Bit short this one, but it’s been annoying me for a while.
Now I’m not a physicist in any way or form, just a widely read layman, but I’m sick and tired of badly written science-fiction that uses the cold of space to cool things down… space is cold so surely you can cool things down really well. Heck if you have some means of pumping your heat to the remote parts of the solar system you’d be able to just cheat on cooling solutions.
But as any real physicist will tell you cooling doesn’t work that way. In an atmosphere or fluid environment cooling works through the air (gas) or liquid warming up from the heat source and the moving that heated substance away through convection. Some of the heat will be radiated away but radiant heat transfer is slow, it’s far better to use convection… hence why PC CPUs and Graphics cards use heat sinks.
So even if you could somehow move your heat from Earth to the depths of space you’d not then be able to just dump it into space. (Yes a story I read used the idea to prevent/stop/limit Climate Change.) Dumping heat in space is not easy.
If you go read some of the earlier classic sci-fi authors even though they had some weird ideas many of which are known not to be true. The science of their fiction has literally caught up with them (eg Buckminsterfullerene was often used a as near frictionless solid used as a perfect lubricant, more slippery than graphite. Yet we know nowadays that it’s no slippier than a lump of coal (possible hyperbole there), but not slippy at all.) There are others, but that’s one of my favourite examples.
A lot of modern science-fiction leaves much to be desired in my mind, I attribute that to what I call the Star Wars effect, so many people have grown up reading Star Wars as their “Great Sci-Fi” that they don’t realise that it’s fantasy with a futuristic theme, okay it’s set long ago but it has lasers and space ships, must be sci-fi? George Lucas himself said:
Well, I had a real problem because I was afraid that science-fiction buffs and everybody would say things like, “You know there’s no sound in outer space”. I just wanted to forget science. That would take care of itself. Stanley Kubrick made the ultimate science-fiction movie and it is going to be very hard for somebody to come along and make a better movie, as far as I’m concerned. I didn’t want to make a 2001, I wanted to make a space fantasy that was more in the genre of Edgar Rice Burroughs; that whole other end of space fantasy that was there before science took it over in the Fifties. Once the atomic bomb came, everybody got into monsters and science and what would happen with this and what would happen with that. I think speculative fiction is very valid but they forgot the fairy tales and the dragons and Tolkien and all the real heroes.
https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/george-lucas-the-wizard-of-star-wars-2-232011/
Yet even a cursory search for “Star Wars and Sci-Fi” shows that many think that Star Wars is sci-fi. When they write their own sci-fi they don’t write sci-fi they write fantasy and make stuff up that works because. Good sci-fi might use fantastical elements to make things work, force fields for instance. But they are consistent within the setting. Ian M. Banks’ culture books use science and materials that are as fantastical to us, but within the setting they are part of the science.
Reason for this rant? Just finished reading a couple of books by the same author. I won’t name him or his books (that’s not cool), I’d found him through a fantasy series that while his protagonist was most definitely a Marty Stu (male Mary Sue) wasn’t a bade read, gave me some ideas toward some of the many books I still haven’t written yet. I tried his sci-fi and realised that it wasn’t sci-fi at all but thinly veiled fantasy… and unlike Lucas this author thought he was writing science fiction (based on the Amazon category anyway).
Maybe I’ll rant about Mary Sue characters another time.