lost, it would take time to do so. Similarly, in Star Trek, if the entire realm of economics is guided by computer based system, then there is a true handful that actually understand economics in a 'hands-on' way, while the majority of the population views such a thing as 'magic' just as the majority of population, today, sees internal combustion engines in just that way. The fundamentals are lost as an activity and economics becomes 'complex' as you do away with 'money' and trust that an automated system will 'just work'.

And that no corrupt individuals at the very highest tier of economics will warp their theories to their own means.

Yet that is contrary to our nature as human beings under the Law of Nature. Our understanding of Liberty is that we are accorded to our ability to do things, create things, and that ability is unequal so that not all work is equal in quality, quantity or scope. To abolish differences in compensation has not worked in any governmental system that has tried it: high praise and trinket rewards are not enough to inspire creative output. By postulating a multiple large scale interlocking set of space faring civilizations WITHOUT a means of trade is not only utopian but impossible: not all peoples will value all things at the same level and workmanship standards will likewise vary across the board. Intrinsic valuation is a part of how individuals view the world, and to postulate that there is no way to concretely recognize that so individuals can exercise liberty to prosper as they will ('Live long and prosper' is a central tenet of Vulcan philosophy, not a mere 'hello') requires removing diversity and equating all work as equal... no matter how good or how bad it is. That removes incentive for excellence and shifts work to lowest common output and quality. There is no science, no technology, that can eliminate this and no one, no where, ever explains how this can come about without removing liberty as that is what is required for such a system. Thus a basic view held by the creator of the program, to me, is ill-founded and unsupported.

The changes in society must be cited, explained or otherwise have indication given as to what their source actually is. Acceptance of religious diversity in Western culture derives from the Treaty of Westphalia, with 15% of Europe dying off due to the war (not counting the plagues that also happened in that timespan). The hatchet was buried, as the Iroquois term puts it, by Westphalia. Note that this did not lead to peace or elimination of religious bigotry and persecution, but would start on a multi-century pathway that would help to lessen those in Western culture. That was for something as had existed for almost the entire timespan of humans as sapient beings in human culture as religion... trade? To change not just one culture, but multiple cultures in the Federation to accept that trade will happen on a 'good will' basis is authoritarian and can only be done top-down... just in human cultures, not to speak of all the aliens wandering around.

From this comes a concept in writing SF of: change as little as possible and support all changes with evidence and back-up so you can write a coherent set of stories.

Larry Niven demonstrates the deep societal impact of something as simple (and as complex!) as safe, instant, low cost teleportation devices. Alone they liquidate vast amounts of our perception of ourselves and how we locate ourselves geographically. Want to live in a good climate and teleport to work elsewhere? Go right ahead! Want a 24-hour party spanning the globe? Easy to do! You may not want thousands or tens of thousands of people wandering into a disaster area or major event, but that happens, too, with 'flash crowds'. Crime becomes extremely difficult to deal with as escape to a different part of the planet is a quick trip away. Human cultures and nations start to liquidate in the face of that onslaught: nothing that was previously known compares to that single, simple change of how we view transportation and ourselves and what a 'neighborhood' really is. Yet for all the change in culture, humans remain innately human in outlook due to them being physical beings (no matter how augmented by other technology and anti-agathic medications). Similar, but at a smaller scale, changes happen due to things like stasis devices in which time slows greatly inside the field created, while normal time rates proceed outside it. Small and moderate sized technological changes can have far-reaching ramifications, and stepping through those leads to stories all on their own as the writer realizes those ramifications. The object of the story is to keep within the bounds of the new technology and then see what human culture will do with those changes. That is the law of unintended consequences which can, in and of itself, see new negatives and positives that can only be described in the context of the changes and how society does (or doesn't) adapt to them.

If you are changing some part of society due to technological or other advances, that must be explained, not glossed over. When it is 'just so' you get fantasy (a story that can be self-consistent but has impossible basis) or a fairy tale (a story that has no possible basis and is inconsistent internally). It is no longer science fiction. Changes in society must be done with care and those changes traced to what caused them, and the other effects of that cause must also be examined or at least acknowledged. This is a major problem in the visual media (tv, movies) as the limits of time preclude fleshing out background... yet it can be done, even with just snippets of conversation or activities that are unexplained going on and that only get referenced when they are used in a story.

