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Comment by mihaic | Hacker News Reader

My greatest gripe with the show is that none of the writers seem to have any understanding of science, technology and have only a vague understanding of sociology, pretty much all of the main themes of the books. I actually liked the imperial cloning elements, as they fleshed out well an ossified society, but every other plotline seems to just happen because of pseudo-magic.

I can only wish that the writer's room of Futurama could have had a go at this. Writers today seem to not understand anymore how reality works, so they aren't able to extrapolate from it.

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> Writers today seem to not understand anymore how reality works, so they aren't able to extrapolate from it.

That's a quite accurate observation. Even for the largest budgets people tasked with story telling are almost always the weakest element. Who makes them? What kind of education do they undergo to be this wrong about reality and storytelling? Are they such small and in-bred group that they are all so wrong in such similar ways?

This reminds me of another weird thing. In games, various NPCs often say the same dialog line just in different voices. So the bottleneck is writing few words? Not hiring voice talent, not recording it in the studio and postprocessing it? But writing few unique words less is where you get your savings?

True, it might be that the bubble writers live in nowadays is stronger than it's ever been, and it's a guild that rejects all non-aligned newcomers. It might also be that people that understand reality go into more stable domains, to make a sure income.

Whatever the reason, we're surely becoming culturally poorer.

Because writers don't fund movies and tv shows, and are almost always left out of the decision making process for what elements need to appear in the story.

So the problem is that writers don't write the scripts? I know directors don't actually direct them since there often is director's cut, that is supposed to reflect better the intentions of the director.

How many actors can you name? Directors?

Screenwriters would seem to be critically important, but writing is hard, often slow and converts much less recognition than other roles in the industry. Further, there are innumerable points in the production chain in which the (necessary!) decisions of other crew members can alter/dilute/confuse the intentions of the screenwriter.

Recently I'm learning a lot of names of screenwriters exactly because they tank show after show but they are given yet another chance by producers because one of the things they wrote was mediocre.

> Screenwriters would seem to be critically important, but writing is hard, often slow and converts much less recognition than other roles in the industry

I can name Levinson and Link. Ronald D. Moore also seemed pretty great. Some writers are talented enough that they can transcend the obscurity granted by their profession, and achieve "cult status" within a small niche who cares about these things.

But frankly, it seems many writers are simply not good. Most TV show nowadays consist of central characters doing dumb things, and needing an episode or two to dig themselves out, acting as filler. Episodic formats tend to promote lazy writing and overreliance on tropes. And it seems to me that most writers watch more TV shows than they read books, given how homogeneous the average popular TV show can be.

I can usually forgive some tech contradiction details, but its really annoying when there is faster than light travel... But to create contrived suspense because no technology exists to make a flashlight strong enough to illuminate a cave for 10m ??!?!

The humble flashlight must be one of the most abused pieces of modern technology in fiction. According to video games, it doesn't matter what century you're in, it is impossible to create a flashlight that lasts for more than a few minutes, and only provides a feeble cone of barely-light for that time. According to science fiction, despite the fact ~98%+ of the people reading this literally have a flashlight in their pocket or equally available right now, they are rare things that you have to remember to take with you, and even if you do remember, they'd often be outshone by a 1970s campground flashlight.

Back here in the real world we have more light than we know what to do with. We have things that seem to light up the world accidentally, like the screen of our phones, better than flashlights can do the job in the future.

There's some other tropes where super-futuristic, sci-fi technology is noticeably worse than our real-world technology (weaponry in particular, most "ray guns" are noticeably inferior to real-world guns in almost every way except perhaps ammo capacity), but none I can think of where the every day experience of everybody now is so readily at-hand to know better.

> a flashlight that lasts for more than a few minutes (...) despite the fact ~98%+ of the people reading this literally have a flashlight in their pocket or equally available right now

A tangent: it dawned on me only a few years ago just how little power LED lights use compared to most other things we do with energy. I never had a good intuition for this, so I was surprised when I noticed that keeping my smartphone's flashlight active at full power doesn't noticeably drain its battery - in stark contrast to even keeping the screen on (and thus the phone's CPU awake).

This is not my experience on iPhones. This light drains the battery pretty quickly.

I see. To contextualize my observation, it is my experience with Galaxy S7 and S9.

I suspect your iPhones must be staying awake for the duration of using the flashlight, for some reason.

Even when LED flashlights were first popularized (more than a decade ago), it was believable that batteries always seemed to be on their last legs, especially in the wilderness. It's probably not supposed to be a thing on Terminus unless there's a missing plot point that explains why they couldn't use or were preserving their pocket nuclear reactors / batteries that can power force fields among other things.

0.5W flash light mounted on pulse rifle that produces 1MW :{

In the book it took them eighty years of being metal-starved on Terminus to develop pocket reactors, with everyone else in the galaxy incredulous that it was possible.

