Dome, Dome on the Range

António Pedro Marques · 13 Jan 2011, 19:32 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

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From: entonio at gmail.com (=?UTF-8?B?QW50w7NuaW8gUGVkcm8gTWFycXVlcw==?=)
Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2011 19:32:05 +0000
Subject: (urth) Dome, Dome on the Range
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Jeff Wilson wrote (13-01-2011 18:36):

> It has been a while since I have mentioned that I do a lot of peer
> review and fact-checking on role-playing game books. While this includes
> a lot of fanciful "zapping" with super powers and such, the publisher
> sjgames.com courts a lot of the hard-SF crowd by making a point of
> consulting domain experts in the preparation of the books on real world
> subjects like planetary science and biotechnology.

My take on this is that what's important is not saying nonsense about the 
stuff we do obvservational data on. Our knowledge is so limited that it 
really doesn't matter if the author makes it all work based on giant turtles 
somewhere else far away (who doesn't love giant turtles). In fact, tying 
fiction to current understanding is a sure way to make it dated, and if an 
important goal of the work is to present innovative ideas, then it's fail. 
But for crying out loud, I had to tune out the TV in disgust the other day 
while watching Eleventh Hour (US TV series) the other day. Whoever wrote the 
script seemed ignorant of 4th grade biology. That isn't good. Exactly the 
same storyline could have been written in a reasonable way, but no, they had 
to ruin it. It's the line between understanding, which is always susceptible 
to revolution, and observation, in which we do know that red blood cells 
don't wear firemen hats.

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