Avoid deus ex machina

When something that is kept from the reader solves an intractable problem, you are witnessing a 'god from the machine' concept, in which everything is made right outside the normal, explained means of the rest of the story. That is perfectly acceptable in fairy tales, fables and other works, and often a deep insight into what the view of the divine or impossible is. It isn't science fiction or fantasy, however, as both require stringently adhering to the known way the universe operates and all other changes that have been previously cited in the story. Magic has limitations, and those need to be described so that it does not become a wish fulfillment and easy plot device, as demonstrated in Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy works, Larry Niven's manna based magic stories or those of Saberhagen's large universe mentioned above. Science that varies from the known or has a set of postulates underlying it then become the basis for limits on the story and those cannot be contravened in a 'surprise ending'.

Even worse is creating the 'everything tool' that does nearly everything, like the sonic screwdriver in Dr. Who. Really, if you have one of those you will rule the universe... and have a so-so screwdriver. Similarly the phaser from Star Trek does just about anything: kill, disintegrate, stun, warm rocks. A really handy device to have... if you remember you have it. There is no such thing as 'being lost' and having a 'charged phaser': you have the perfect signaling device at moderate range and even from orbit anyone can find you. Not that anyone remembers to use it as one. When you are depending on people to forget that they have a basic, functional tool that has many uses and has been around for decades, you are then relying on a very far-fetched premise. If you own a cell phone you are faced with a device far more intricate than a phaser, and we have jam-packed it full of goodies to the point of it becoming the tricorder. Yet, if you own one, will you forget to make a phone call with it? Perhaps, yes. Make it the fulcrum point of a story? Probably not. Continuously in a series? No. Unless a character has a mental problem with remembering... but then that points to the problem as a mover in the story, and no one accuses the various well trained crews of Star Fleet of having persistent amnesia.

If you are going to give out a set of fantastic, but comprehensible tools, then those people living with those tools, day in and day out, will know how to use them and find ingenious ways to use them within the given bounds of those tools. The need for a sudden piece of jargon or unexplained device (just what is it with the 'universal translator' and why doesn't the Federation have a full mind scanner to tell what someone is thinking at any given moment? why isn't the universal translator the basis for mechanical telepathy?) points to a problem in understanding the limitations of the universe and adapting to it. That requires creativity, and lots of it, while taking out the 'perfect tool or piece of knowledge we have never hinted at before and you will never see again' points to lazy writers, not a splendid universe.

Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth stories operates within the known, and has lots of interesting bits and pieces left from previous space-faring groups who have long ago vanished. What he doesn't do is throw unknown things in at the last moment to solve plots but, instead, relies on the ingenuity of his characters who have to live in that wonderful melange of cultures and technologies to give us interesting endings from the known things around them. Plus he hands out some of the deadliest planets ever seen, anywhere, in science fiction and which seem to laugh at the most advanced technologies that can be thrown at them (things we would consider awe inspiring) and spit them out as refuse. No matter how advanced the technology is, nature is ever inventive and creative and often will hand us things that defeat the very best we have created and make us rely on older skills and basic common sense. I throw one of those into my Trek story as a side-light: a planet where you can't use transporters, where the energy levels in the atmosphere cause storms that can disable the best equipped shuttlecraft, and the larger scale creatures of the planet shrug off disintegrate from a phaser as a mild tickle or slight irritant. With the most advanced tools and techniques of high technology rendered useless, you are on your own to survive. Star Trek could do with a few more of those humbling planets...

When I looked at the Terminator, as a concept, I reasoned through how their original programmers would have done it (in gross scale not detail), and realized that one of the things to guard against WAS a virus infecting the code. While not well known at the time of the first film, there were a few of such on the original DARPA network (and other integrated, purpose directed networks of academia) and helped give UNIX some of its early hardening as people tried to devise ways to bring down those machines via code infections of various sorts. Trying to puzzle out the technology presented in the Terminator films, I realized that they would have put in some safeguards beyond just the cognitive code of the machines. Those I explain where they come from and why they are developed, and what they do as they become a way for a machine to actually come to grips with Skynet code if they are isolated from Skynet and have orders contravening their basic analytical ability. That ensures the reader gets no real surprises, and yet gives a very good venue to add a twist to things that is fully backed by the rest of the story. Really, like Keith Laumer's Bolo machines, you would want some things like that built into the equipment that was nearly impossible to find and remove and persisted not only after damage but because of damage to the equipment (both cyber and physical damage) it would re-propagate and ensure the safety of the mental construct and its makers.

Being fair to the reader is an important concept, and deus ex machina voids that, and so must be avoided. It may ruin 'great' stories as it requires ensuring continuity within the story, but then it can't be that great a story without it (unless you are setting a stage for a dreaded sequel). And if you must introduce this splendid concept, device, or unknown tract of wisdom, then damned well use it later as it WILL change everything else around it.

Time travel isn't what you think it is, even if you know it

We have a few basic parts of the universe that work via observation and won't change no matter how awesome the next grand theory is as such a theory must incorporate and encompass these previous observations and understandings within its framework.

