Blood Brain Barrier said:
Reading that I agree with most of it but it's also confusing because I'm not sure whether you're for or against fantasy in sci-fi, since you seem to be for realism then bring up Dune, a work of fantasy, in a positive light. I fully agree with you that the science in sci-fi must be there for a reason - to raise issues actually relevant to the way we live now or may live in the future. I don't see how greater realism and "grittiness" do anything but limit the scope of the work.
In the future anything must be considered possible - things people considered impossible 1000 years ago are now our reality. Saying something's impossible in the future must be done for a greater reason - for example in Babylon 5 the station needs rotating parts to create gravity - something which is ignored in say, Star Trek. But this is not just to show off the knowledge of physics, but to contrast the humans with the more advanced species which have artificial gravity, something which may well be impossible.
TLDR: I'm not against realism, more against realism for its own sake. The shaky-cam and lots of blood we're stuck with in new sci-fi is there to look cool, not for any good reason.
My issue has more to do with things being credible than anything. I don't mind if a work isn't "nuts and bolts" realistic or not, but that it's consistant.
Dune set up not only a world, but a set of mechanics around the technology within that world and never deviated from the strict path set out and even worked in some novel tactics to make use of certain technological effects (like suicidal Fremen abusing the lasgun-Holtzman shield reaction to wipe out large chunks of the Harkonnens forces near the beginning of the first novel and a novel creating minefields of shields for someone to shoot a lasgun at to delay a planned assault).
I'm for fantasy in Sci-Fi, because I look on them as two sides to the same coin, the issue is that fantasy is more susceptible to abused mechanics than Sci-Fi and it sticks out less when they are abused - see Star Trek technobabble which could be explained away in fantasy with the old "a wizard did it". But while I'm on that, that's also a big reason why I love and respect Tolkiens work so much, because unlike all the derivative crap that remains wedded to imitating him, he was really restrictive on the use of magic in his world, which was largely limited to enchantments doing their subtle work like the Rings of Power or other little ways like Saruman controlling Theodan.
The only open use of a "spell" I can think of is when they get into Moria and Gandalf uses his staff to produce a light source.
Anyway, getting back into things whether it's fantasy or Sci-Fi I want to see something grounded where rules are made and followed and bullshit isn't pulled out of asses that makes the wonder of wonderful things, be they magic of technology, wonderful. Star Trek Voyager with it's infamous Reset Button and Technobabble made me give up on Star Trek, even casually watching it with a grain of salt because it was as convincing as a kid imagining bullets fly around playing with his GI Joe toys as oppose to playing a game and seeing them.
The other thing is playing out the full consequences of a technology and it's something we often see not done, most of all in Star Trek. I mentioned before, maybe not in this thread, that replicator technology would make for horrifying wars where warfare was reduced to pure attrition with replicators efficiently churning out every many of war material at a constant pace.
With your example of artificial gravity, it's another thing that's bugged me since the two tie together: We don't get to hear the rules set out defining what artificial gravity can and can't do.
Why does it seem to be contained within the ships hull, for example? Why would the crew of the Enterprise been magnetic boots to walk around outside when they should still be affected by the gravity? Along with that, why don't ships with artificial gravity collect dust on their hulls, get dirty and require cleaning? Why can artificial gravity be produced to be as strong as that of an Earth sized planet or more, yet the field isn't as large as the field produced by a planet? How can gravity be produced on one side of something but not all the others - like the deck of a ship producing gravity, and yet the deck above it not pulling people away from the field of the one below it they're walking on - is artificial gravity directional?
All these things could be explain with fantastical excuses, but so long as they were consistent and not used or ignored at whim, they'd feel grounded and I'd be with that degree of "realism" - realism as in being loyal to how that universe functions.
It's why in my own self-written fiction I try my best to explain these things - like artificial gravity existing, but being sensible where it emanates from one source with ships build around that source - like ship being built cigar shaped are even circular with the field itself being unlike natural gravity, where it can produce Earth-like levels of gravity, but the fields strength drops off exponentially after a certain distance away from the source while the a ships crew has to constantly send EVA teams out to clean, repair and repaint the hull as the field is constantly collecting dust which damages equipment and eats away at the ships paint scheme, itself existing to help protect the hull from corrosion no differently than how ships are painted to prevent the corrosive effects of saltwater from eating holes in the hull.
As for greater realism and grittiness limiting a work - it can or can;t depending on how it's handled, but they're more used for aesthetic reasons than anything and I mean that both to create the illusion of a world being more like ours and feeling like one and also because that kind of look is in style and most people actually want to see their games filled with dirty, brown and grey worlds and colourful ones like we used to have dominate games twenty years ago.
