Mythic Sci-Fi: does it work for you? RNA (Destiny)

by Quirel, Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 13:01 (3442 days ago) @ scarab

Star Wars was mythic sci-fi and that worked for me. (Greedo-shot-first and anything after doesn't count - in case I need to state the obvious. La, La, la, can't hear you, didn't happen.)

But Destiny's take on it? I don't think so. Yet.

Was the story a damp squib because the writer's were incompetent? Or was the subject matter/ genre the problem?

Most film/tv/game sci-fi is unscientific. It doesn't get science and doesn't care. Science is magic. Who cares how it works?

Add actual magic on top and what is left is just made up shit that nobody has taken the time to work out how it works.

One example: the glimmer drill. WTF is a glimmer drill? Why is glimmer a currency if you can dig it out of the ground so easily? We can't say for sure that you can't mine glimmer because we have no idea what glimmer is. Yes we mine for gold but that is rare and difficult to get. Glimmer mining seems easy. (part from the being killed by: psycho zombie Guardians!)

Can we mine glimmer? If so why are we bothering to collect it from chests and shooting people? Can we steal a glimmer drill from the Fallen? Or we could do a deal - you mine without being killed - you give us 50% Does it harm the soil to extract glimmer from it? Do we care about the soil in the Cosmodrome?

But, anyway, that is a digression... Except: I do wonder why we don't talk to the Fallen, do deals, come to arrangements, find out what they know of the Darkness, the rest of the galaxy...

Back to the genre being a problem...

The names! God the names. Nigel the knickerless, Morag the unlovable. Can you imagine having to come up with that lot? A story for every exotic weapon, "there was an elf who lived in a shoe and he??? made a weapon that does stuff. I think he made it out of bones or something" I couldn't do it. I would be so depressed if that was my job.

Do you remember the presentation where Joe Staten said that we tried to come up with a real-world based explanation for why souls shoot out of Fallen when you headshot them. I think in the end he just gave up and went with it: souls fly out of Fallen when you shoot them.

Science fiction seems to fall into two camps. The first asks "What if" and extrapolates from there. What if two spacefaring empires waged a hundred-year war so vicious that experienced leaders would not have time to properly train new captains and tactics degraded as a result? What if there was an ancient galaxy-spanning civilization of Humans that mysteriously disappeared and new alien races grew up worshiping their remains? What if there was a form of matter that could increase or decrease the mass of surrounding matter if you ran an electric current through it?

The other kind of science fiction just uses the trappings and tropes of science fiction to tell a story. You could have a murder mystery on a generation ship instead of the Orient Express. You could have armies of the dead made from AI clones of humans. You could have the moon propelled to superluminal speeds by an explosion of radioactive material on the dark side, and Isaac Asimov would take time off from his busy schedule to write about how terrible you are at science fiction.

I won't say that you need to have hard science fiction to have a good story, but mythic science fiction seems to run into the same problems that generic fantasy does. It's more about the characters, and the universe breaks down the closer you examine it. Things happen because they have to happen, and nobody is going to work with the rules of magic to do something more interesting than enchanting swords.

I mean, WTF does restoring a priest's soul actually mean? Is there a person alive who cares?

How do we reason about machines that feed off souls? What is a soul? Is it energy? Can you grow a new one?

Quick question: Have you ever read the Night's Dawn trilogy?