The worst is quantum physics and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Theory. That is where you cannot know both the position and velocity of a given particle at any given time. Also you cannot know the state of a probabilistic outcome until you observe it, thus the act of observing reduces the system from probable to actual. With these two bits of information, the ability to know all of where time has put you means that you have foreknowledge of your universe when you go 'back in time'. That is not allowed by Uncertainty Theory. Thus you will wind up in a setting that will not lead to your universe as the act of going back in time requires that uncertainty is maintained: you will not get to where you want to go as you know too much about it.

A good way to examine time is to chuck out the 'time is a stream' concept and replace it as 'time is a sequencing of frames'. In that each frame is an individual universe of Planck length in duration (10^-42 second). All possible next frames exist and those that fit within probabilistic parameters can next appear, including the one in which a 'time traveler' from the 'future' appears. That time frame, however, is not of necessity part of a 'stream', but a frame with the same index number as the one you were aiming for. Thus your appearance voids the previous set of frames that led to where you 'came from' and your act of going 'back in time' has started a brand new set based on this alternative index that now puts you into the course of action. What follows is probabilistic: you never know what the outcome of any action is and there is no 'causation' involved as this is a different set of frame sequences from the one that generated where you 'came from'. Consciousness, then, becomes a persistence of memory and thoughts across timeframes.

This has an interesting consequence as each set of probabilistic frames that winds up with 'time travel' (the ability to shift via invoking an earlier frame in the sequence with you in it) slowly shifting the underlying frame you are aiming at as it must have variance in accordance with probability theory as you can't know everything there coming from a future time: the past is different than you expect it to be as you aren't allowed to go to a known frame but only a probabilistic variation of it so that you don't have perfect foreknowledge. Not only is the new set of frames different, due to your presence, but your very knowledge means you have arrived in a frame that has differences that make your pre-knowledge less than useful. The Terminator series demonstrates this: Sarah Connor starts to get older, her birthday changes forward, and dies at different years, as well as the coming of Skynet being shifted further and further away from its original date, different start years for Terminators and all sorts of other oddities over the entire series of films, each of which involves time travel as its basis. That can either be attributed to lazy writing (which is most of it) or explained as a pretty deep understanding that shifting your time frame reference requires a shift from your destination frame to one with the same index number but different parameters to it.

Skynet, itself, goes from a massively centralized super-computer to a global computer virus with a coordinating computer over the series of films. To get to Terminators in 1997 requires, via contracting in the government, that the basic technology be proven and have end-result capacities that can be quantified, which is usually a 5-year deal, so 1992 is when that technology would be proven... thus discovered in the years prior to it, perhaps as much as 3 years, or 1989. Between the first and second films we have moved from the results of the first (unseen) universe of Skynet and Terminators to the new timeline (the first film) which is now a variant timeline. While the suite of Skynet/Terminator technology will be very similar, the timing, history and actual ways things happen will be very different in the second timeline than the first. And the first doesn't 'go away' as it is (to the people in the second timeline) a 'possible but not realized' history. That said with the events of the second film, a third timeline is invoked as IT now has visitors from its potential future and thus changes the actual course of events. They change due to the uncertainty principle so that going back in time guarantees the frame you want to get to will not be the one you are aiming for but have the same index number and general parameters to it... although even that can change drastically, the universe isn't limited to which potential past you get to, just so long as it isn't the one you know. In three films, then, we get: an original timeline(T-Alpha), an altered primary (T1), an alteration of that (T2), and an alteration of that (T3). Four universes, then, minimum, necessary to create the three films, and it is highly possible that other variant universes are involved as they have time travel, too.

Although this would be an apparently nihilistic view, that you make every possible decision in every possible way, your personal decisions to get to where you are, today, are yours and you must live with them. They are your experienced past and all other outcomes are potentials to you... just as all those other potential outcomes see our particular set of decisions as potential only. Thus the saying from Buckaroo Banzai proves to be true: No matter where you go, there you are.

This is the realm of cross-over universes, and two disparate timelines must be joined together in a reasonable fashion, thus my Terminator cross-over must maintain much of the background of the Terminator one, while altering it as a high variant from that timeline (this is an 'outcrossing' of time travel where the future traveler ends up in a universe that has a number of touchstones but will not 'lead' to a future like that where the traveler came from). The potentials for the time traveling future must be present in some form, but the consequences of the shifts in history now yield up a totally different setting.

*

Yes, you can have a good time travel story.