Bulky power sources at this point in the timeline are entirely consistent with the book. What's wildly inconsistent is that Cleon has a personal force field that's supposed to be invented a hundred years later, on Terminus, isolated from the Empire.

> weaponry in particular, most "ray guns" are noticeably inferior to real-world guns in almost every way except perhaps ammo capacity

I was thinking about this watching Foundation. In thousands of years will humans really be _shooting projectiles_ at each other to disrupt vital organs? Why wouldn't it be some kind of device that interacts on a deeper level, I'm thinking like setting off a mini-nuclear-chain-reaction when coming into contact with a single cell that just causes their body to instantly vaporize.

Guns in general seem like something that should already be antiquated.

The Foundation book series, IIRC, has "disintegrators", which are invisible beams that disrupt the charges of the target atoms and cause the target to lose all chemical cohesion. However, "invisible beams" work poorly for video. As a result, most sci-fi video weapons have the huge disadvantage of forming an arrow pointing directly at where you are. Real firearms have muzzle flash but that has nothing on a huge finger pointing right at you.

Additionally, since the audience needs to "see" the beam, most sci-fi weapons have miserably slow firing rates, enough that on the modern battlefield they would be useless.

"Guns in general seem like something that should already be antiquated."

This comes from a mindset that technology is "tiered" and that later technologies are "better" than earlier ones in all ways. This is caused by watching too much science fiction and/or playing too many video games. It is not how the real universe works. In reality, throwing things really hard at your opponent is likely to be a viable strategy indefinitely. The science fiction technologies that would invalidate this, like Dune's shields, do not seem to be things that exist in the real universe.

> This comes from a mindset that technology is "tiered" and that later technologies are "better" than earlier ones in all ways.

That wasn't really what I was going for. What I was thinking was actually efficiency. Of course projectiles will always be effective, but they are not the most efficient. Technology tends towards an increase in efficiency, and inefficient technologies are often supplanted by new ones (swords being largely displaced by guns, muzzle loading weapons being largely replaced by automatic, etc).

If the point is to eliminate an adversary's existence, I can imagine that in thousands of years more efficient means will have been invented. But you're probably right that it doesn't make for exciting television.

>> but its really annoying when there is faster than light travel.

Almost all space scifi has FTL, wormholes, warp drive or jump drive out of necessity, otherwise you're rather limited in travel. Even the Expanse allows for it at some point, after allowing for the super high efficiency fusion drive just to make travel around the Solar System reasonably fast enough. It's a necessary plot device, unless you're doing a generational ship or staying close to home.

I am totally fine with FTL. My point is, if you have FTL travel, but the tech at the time cant invent a flashlight to illuminate a cave for more than 10m, or even have tech that allow them to see every imaginable detail etc... Dont create lazy tension points that are built on fumbling around in the dark due to inadequate lighting.

Speaker for the Dead and the ensuing novels in the Ender's Game series managed to tell multi-stellar stories with sub-light travel and relativistic effects.

Also most of the Three-Body Problem trilogy, there is no FTL until the very end when they jump forward by aeons.

Fair enough, but if you have a galactic empire, some sort of fast travel is needed.

Read Deepness in the Sky for an alternative take.

I forgive it much less now than in the past. Everyone has a direct portal to the sum total knowledge of humanity in their pocket and the internet is full of knowledgeable communities who can answer questions. Not leveraging this as a writer is lazy and arrogant.

There is a definite sliding scale. Make your Sci-Fi too hard and you just have science and no fiction. But its not that hard to stick to the "One Big Lie" rule. If the expanse and the Martian can do it then so can everyone else.

> My greatest gripe with the show is that none of the writers seem to have any understanding of science, technology and have only a vague understanding of sociology

> but every other plotline seems to just happen because of pseudo-magic.

I mean, you could say the same of the original books! Asimov obviously did have a good understanding of science, but it is not meaningfully on display in Foundation; psychohistory is _nonsense_, and that's before you get to the 'atomics'. Foundation wasn't (and wasn't intended to be) rock-hard sci-fi, and that's okay.

Yeah, the Genetic Dynasty stuff is the most compelling so far. I'd happily watch a West Wing-style "how the Empire is run" show with Lee Pace.

Brother Darkness' "ascension" scene was pretty good imho and of course it was not in the books.

The first reaction I got watching genetic dynasty stuff is Elon Musk probably has something like that planned. The technology is more or less ready. And he is that reckless

Given some of the podcast interviews, it appears the show-runners don’t actually care about the consistency of the scope of the world they’ve made. They have multi-orders-of-magnitude inconsistencies about the size of the empire in both number of people, number of worlds, and distances. Which can really crash the sense of conflict back into a pure fantasy-land, Star Wars style. Which, generally, Asimov really avoided. And which can undercut the themes that are driven by the grand scope.

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