The problem with stories like Battle Star Galactica, Lost, etc. is that they don’t make sense to begin with.
BSG: The Cylons are an artificial race. They don’t need air, water, food. They can live everywhere. Unlike the humans, the few life-supporting planets in the galaxy mean nothing to them. So why bother attacking the humans when you can just go away, start hundreds or thousands of civilizations all over the galaxy and ignore the 13 human worlds?
They might attack one day? So what? By that time, the Cylons will outnumber them a billion to one. They could even simply ignore any human attacks without any noticeable loss. Humans killed a million Cylons? Meh …
So the core issue in the story (human vs. Cylons) is buggy.
And that’s the core problem of all SciFi stories: they simply don’t make sense to begin with. It’s an intrinsic problem.
The motto of the human race is boundless growth. What’s going to happen when we can travel to distant stars? We put colonies there. For what end? We will accumulate more knowledge but each individual being will know a lot about a tiny fraction of all the lore. There will be people who will have to split their bank accounts over several institutes because the numbers will be too big for their ancient mainframe software to cope with. For what? What’s the point of endless growth? Our greedy parts say “go-go-go” but our ratio asks “why?”
Life’s answer: There is no boundless growth. Natures rules make sure that everything that got too big gets killed or kills itself. In a way, the climate skeptics are the next big stumbling block on the road to the future (after the bankers failed a few years ago). Life is in cycles.
Of course, this doesn’t make a good story. People are disappointed when their love doesn’t grow out of all proportions after they marry. Well, duh. How did you plan to fit epic emotions into your tiny skull? How did you plan to love someone more than “with all your heart”? Get a second one? Get a brain!
So as a writer, I’m stuck between a stone and a hard place: I can make the story realistic but that’s boring. Imagine getting the Galactica battle ready. Thousands of people have to do millions of things. Getting that into the story would fill 5-10 episodes just to get an overview. Finding the right kind of ammunition. Hauling it to the Vipers. Fitting the Vipers. Looking through 517 pages of preflight preparation checkpoints. It would bore people to death. So they get to see Adama yell “BATTLESTATIONS” + 10 seconds of pure panic on the flight deck.
If you know a bit about physics, then you know that the only reasonable weapon in space is a laser. If you can move a ship the size of the Galactica, you can power one big, mean laser (or ten). With that laser, you can slice and dice a Cylon battlestar before it comes close enough to fire any projectiles on you. Even if it manages to fire its projectile weapons, you can easily evade them after cutting the damn platform to bits. Afterwards, you take the same laser to fry the small fighters which the battlestar dropped long before they can get to full acceleration. And the torpedoes and rockets, too. Without deploying a single Viper. Vipers are stupid, physically speaking. They are slow, they need to take fuel and bullets along, they have a human pilot (fragile and slow), they need to waste space on a cockpit, air recycling. And they are easy to find: They have a long trail of the stuff that comes out of the exhausts. That trail is pretty easy to make out in space where there is nothing else (oh, yeah, radiation from stars a few light years away). It’s like a big pointer for the enemy radar saying: “HIT HARD HERE!”
Looking at this from an angle of reality and physics, a space battle would work like this: Everyone would be invisible because the monent you get noticed, you’re dead (try to outrun a laster that travels with 300’000km/s and possibly an angular velocity that is even greater). In a TV episode, you’d see space, full of stars and nothing else. No ships, no heroic battles, no impressive last stands, no dodge-fights. Several minutes, nothing would happen. Then suddenly, something would blow up. All survivors on the other side would fire on the spot where that shot came from. 13 seconds later, everyone would be dead or dying. How does that sound? Boring. Oh, and no survivors. The first space battle would also be the last. A TV show with one episode. A book with ten pages.
That’s why SciFi stories have to be unrealistic.
Posted by digulla 
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Copyright vs. authors
17. August, 2010Everyone always argues “we need a strong copyright to protect the authors and their work” (here, for example). Frankly, I’m very suspicious how many authors are in this “we”. Usually, this “we” includes publishers, lawyers and people living off the work of authors but rarely those who actually do the work.
Just two days ago, I stumbled over an article (German) that compared the book market in England and Germany around 1800. The time is interesting because Germany had no copyright before 1837 and England had one for almost a century by that time. Of course, everyone in Germany was arguing that authors were starving and they needed a stronger copyright – just like England.
Before these copyright laws were enacted, the book market in Germany was between five to ten times bigger than that of England. A book in England would cost as much as you’d make in a week – between $500 and $1000 today. As a consequence, only very few people had books. In Germany, everyone could afford books. In 1800, only 700 news books were published in rich England while in poor Germany, they had 4000. They were cheap. Since only a few people could afford the expensive English books, print runs were tiny. A “successful” book would means a print run of 500 to 750. Reprinting was outlawed, so as soon as a book went out of print, it wasn’t available anymore. And who would reprint something that sold only 700 times?
And, surprisingly, the authors could live from their work. Around 1810, the author of a monograph could make 25% to 50% of a year’s income. In England, bestsellers got more but there are only a few bestsellers. It’s nice that 5 or 10 of the most successful authors make millions but isn’t it better when most people make enough for a living?
Yearly income of the most successful authors 2008
Why did that happen?
Because so many books were printed. Publishers always needed new material, so the authors were in a position of power. Also, “unsuccessful” books sold many thousand times. Publishers also had to keep them in print (as long as it was reasonable) to keep reprinters at bay. With a strong copyright, authors had to beg to be published (except for the few successful ones). Guess what that meant for income.
What happens today? Anyone can publish. Google has written software that collects interesting bits of information all over the globe and presents them in a nice, accessible way. Suddenly, the publishers cry out: “We need a stronger copyright.” I bet they do. But I don’t buy it when they add “to protect the rights of our authors.”
Which rights? The ones they take away with slave contracts? “Author gets 4% of the price printed on the book and publisher gets the right to publish the work in any way, forever.”
How many authors do you know which made a fortune from their books? Name five. King. Rowling. Patterson. Clancy (doesn’t even have a web site; poor guy only makes $35 Million/year). Steel. (Source)
I didn’t know two of them and the difference between #1 (Rowling, $300 Million) and #5 (Steel, $30 Million) is tenfold. See the graph for an idea where this leads.
Penguin sells books for £786 Million/year. This weeks bestseller in “Stolen” by Lesley Pearse. Amazon rank 118. I wonder how much of the $780m Ms. Pearse makes.
The next time someone tries to sell you that the copyright is good for authors, you know they’re lying.
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