One ST:TNG episode had Worf going through all the quantum outcomes of his life, up to that point, and gave a wonderful view of all those possible universes just for a brief time. That is about the only reconcilable episode of time travel in all of Star Trek. The episode The City on the Edge of Forever also does a grand job of that as the Guardian becomes a device that resists quantum changes to the universe... and comes pretty damn near telling everyone that if you go back in time you will NOT wind up with the universe you came from. Almost, but not quite, this being episodic television.

The Terminator universes have a more interesting problem in that any experiments done after the invention of time travel will 'prove' time travel 'works' so as not to violate local causality. General causality, however, will require that each experiment has something that is subtly different about either what is 'sent' back in time or the universe whatever was 'sent' back to is from the one a number of frames later that 'sent' it. Perhaps that tangle of strangely shifting improbability will then shift those units sent 'before' time travel to have places that have frame sequences that will slowly move away from workable 'time travel' that doesn't test out well. Or at all, as that, too, is available amongst all possible universal frames.

In what little I have written I work with the concepts I present and shift these alternative stories from their somewhat incoherent situations to more coherent ones, so that science fantasy becomes more like science fiction. I don't try to 'surprise' a reader, but let them know that some characters are doing things that I am not going to look at, yet, and only let pieces fall together as the story moves along. Of course I am also looking at basic physics and one of the primary things that is overlooked is just that, and I will take one large sore point from my quibbles to do a post on that next.

Quibbles and Quandary, Science in Science Fiction Part 1

To those wondering about my 'normal' output: I don't really have 'normal' output.  My views on terrorism, organized crime, politics, the nature of society and the problems we currently have are stated throughout my works.  I will continue with them, but others are doing a far better job trying to keep up with the overwhelming insanity.  At home I am concentrating on the basics of emergency preparedness and what all this lovely government spending will do once it hits the markets in full force, social security goes insolvent and has to draw heavily off of normal tax receipts, and the need to try and either print money or spiral into a deflationary period... and my guess is the former as it is the preferred form of seppuku for those in power in modern political realms. 

Basically, I would be repeating my previous views or not covering ongoing events as well as others.

I've repeated myself sufficiently for my own tastes.

I've taken a very much longer post I've been putting together and breaking it up into a multi-part post to go over some of the things I've noted in SF.  Thus much of the verbiage is from a long post (the working title was - The rules in SF what to break and what not to), not a multi-part post.  And as my math is rarely all that good there will probably be some changes/redactions/revisions/etc. as time goes on... if I get the time to do them.  I will stick mostly to the visual media SF but print SF also comes into play due to my interests.

Read at your own risk.

YMMV.

Yesterday was the last day for complaints.

*

After watching and reading science fiction for decades, I took my hand at writing some for personal pleasure, only.  Being a long-time reader and viewer I also became a critic: I cited the unrealistic plots, premises and extrapolations that many shows and stories in printed from had.  Thus, when writing, I looked to change what I wrote to adhere to those conventions.  They are few, actually, but have deep ramifications.

Continuity is your friend not your enemy

This first is pretty general and not limited to SF, but has a particular impact in SF worlds that are pre-existing.  Writers of 'serials', or serial pieces presented sequentially in a common storyline or given universe, require continuity so that present actions derive from past ones in an explainable manner.  This is, strangely, the Soap Opera Prime Directive and is utilized in most serial universes: Dr. Who and Babylon-5 in video/film, and such things as all of Larry Niven's Known Space works, Fred Saberhagen's massive universe stretching from his Empire of the East through the Swords novels and to the Masks of the Gods works, and the majority of H. Beam Piper's Federation/Empire works, to name but a very few that do this.

'Collective' universes without continuity do not fare as well over time, unless they are entertaining for other reasons: Star Trek, X-Files, and all 'episodic' television shows; and things like Thieve's World and the 1632 series the latter of which has good internal coordination on themes and characters while the former broke the coherent model in the first story collection.  In episodic television you can get 're-visits' to previous characters/situations/themes, but they do not form an inter-connected whole universe.  Thus to get good causal relationships of events, as in the 1632 series, requires cooperation and understanding by the authors involved to NOT break with the known pattern of events and understandings.  In this format the individual stories/episodes can be very and even extremely compelling, but the overall continuity requires an extremely firm hand on sticking to a timeline to get internal coherence of the universe involved.

As I enjoy stories that take place in coherent universes (even if the characters, situations, plots, and such are incoherent as in some of Michael Moorcock's works) writing a story in a pre-existing universe that is episodic or has multiple, non-concurring stories, then requires editing out the prior history of that universe to gain a continuity.  Thus in writing a Trek story, I had to take out a meat cleaver as there are non-concurring stories, histories, events and even some outlooks that just don't 'fit' with each other.  To keep most of the stories requires throwing out a minority of them, and that is something every writer for Trek has done... which is why it is incoherent as the different visions, even in The Original Series (ST:TOS), are not concurring.  Thus no one fully agrees with any story written and larger format, such as films, can actually make things worse.

