posted
I think if anything it shows that this isn't science fiction. It's a character drama, against the backdrop of a sci-fi world, just like Star Wars is a fantasy tale and the new Battlestar Galactica is a military/sociopolitical drama, again both with a Sci-Fi backdrop. In all these cases the science element is all but irrelevant, not being the focus of the storys. For instance, on what basis does Galactica's FTL work? Who cares, it just works! How fast are ships in the Star Wars Universe? As fast as the plot requires of course! The point is, as has been stated, none of this really matters and the vagueness of the geography of the Firefly 'Verse dosen't change the fact that it's a great show.
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Member # 256
posted
The point here is that, if you're going to do drama against any backdrop other than the real world, you should at least build in some semblance of logic (temporal in Lucas' case, spatial in Whedon's), because otherwise people will just be looking at the backdrop and ignoring everything in front of it.
(Well, some people.)
Registered: Nov 1999
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posted
No matter how much time they spend figuring out what planets are where, some obsessive fan is still going to poke holes in it, plus establishing a solid "map" of where everything is and how fast a ship can go would REALLY restrict the story telling. The advantage of keeping things vague is you don't have to explain how far Ariel is from Osirs or how long it takes the Dortmunder to get from Persephony to Whitefall at full throttle, because you can't contradict what hasn't already been established. Things like this were part of the downfall of Star Trek, things got so convoluted and established that gaping plot holes started springing up everywhere. So I think Whedon intentionally stayed well clear of that minefield on purpose, but who knows? We only got a dozzen or so episodes, hardly enough time to get into that kind of tedious detail.
Also from a realisum standpoint, how many people stand around discussing geography? Everyone with a basic education knows that if you're in the UK, Australia is half way around the globe. So when you're telling your friends you're going there on holiday, you're not likely to say "I'm going to Sydney Australia, which is 10,500 miles away from London and is close to New Zealand which was mentioned three episodes away!"
You'd just say, "I'm off to Oz, see you next month!"
posted
Er....I think you can still sdhere to basic science while having a (cough) "character based drama"(cough). the advanced tech (like FTL) is not really something that needs to be explained (except mabye on BSG, here everything else seems so low-tech- mabye proto-cylons made it for the colonies?).
I dont think the obsessive techie side of Trek contributed to it's "downfall" at all, but seeing writers with no idea how or what space might be like probably did (to us fans: see the Scimitar pulling itself off the crashed Enterprise as though gravity were in effect).
BSG does not work for me simply because it's sci-fi trappings are so transparant. They should have just placed the show on an aircraft carrier.
I'd say that Star Wars is far more sci-fi than many shows today- without having to explain anything- by havng the characters take the tech for granted and not explaining it all via technobabble -all the time (as on TNG).
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
Maybe someone else has already suggested this regarding the number of habitable worlds in one system, but think about what a "system" means. The Alpha Centauri system has two main stars each far enough apart to have planets in Earthlike orbits, as the suns only get about as close as Uranus and our sun. If you imagine a cluster of stars each with planets, and you assume that many of the inhabitable ones are moons of gas giants (so you can have several in effectively the same orbit around one star), it's not entirely far fetched. Well, SEVENTY is far fetched, but maybe not a smaller number.
-------------------- "Well, I mean, it's generally understood that, of all of the people in the world, Mike Nelson is the best." -- ULTRA MAGNUS, steadfast in curmudgeon
Registered: Feb 2001
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