Most of us know that sound doesn’t travel in vacuum. Apart from school, we’ve been taught it by negative examples in countless movies so obviously bending the laws of physics that the suspension of disbelief was the only way to fully enjoy the show. The roaring engines and thunderous explosions in space are cool and add to the experience. They are also easy to implement and easy to digest by audience because: suspension of disbelief. The same applies to laser guns, artificial gravity, flying cars and plenty of other SF concepts that work in the comfort zone of ‘suspension of disbelief’. These trends are so well established, that they became predictable. And while hard-core science approach hinders the accessibility of the medium and is simply slow and boring, the trick with technology working in a ‘magical’ way is not doing the trick anymore (at least to us).
When working on our SF game, we have an ambition that it will add some more scientific spin to commonplace science-fiction concepts. While we do not want to make it too heavy on science, we at least want to try to do some reality check and make the technology in our setting a bit less ‘magical’. This approach demands some in-depth research in the fields already visited by SF, and we agreed that it would be nice to share our findings and conclusions with the rest of the world. Of course it’s not a serious futurogical analysis, we’re still playing with science-fiction concepts but a bit more in a nerdy fashion.
And so we came to announce the new series, where we’ll be discussing some potent science-fiction tropes. The series is called Science Fixer, as we will be trying to fix some faults in ‘science’ part of pop-cultural science-fiction. Don’t get us wrong, the ‘lite’ approach is fun and we really love light-sabres, but SF scene is a bit out of balance with strong representation of quasi-science and scarce manifestations of hermetic hard SF. Science Fixer will attempt to bridge the pop-cultural approach with hard SF view by picking up some popular or exotic SF concepts and try to figure out what it would take to actually make them work. Also, we’ll highlight some facts, that are commonly sacrificed on the altar of licentia poetica, or may no be obvious enough to draw attention. While we’ll keep away from academic approach, will try to stick us much as possible to scientific knowledge. The main idea behind the series is to shake some well established SF tropes and encourage you to take some critical view point on what popular culture is selling you as science-fiction. We also hope that Science Fixer will inspire you to do your own broadened research, that hopefully will result in some fruitful discussions in comments down below.
The first episode, which will act as a trial. If it ends up well and catches some attention, there will be more coming. Each episode will be illustrated by leading infographics, to give you a quick view on the content. We’ll be distributing these infographics through our social media, and if you feel like reading you can jump from there to the relevant post and see the full content. And of course you can share it with the others 🙂
Stay tuned for the first episode incoming next week. There will be lasers!