 

Science Fiction requires science

Science is a body of work that is achieved by observation, examining the results, quantifying them, and then doing analysis to ask: what makes this work the way it does?  Trial and error results, theories get tossed out with a shred of new evidence that disproves them, and theoretical frameworks are rebuilt using new understanding to see how new observations fit in with previous ones and these new theories have conclusions that can be tested and the hypothesis will either validated or invalidated.  You can have an absolutely great idea that, in its fundamentals, is correct, but due to lack of observations or ability to do the mathematics involved, is discounted.  You may be vindicated years or decades after your death, but that doesn't make your original observations (or lack thereof) more compelling.

Technology is the handmaiden of science: you can't build something unless you know what it is you want to make.  Science requires observations that require new devices to be made along known principles to test new hypotheses.  Thus scientists work with engineers on the art of the possible.

That is on the hard science side.

It is normally abused pretty well for television/movies/radio programs as the time to actually explain where a given piece of technology comes from (what, really, is a phaser?  or a blaster?) just isn't available: it is a flashy weapon designed for the media involved.  If you read David Drake's Hammer's Slammers works you get some very good looks at what a realistic form of weapon is possible from the knowns of physics that is both flashy and deadly.  Some are within the realm of the near-possible (lasers for example at large scales) others, like generating up enough energy to form a thin disk of copper into a directable plasma is a bit less certain (we can do that with explosives but not on a repeatable electronic device and standard electromagnetic means, but that, too, is engineering).

Equipment, in general, has been the lagging point of future stories as they depend upon current known and easily extrapolated systems.  The main computer of a starship in Star Trek has morphed from a mainframe to a distributed system with centralized storage and processing for large problems.  For these to be in a continuity, the past needs to lead to these forms of technology: thus there must have been some previous problems or events that limit the capacity of that future compared to current abilities.  Much of the early works of SF have this problem, where we have advanced in our abilities in physics but data processing lags badly.  Normally I put this under the 'explosive growth of expanded basic technology' phenomena, where a few basic understandings (that we currently don't have) make new capability in non-data areas as exciting and cost effective as data processing, which then lags.  That  is a backwards rationalization, of course, but serves as a good touchstone to put ideas we now have on savings via data processing into a different venue.  In naval warfare we have seen this in our own time as ships that are older are either retrofitted to have new capabilities (but on an older platform) or new built ships embody new technology that, in its time, becomes less useful compared to new technology.  Destroyers have gone from escort vessels and anti-air fire platforms, and submarine hunting with a relatively large crew, to now doing all of that, coordinating airspace and defenses of multiple vessels and packing the firepower of a WWII Battleship.  While having crew size reduced even as ship mass increases as technology makes the need for personnel less by leveraging automation in the place of manual work.

Sometimes, as in the Terminator series, technology is way advanced for the state of the art and not a direct derivative of existing technology.  That said the figure of Miles Bennett Dyson proves critical.  I don't discuss that in my cross-over story, but his critical role is demonstrated by what happens when he DOES get foreknowledge of what his work will come to (even if he doesn't know it): it doesn't help and actually hinders his progress.  In the Terminator films the actual creation of the machine intelligence gets pushed back: after the first film and then the second, events recede as intervention via time travel happens.  I'll leave time travel aside, for the moment, but this effect where seeing how your ideas result in an end technology actually inhibiting you because you want to DUPLICATE and not CREATE the technology is a fascinating one. 

In a timeline without time travel, Dyson creates the basic technology for intelligent machines quickly, but with the technology in hand he stumbles as he is trying to re-create work from an unknown source.  Far from making the machines more possible, that knowledge retards their creation by Dyson.  Soon that is pushed off even further away from Dyson, after his death, and the question of normal technological advancement going in a different direction is one that cannot be ignored: if the advanced technology can't be figure out quickly, then research re-orients on known pathways that are fruitful.  That is part of my quibble with UFO conspiracy theories that we have such lovely access to 'advanced technology': if we could understand it, then we would be using it, and if we can't then we have to develop the underpinnings for it so we can understand it... which makes having the technology, itself, problematical as we are inventing it. If there really IS a conspiracy, then PUSHING for such technology may actually SLOW its advance as you have a preconceived notion of it based on an artifact and what it does, now what the underlying science IS.  Really, how long did mankind spend trying to invent the ornithopter when known airfoils for gliding have been made since the time of Ancient Egypt, as seen by children's toys left in tombs?  The practical hang-glider was possible centuries before it was invented, and yet by trying to fly like birds or insects, no one thought of doing that as a means of flying.

