A pretty good sf story
Jun. 16th, 2008 12:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nancylebovMine the Primes by Julian Todd. It's a cross between environmentalism and Atlas Shrugged-- not the sort of thing I'd expect to work, but it does.
It came up in a discussion at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
yhlee's about how much science you need to write science fiction.
I'm really not sure-- the problem may be that some authors are thrown off-balance by bad science or history or whatever. There are certainly stories that work very well for readers in spite of bad science or other nonsense. 1984_ has been a very useful horror story for the intelligentsia even if it doesn't make sense that O'Brian would put so much work into into breaking Winston. _Dune_ works nicely even though the still suits wouldn't. (They don't seem to have any way of getting rid of heat.) The still suits work very well as a way of underlining the scarcity of water.
I'm very fond of the premise of "Mine the Primes", but it's definitely a shiver-down-the-spine collision of coolness with only the smallest homeopathic nibble of truth.
It came up in a discussion at
yhlee's about how much science you need to write science fiction.I'm really not sure-- the problem may be that some authors are thrown off-balance by bad science or history or whatever. There are certainly stories that work very well for readers in spite of bad science or other nonsense. 1984_ has been a very useful horror story for the intelligentsia even if it doesn't make sense that O'Brian would put so much work into into breaking Winston. _Dune_ works nicely even though the still suits wouldn't. (They don't seem to have any way of getting rid of heat.) The still suits work very well as a way of underlining the scarcity of water.
I'm very fond of the premise of "Mine the Primes", but it's definitely a shiver-down-the-spine collision of coolness with only the smallest homeopathic nibble of truth.
