Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
One of the more popular SF TV series, Galactica, would be a perfect example of this: How much did the show get into the mechanics of the robots, or the theory behind their jump drives? They didn't; they just accepted 'em, used 'em, and told us a great dramatic story of exodus, prejudice, war and love. And the show was a runaway hit.
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Funny you should mention the new Battlestar Galactica as an example.
BG is about as hard sci-fi as it gets in my book. "Hard sci-fi" doesn't equate to "bogged down in technical minutia," nor does it need to be purely extrapolative, based only on real-world physics.
The new BG was great, with some of the best writing in television, but, except for the decided effort to push it toward recognizable military fiction with the use of bullet-firing weapons, mid-twentieth-century-like naval gear, BG DID get a lot of it story and drama from hard sci-fi details:
The idea of humanity originating on another planet, the Frankenstein notion of our technology causing our doom, the nature of artificial intelligence, and the difference between 'human' and 'human-like manufactured beings', the space assaults on space-based techno-centers.
Heck, they even made an effective dramatic moments out of "jumping way past the red-line."
ApK