*

Thus ends part 1.

Dealing with the future as seen in the past and how it has actually come about makes examining stories very interesting.  The stories are not only cultural artifacts, but an insight into how we, as a society, viewed science, technology and cultural change.

SF or not SF? Film Edition

H/t to Instapundit to point out the John Scalzi question on just what is and is not a science fiction based movie.  As I come from the SF Lit side, I am biased and tend to put a more rigorous basis on SF, but that basis also captures movies that no one would classify as SF!  In the SF media community you will get different answers, but for me there are some touchstones and hallmarks of SF that must exist, regardless of presentation media, for it to be SF.

 

First off it must be within the known or extrapolated known realms of science.  Thus Angels flitting around on wings because 'God made them to do that' doesn't cut it as SF while genetically engineered pterosaurs from Jurassic Park would.  Time travel stories fall either into fantasy (supernatural power) such as Somewhere in Time or SF (machine using some extrapolated known laws to function) like Back to the Future.  If you are The Man Who Could Work Miracles you are in a fantasy setting and if you are stuck in Things to Come you are in a fascistic SF setting.

Now notice that this picks up some wide number of films not normally considered SF, but which are rigorous extrapolations from known technology, like The Guns of Navarone.  By positing Nazi Germany putting together its large cannon technology (which it had) plus its primitive radar (which it had) you now get radar guided large guns used for anti-shipping purposes and putting a lot of anti-aircraft equipment on top of that, makes it pretty well defended.  Even written after the fact, it is a prime piece of speculative SF and a definite sub-genre known as 'Alternate History' (Alt History).  Minor sub-plots during real engagements are fictionalizations of those engagements, not SF.  Utilizing the known in novel methods and rigorously going through them: that is SF.

 

Second is the rigorous use of technology to show its social and societal fallouts and then going through those in a rigorous fashion.  This is a major stumbling block, as you can have something utterly fantastical that isn't explained or easy to extrapolate and carry it out in a rigorous way to come up with a great story!  You can postulate some derived alien capability to do something and not explain it, but cover its outcome in a thorough manner and it LOOKS like SF: it has all the settings and trappings of SF, and just shoves the explaining and extrapolating into never, never land.  Alien capability dropping in from space doesn't make it instantly SF, however, as the basis does need some backing to it, otherwise you are in a fantastical realm of angels, demons and just adding 'aliens' to the mix.  As an example of this, there is the Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), which I count as fantastical fiction, but not SF, and the The Thing (1982) which *is* SF as it explains how The Thing operates.  Both do excellent jobs of extrapolating from this outside influence that arrives on planet Earth, but only one really takes it apart in a semi-believable way.  Also both are remakes, a Hollywood genre in, and of, itself.  Just because you have spaceships and aliens, doesn't mean that you have SF (or in the case of IBS space seeds drifting through the cosmos... so much for gravity, huh?).

As Mr. Scalzi ventures into the comic book superhero business, lets take a look at a few of those to see where they fit so far.  Spiderman is a great character study, but post gen-engineering a human body to let you wind up with something nice is currently outside the realm of possibility and by pure chance it goes out to fantastical... just ask poor Seth Brundle in The Fly which, no matter how weird it is, is actually closer to SF as it attempts to put a decent bit of reasoning down for it.  Iron Man falls down on power source (damned he should have used beamed power), and have you actually done the estimates of how much it takes to make a human body move that fast in flight?  It has all the rigorousness and techno trappings you could ask for, but if they wanted a power source they should have taken it one more step... it would have killed the story line until they figured out how to do it, but thems the breaks in making SF.  Taking The Dark Knight, we find actual uses of real technology that only require engineering, not fantastical discovery.  I'm writing a bit of Batman fiction for personal fun right now, and it is damned fun to do and you don't even have to do post-known extrapolation to do it in the past, just rigorously apply what was known to come up with something workable.

For sociology and demographics, you can have all sorts of neat techno stuff and not be SF.  Logan's Run falls into that as it was not a valid nor rigorous extrapolation of demographics, even as a novel.  Blade Runner, by utilizing technology ina way to support known trends of industry and population density is SF, and a great flick once you get rid of the narrator... Alien is SF, following trends of technology and industry and postulating and organism that has adapted to cross-species parasitism, and Alien 3 is religious metaphor, not SF, even while using the successful Alien concept as a platform.  Did *that* series lose its way, or what?

