You gots to do something with all that velocity, Hollywood.

Anyway, what Jose said: some people aren’t bothered by inconsistency, and there will probably always be an enmity between them and people who are. I actually do enjoy watching movies in which brave oil riggers ride a space shuttle (orbital ceiling 400 miles) to plant a single nuke into an asteroid the size of Texas and so forth… but it’s to laugh at them. The problem with religion for me is it starts to sound like Spiderman’s pendulum arc or a Hollywood disaster movie. Hardly the basis of 9th-grade biology curriculum, and I don’t know how to be nice to people who think it should be.

Creativity thrives on rules and limitations. When you know what you want to do with a narrative and there are issues of internal consistency that block that story direction, there are four things that you can do.

You can forget about internal consistency and just do what you want.

Or you can find a way to make your story work within the framework you’ve put up.

Or you can change the rules — and then go through your narrative and make sure that it’s compatible with the new rules.

Or you can go in a new and unexpected direction.

The last three tactics will enrich your world and provide creative satisfaction. The first tactic is the golden road to garbage.

At least that’s my take on it. And when science is part of the ground rules of your narrative, there is a whole new level of intellectual rigor and relevance introduced. In a comment on another blog I recently mentioned the story Tiny Tango by Judith Moffett. That story has resonated through my mind over the years, and one of the reasons why is that good science enhanced the humanity of the story. If Ms. Moffett had been lazy about the science, the story wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good as it is.

Dan J: I think it’s a really interesting point that video games might be influencing the expectations of gamer movie-goers. It will be a few years before the gaming generation displaces the current big name directors, but it could very well change the way worldbuilding is approached in the movies.

Ok, next one. (Might not actually be accurate, but seems right to me.)

Deep space, very little light. Ships should be hard to see. I imagine that in a real ship to ship encounter you’d mostly be using infra-red and radar or you’d need to really boost the gain on the image, in which case the background stars would be very bright. (I actually have a sci-fi scenario in the back of my head where this forms part of the plot.)

There were a few scenes in the new Star Trek movie that used silence appropriately (the drop from space into atmosphere) and were quite powerful for it. Serenity too. I think we’re seeing a testing of the waters, moviemakers trying to make sure that their audiences won’t fault them for doing it right. The last thing to go, of course, will be the explosions.