Well, as with just about anything, when the results are good, you can forgive lapses. Ursula K LeGuin wrote an entire future history based on what she called NAFAL (Nearly As Fast As Light) starflight, which would almost certainly not be given such a grammatical name, and she cared not a fig how it worked; what mattered were the human consequences of that kind of relativistic travel, what it would mean to people and to societies.
(It's a facet of Larry Niven's adage, “Change the technology, change the society” - a civilization based on Millennium Falcon-style casual starflight is not going to be the same as one where a “starcrosser” is like a comet, might only arrive once in a century, but people have to get on with their day-to-day lives anyway.)
It could be argued that this soft science approach leavened SF and allowed it to rise beyond John Campbell gee whiz techno pulp and become literature. The greats of 1940s SF were those who caught sight of this and put real characters into their stories of gee whiz robots and rayguns.
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Date: 2013-01-22 10:09 am (UTC)Well, as with just about anything, when the results are good, you can forgive lapses. Ursula K LeGuin wrote an entire future history based on what she called NAFAL (Nearly As Fast As Light) starflight, which would almost certainly not be given such a grammatical name, and she cared not a fig how it worked; what mattered were the human consequences of that kind of relativistic travel, what it would mean to people and to societies.
(It's a facet of Larry Niven's adage, “Change the technology, change the society” - a civilization based on Millennium Falcon-style casual starflight is not going to be the same as one where a “starcrosser” is like a comet, might only arrive once in a century, but people have to get on with their day-to-day lives anyway.)
It could be argued that this soft science approach leavened SF and allowed it to rise beyond John Campbell gee whiz techno pulp and become literature. The greats of 1940s SF were those who caught sight of this and put real characters into their stories of gee whiz robots and rayguns.