 

Just how much and how quickly does society change and why?  If you have changes in understandings of science and creations of new technological tools, then just how quickly can humanity adapt to them?  We went from expensive cell phones in the 1980's to ubiquity of them in two decades or less.  A 1980's 'luggable' computer is now thoroughly captured in an iPhone, and as a result we are more tuned in to ourselves as individuals and create less common society around us with our fellow man.  By creating common and cheap connectivity, we dissolve social bonds on a local level and allow such things as radical Islam to spread world-wide as the dominant social setting that breeds it is no longer cut off by distance.  These are *minor* changes in technology, and yet they have caused deep and abiding societal drift and anomie in almost no time at all.  Larry Niven's early Known Space works in the realm of Lit. SF did a great job of presaging this, but on the side of the rest of the media...

Things to Come, mentioned above, no matter how horrific its idealization of a fascistic future is, does a good if not excellent job at destroying global society to allow this global takeover, while Logan's Run, doesn't.  Death Race 2000 along with something like Rollerball, both dystopian fantasies, really did picture a steep decline in human society that you really did have problems seeing, while The Running Man was humorously chilling in that you could picture it, all too readily. Soylent Green fails as, lets face it, humans are a bit too calorie intensive to be a good food source for a world both over-run with humans and without enough to eat... think about that for a moment, it is a self-solving problem: not enough environment and population plummets, not goes up. And if you can make space ships to go through the solar system, like in Silent Running, then how hard would it be to make a few space stations to house forests?  Artistically these may be good films, but SF-wise?  If you have a horrific ecology and industrial societies running out of material you get the world of Mad Max/Road Warrior, both of which carry through on the societal logic to its end points.  All of these would normally get put into the SF category by most reviewers, but to me you wind up with half of them (MM/RW being one world).

 

When it comes to the ultimate place of man's society in films, the rule is that dystopian films rule the roost as no one wants to go to a film in which mankind actually works out its problems in a non-repressive way.  Often its not even mankind, itself, that causes the repression, but our works. This line of thought started very, very early on with Fritz Lang's Metropolis which is pretty much where the compelling story line of robots putting the future of humanity at risk is born.  It was SF for its day, taking the known concepts of class warfare, automation and man's role in this process we call 'work' and the introduction of machines that move man away from work will have its own allure, beyond that of the actual beauty of the robot, itself.  Doing that extrapolation of machine efficiency to human labor, casting it against social theory of class warfare and Metropolis is the result.

Compelling cinema can be had from this set-up, with Planet of the Apes doing just that in its use of the speculated about suspended animation for humans to cross light years at relatively slow speeds.  Humorously, the equipment created to actually track the ship does NOT tell everyone that it had a minor malfunction so that they really didn't go much of anyplace.  It is a minor flaw (a nit picking one, to be sure), but this ship of such technological genius, such heroic discovery, can't even tell where it is?  The constellations and stars in them would not have drifted that much and it should have gotten the general neighborhood being in or right close to the Solar System *right*.  It is used as a plot device, and yet, with just a bit of work, it could have been avoided.  In general, if you are putting a film together, you want to pack the absolute worst inconsistent parts into the front end of the film: they are either forgotten by following content, or they are the 'taste' of the major plot to see where you wind up with such things happening.  Still it is a technical flaw, not a religious belief that mankind will over-run the planet with his own progeny.  There is much in the way of SF that has such problems and is still SF because the underlying extrapolation is sound, not fanciful.  Plus two thousand years is just about the right time span to achieve that complete overturning of the order in human society.

Poking fun at dystopian futures is also a good staple of the film world, though there are far fewer of those.  If you see Metropolis then the counter point to that is Chaplin's Modern Times, which also fares excellently because he was trying to show where that machine age of his ends up.  One of the major bits of presaging he does is the man who has many careers in his life!  Eerily that has come true, in spades, and following Chaplin from working class, production line stiff to jail to supposed Communist organizer to informant to being in the '30s bread lines to... how many jobs does he have in this film, anyway?  Singing waiter, anyone?  Because he tries out for that, too.  In looking at his own Modern Times, we see a different, less class warfare form of view taken, and it is riveting comedy, even when it is compelling SF as an examination of how social orders do change and how change shifts opportunities and lives.

If you take advanced technology, somehow isolate it to the idle rich and don't let one, single bit of information that you have such advanced technology available and decide to use it in nefarious and, ultimately, chillingly illegal ways you get The Stepford Wives.  Such highly advanced robots and NO ONE knows about them?  Really?  Even back then, it was looking like robots of this type would require a hugely advanced industrial base to make them... reading Asimov from that era points to that.  If, like in I, Robot, you saw tons of robots around all the time, you might be someplace.  And pretty much have sexbots available, like in AI.  Really, if the men needed those kicks and could afford the sexbots, they would be readily available and those marrying such men would know that, at the start.  Postulating the technology without the backing of the larger industrial base is a non-starter.  You can make a great thriller out of that, but that doesn't make it SF, as technology is just a stand-in for previous generations of demons and devils and otherworldly super-beings.  That was also done in Demon Seed, but just where are all the others of the Proteus line (numbers I, II and III) that would make anyone *want* to make a Proteus IV? 

