"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote in message
news:4c150d75@news.povray.org...
> John VanSickle <evi### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:

>   For example, some people consider the Terminator series to be sci-fi,
> even if slightly on the softer half of the scale. Others don't.

I don't mind speculative sci-fi, where science and technology goes
explicitly far beyond present and even the plausible. Terminator may be soft
on the sci part in that respect, but it's at least not horribly wrong. I
don't have a problem with time travel, FTL... etc. But communicating FTL,
when such technology is not explicitly given or deducible, is simply wrong.
Not accounting differences between moon and earth gravity, when artificial
gravity is not explicitly specified and really infeasible given the
timeline, is plain wrong. I can live with sound in space, for it's not hard
to imagine an observer shift, but how do we explain away these other obvious
and lazy blunders? Further, making people and corporations behave contrary
to common sense in order to introduce a plot, is lazy and wrong.

>   Sometimes I get the feeling that "sci-fi purists" consider "true sci-fi"
> only those stories which are really obscure and next to incomprehensible,

I don't have a problem with Dali's clocks. It's a different premise,
different context than realism. I can buy that. But if some artist is
claiming to be drawing a realistic clock but fumbles and places both the
hour and minute hand at exactly 6 o'clock, for no good artistic reason, that
would ruin the painting.

> a bit like an artist who thinks that "true art" is something that a
regular
> person cannot understand. Of course the problem with this that this kind
of
> abstract storytelling doesn't sell, so why would movie companies even
bother
> to try making them?

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