Big mistakes in sf.

[Marvolo]

Originally Posted by sarakoth

Another thing I don't get is how they move around so fast in The Butlerin Jihad. Fold space drive wasn't invented yet but they could traverse the galaxy in a matter of months.

Also, astronomy seems to be a lost science. The "known universe" in Dune is much smaller than the "known universe" today.

The known universe today is much bigger than the known universe back when the book was originally written too.

[lin robinson]

Arrakis is not located in another galaxy, and you don't see any Tatooine people running around with blue-in-blue eyes, or any mention of spice. People seem able to exist there quite well without benefit of stillsuits, there are no worms cruising around the desert, and Arrakis doesn't have any nonhumans that remotely resemble those found on Tatooine.

None of that seems much of a barrier to an imaginative writer. I don't know what "another galaxy" means...that gets relative pretty quick, I'd say. But how many Tatooine people did we see? A few little mongers here and there. Who knows whether there is not deeper desert somewhere else on the planet. I would see Luke's family as colonists from elsewhere anyway. And we see at least two different races...who says there aren't more? Suits shouldn't be all that necessary near irrigation equipment. Another great planetary secret/irony...there was water way down there all along, but it took some hi-tech gringos to come find it and drill it up.

[Timewalker]

Originally Posted by sarakoth

Another thing I don't get is how they move around so fast in The Butlerin Jihad. Fold space drive wasn't invented yet but they could traverse the galaxy in a matter of months.

Also, astronomy seems to be a lost science. The "known universe" in Dune is much smaller than the "known universe" today.

Simply put, Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert just decided to completely ignore the inconvenient fact of Ensteinian relativity. The entire Legends trilogy simply should not have been able to happen, because even in the course of ONE trip from Planet A to Planet B, a much shorter span of time would have happened on the ship than on the world they left/were going to and they would have arrived at their destination to find that the situation they expected was completely different (ie. the planet was dead, the war was won, etc.).

As for the size of the "known universe" -- it's fair to say that Frank Herbert didn't have all the benefits we do today from the fantastic knowledge gained by using the Hubble telescope, the IRAS, and many other far-reaching telescopes and instruments.

For story purposes, I suppose we could speculate that the anti-Thinking Machine fighters regarded such astronomical instruments as a form of thinking machine and simply destroyed them. Or even more simply, Earth's records at this point are tens of thousands of years in the past and likely destroyed anyway.

[lin robinson]

As for the size of the "known universe" -- it's fair to say that Frank Herbert didn't have all the benefits we do today from the fantastic knowledge gained by using the Hubble telescope, the IRAS, and many other far-reaching telescopes and instruments.

I'm trying to figure out how that would have affected his books and just can't come up with anything.

[Marvolo]

I think they are trying to say that Herbert didn't know how large the universe truly is when he originally wrote the novel because the scientists of the day didn't.

[Timewalker]

Originally Posted by Marvolo

I think they are trying to say that Herbert didn't know how large the universe truly is when he originally wrote the novel because the scientists of the day didn't.

That's exactly it.

[lin robinson]

But now we do, right? :-)

What I'm saying is...what possible effect could the size of the universe have on the matter?

[Marvolo]

The only thing it affects in the series is the references to the size of the known universe in the time period of the novels. The implications in the novels is that the universe is much smaller than the discoveries since the novels were written have revealed.

[Omphalos]

Mistake. Sorry.

[Omphalos]

Lucas has acknowledged Dune as an inspiration, and I believe Brian Herbert mentions that Frank considered a lawsuit after A New Hope came out. There used to be an amazingly good page out there that went into a great amount of detail about Dune as a source for Star Wars.

The page is now gone, but for example, consider Alia, Leia. In the original script instead of plans for the Death Star Leia had a load of spice. BG body controls reflected in the Jedi. Jedi's use of voice. Jabba and worms. Tatoonie and Arrakis. A young hero with dead parents who overthrows an empire and becomes mythically famous and gets superpowers. I think there is a powerful trade guild in Star Wars too. There are more. Too bad that page is gone. She said that she wanted to write a book. I hope to god she is, because she was really onto something.

[Timewalker]

Who wanted to write a book?

(btw -- hello, Omphalos -- it's Hypatia from Arrakeen! )

[Omphalos]

Hi Timewalker! I thought that was the avatar you were describing.

I cannot remember the woman's name. I sent you a link to the page a loooooong time ago. If you bookmarked it, it was either spookybug or jitterbut dot com. If you read through her entire website, she says at the end that she was trying to get a book on the sources for Star Wars. The website was really dense with information, and the section on Dune as a source for Star Wars was really well written.

You dont know where that page wound up, do you?

[Timewalker]

Sorry, no. But I save all my PMs so I'll find it and do some searching.

[Lith]

Dune has always struck me more as a fantasy work than a SF work, at least in spirit. But I also only read the first one... And I never thought about the oxygen problem- but it's funny!

A lot of old SF is riddled with horrible science. More room for the imagination that way.

[iansales]

And Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is set in 1992. And 2001: A Space Odyssey... well, it's going to be two decades after that date before the US sends another man to the Moon. None of Asimov's stories or novels predicted the prevalence of computers. But then sf isn't meant to be predictive. Writing a story set in the future, extrapolated from the science and technology of the time of writing, is always going to result in something will be dated several years later. Those sf novels that haven't dated are usually ones whose background is less tied to hard science and technology. Such as Dune. Herbert neatly got around commiting any faux pas about future computing by banning them entirely from his universe. Much of the technology described in the books is fantasy technology - it does what he needs it to do for the story, but there's no real scientific rationale behind it. Not that it really matters.