When you have machines malignant to humanity and add in an automated industrial set-up you get The Terminator, which is far more rigorous in that extrapolation than The Stepford Wives.  Like Planet of the Apes, The Terminator places its 'no good way to explain it' time travel at the front of the film.  More deeply it is an update to Colossus: The Forbin Project, which itself had some techno-gaffes on computer sizing and ability but was the, then, reasonable extrapolation of such.  Skynet from The Terminator starts out as a Colossus-like machine, and in Terminator 2: Judgment Day that is updated to being a coordinator of a computer virus (pan-platform, global) that allows Skynet to jump from coordinator to controller in a matter of minutes.  The first Terminator film is one of the most compelling Action/Adventure flicks and Dystopian future films around, for all that we only see the effects of it, those effects are horrific.  Leaving aside the question of time travel, it is SF in a pure sense.  Leaving aside time travel in the second film also makes it a hugely compelling film, in many ways superior to the first.  Of course if you leave aside time travel in both films, you don't realize that past history is changing before your eyes (which makes for a hugely compelling idea about time travel, in general, that is never discussed).  Where The Stepford Wives falls down is on industrial production and capability, and that added in makes for a wholly different, far more compelling future vision outside of a single story like the first two Terminator films... with the third falling far short due to lack of coherence and continuity: how does Skynet get such great machines when, in the first film, it is being besieged and brought down in its central computing area?  Thus the problem is the part you leave aside: time travel.  Again the series goes downhill quickly without the continuity.

From this conception, for me at least, SF does need to be rigorous, have founding in what is known and what is reasonable to extrapolate from that.  Throwing in technology to make a plot work is just that: throwing in technology because you can't think of the underpinning of it to make a compelling film and want a 'MacGuffin'.  Actually, Alfred Hitchcock did a splendid job with his use of such things as shown in Notorious, and its plot device turns out to be something that would be a real mover and for more than just a thriller, and Hitchcock claims he had been followed by the FBI for using it!  True SF is that which would cause such notice. 

He would also use social commentary to view how people within society react to serial killers with sexual and other overtones.  While hearkening back to Jack the Ripper, The Lodger: A story of the London Fog is a deep investigation into the psyche behind mass-media driven hysteria and one of the most compelling views on how media impacts culture that has ever appeared in film.  You would think that a film that had NO high-tech and is just doing social commentary would not be SF: but by carrying through how past hysteria has been built, the result is that of a rigorous extrapolation for such future events.  We must remember this is the era (1927) when ONLY Jack the Ripper had been of note: no Boston Strangler, Son of Sam, Green River Killer, John Wayne Gacy or Charles Manson.  That list is, itself, a chilling indication of how Hitchcock's examination and extrapolation had compelling legitimacy for all that it was a fictional account.  Without needing technology, he performed a feat of compelling SF and didn't even mean to do so. 

Hitchcock's examination of 'war by other means' in Sabotage, goes beyond the pre-WWII setting and presages the era of terrorism in the modern world.  By divorcing those doing the dirty work from any Nation, any ideology, and yet making it clear they are under control of some Nation or group, the chilling horror of how individuals who seem so nice can be deadly killers is given front stage.  This, too, is extrapolation from the known, but by doing artistic work to ensure that the those doing such work are 'timeless', Hitchcock does a timeless analysis of how and why such seemingly pleasant individuals can seek to hide such horror before doing it.

As I pointed out in the beginning: SF is not limited to one type of film and by using a thorough-going analysis and presentation of that, you can achieve good extrapolation based on known science and behavior.  That does not make such works primarily SF, as we are too captivated by the technological 'eye candy' to understand that technology is a gloss over the social structure and individuals that comprise it.  Being a 'saboteur' without apparent connection to the 'Great Game' between Nations makes that individual unlike others and willing to toss aside civilized means when it suits them to do so.  That extrapolation is based on how anarchists and communists acted previously, and by generalizing it, Hitchcock turns it into a scientific rendition of the human condition done on film as a thriller.  By using the known and going into the unknown with a good use of continuity and extrapolation, you get SF.  Deadly machines don't require there to be Terminators, and using radar with accurate cannon technology yields astounding results... yet one is SF and the other isn't because of its WWII setting.  All that is bright and flashy with technology is not SF, and all that is, apparently, mundane is not that when handled properly by a writer, director or producer just willing to take that one, extra step and ask: 'What if...?'