![]() ![]() Prometheus was soft sci-fi, and my issues with that largely stemmed from the fact that it involved the most imbecilic group of movie scientists I’ve ever seen rather than any of its actual “science”. I’m very capable of enjoying sci-fi stories that screw established science up into a little ball and throw it into the dustbin, because if they’re written well enough and don’t go out of their way to draw attention to it I can suspend my disbelief and just accept it as something that’s necessary to the story. ![]() I say this because I want to make it clear I’m not about to brutally suplex Interstellar through a table just because I like nitpicking. Pretty much every single sci-fi film, television show, and 95% of sci-fi books released in the last fifty years are soft science fiction. Soft science fiction requires lots of imagination and very little actual scientific nous to write, and so it’s not particularly surprising that soft sci-fi encompasses the vast, vast majority of science fiction. This is an approach that works, and works well it’s the story that matters to soft science fiction, and nobody is going to care about the precise physics behind lightsabers or artificial gravity unless you make the very poor decision to point it out to your audience. It doesn’t particularly care how its science works - hence the quotation marks - and if it knows what’s good for it it won’t even bother with an explanation unless it’s directly relevant to the plot, instead presenting objects and concepts that outright break the known laws of physics as a fait accompli. Soft science fiction is mainly concerned with telling a story, and using “science” to enable that story. ![]() To understand my particular problems with Interstellar you have to know about the difference between hard science fiction and soft science fiction. Interstellar is the worst science fiction film I’ve seen since Prometheus. Needless to say, though, this post is going to spoil the hell out of the film, so don’t read if you haven’t seen it yet. This was a terrible, terrible mistake, but at least you’re getting what is hopefully a reasonably entertaining blog post out of it. While I was on holiday I decided to watch Interstellar. ![]()
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