The Gap as science-fiction

[Nathan]

Or, "Captain's Fancy has a top speed of 0.5c." Relative to what?

presumably relative to c. (Which is the speed of light.)

[nuk]

Or, "Captain's Fancy has a top speed of 0.5c." Relative to what?

presumably relative to c. (Which is the speed of light.)

(Entering physics teacher mode.) Velocities have to be measured relative to some reference frame. If the ship is moving at 0.5c relative to some star, it might be moving at 0.7c relative to another star which is moving relative to the first star. Depending on your POV, any ship could be moving at any speed below c, so the only speed limit that a ship can have is c. It just depends on how long you can accelerate, and what you want to measure your speed relative to.

[jelerak]

The Gap series is the only sci-fi that I have ever read. I read it book by book as they were released. I cannot put into words how much I loved these books. I read them cuz SRD wrote them.

Reading this thread has made me ever so thankful that I have no background in science, or no other sci-fi series or authors to compare SRD to.

Damn, don't take apart the story for what was some oversights by the author. Hell, I've read this thread (and others), and even after it has been explained to me what the 'science' errors are, I still don't understand.

The Gap is series is a fantastic story with character depth beyond that which I have ever read before. I am just glad that I was too ignorant to know any better...

Thank god for the Louisiana educational system...

[lurch]

...The GAP series by most all definitions has to fall into the Sci-Fiction catcgory..There has been some excellent points made about the gritty characters,,the use of fictional devices and how they solved problems,,etc..Care to take it one more step?..Consider,,that the author's fictional inventions,,just like his characters,,are all flawed. The GAP is not 100 percent okay to use..hence Morn's condition..etc, etc..So,,you have flawed characters struggling in a flawed Universe,,that is the HUMAN CONDITION,,As noted,,it works in just about any genre. For me..the flawed technology,,kept the fiction close to home and masterful was how the author got the humans around the problems created by the flawed technology..In short,,while considered a Sci-Fi,,its greatness is in its expression of humanity..like the other greats of Sci-Fi mentioned above.
....MEL

[I'm Murrin]

It's been years since I read it, so the numbers I remember might be off, but saying things like "we're 1000 km from Forbidden Space" is kind of like saying "we're one nanometer from the Mexican border." The borders of interstellar empires couldn't be measured with anything close to that precision.

If I understood correctly, a part of the Com-Mine belt marked the border (in one particular part of space - the belt itself was human-controlled, past the belt was Amnion). There would probably be other such features to mark it. I'm fairly sure they would be capable of measuring their distance from such 'landmarks'.

[amanibhavam]

I must admit now, when I first read the part where the Amnion came in and I learned that they mutate humans with mutagens injected, I thought hey, what a B-movie plot, invasion of body snatchers or what? But then I realised it did not really matter because SRD handled the question very well and focused on the alien way of thinking of the Amnioni and the problem of losing humanity and it all came out very well.

[nuk]

If I understood correctly, a part of the Com-Mine belt marked the border (in one particular part of space - the belt itself was human-controlled, past the belt was Amnion). There would probably be other such features to mark it. I'm fairly sure they would be capable of measuring their distance from such 'landmarks'.

If SRD did define the boundary to be across part of a star system, that's a problem in itself. Star systems are so tiny compared to the space between them, that this would be like ... hmm... working out a treaty that drew a national boundary through someone's house.

And even if they did draw the boundary through a system, the landmarks move relative to each other. On the other hand, they could just say, "anything within 300 million km of the sun is human territory." Then, analogously, if we approximate Rhode Island as a circle with 30km radius, being 1000km from forbidden space is like being 10cm from Massachussetts. Being 1000km from forbidden space is essentially being on the border.

It's not just that the science is flawed, it's that it has the intention of being serious while being as obviously nonsense as, say, "Covenant then used his third hand to poke the moon."

[Nathan]

Spaces do not become smaller as your understanding of the universe becomes larger.

I'll use the example of the Berlin wall during the cold war, as it seems like a perfect comparison with the cold war state between amnion and humaity.

Being 10cm further from the wall could mean the difference between being shot by a soviet soldier and getting away with your life. In a situation like that it's likely that two empires will jealously guard their borders very accurately.

[nuk]

But space is so big that enforcing a border that precisely would be impossible. The US can't even patrol a 1000 mile border with Mexico. In a solar system, you deal with hundreds of millions of miles, and the problem is made horribly worse when the borders are two-dimensional - now you've got a border which is some hundred million billion square miles. I doubt a border between hostile species would be more precise than "You stay out of these star systems and we'll stay out of those."

[Nathan]

Which is exactly why the com-mine belt is a handy device to use as a border.

[nuk]

The belt would be a more or less one-dimensional object trying to be a 2-dimensional border? And the belt would be nowhere near as precicely bounded as 1000km. Our asteroid belt has a width of maybe 100 million km. And it's fuzzy and changing all the time! The asteroids are constantly changing postion relative to each other and the sun, and there are asteroids all over the system. The belt is just a term for where they're thickest.

[nocturne]

But space is so big that enforcing a border that precisely would be impossible

Yes, in our universe this true. In the GAP universe though, one with the GAP drive, well, all bets are off, it breaks all known laws of physics, in this universe anyway.

But space is so big that enforcing a border that precisely would be impossible

Not without a FTL GAP drive it isn't

[Loredoctor]

No. A Gap-capable ship is only so large, can cover so much distance and can scan so much of a volume of space. If the border is 100 light years long, it doesn't matter if you can hop distances of light years if all you can detect is 50 million kms. Gap ships don't coast along scanning space - they make jumps where they cant detect a thing. AND the UMCP doesn't have that many ships; look how many they had defending Earth.

[Warmark Jay]

I must admit now, when I first read the part where the Amnion came in and I learned that they mutate humans with mutagens injected, I thought hey, what a B-movie plot, invasion of body snatchers or what? But then I realised it did not really matter because SRD handled the question very well and focused on the alien way of thinking of the Amnioni and the problem of losing humanity and it all came out very well.

This is one of the elements that I think really works in the series; SRD's handling of standard sci-fi cliches. I mentioned in another post that he takes standard "space opera" stuff and puts a unique - and very dark - spin on them. The Amnion gave me the creeps in the same way that John Carpenter's version of "The Thing" did.

[Warmark Jay]

No. A Gap-capable ship is only so large, can cover so much distance and can scan so much of a volume of space. If the border is 100 light years long, it doesn't matter if you can hop distances of light years if all you can detect is 50 million kms. Gap ships don't coast along scanning space - they make jumps where they cant detect a thing. AND the UMCP doesn't have that many ships; look how many they had defending Earth.

SRD talks about this in one of the Ancillary Documentation sections. I got the sense that the grand strategy of the UCMP is similar to the theory of Mutual Assured Destruction; that if the Amnion were to launch an attack, UCMP ships would simply cross the Gap and hit the Amnion home world. The vastness of normal space would make pitched battles between fleets unlikely, but Gap drives would make a sneak attack - and a massive response to that attack - relatively easy.

[Dragonlily]

Fiction is concepts and developments, not measurements. It won't help you to understand a cat to measure its individual hairs. You take the calipers, I'll take the purrs.

[nuk]

Fiction is concepts and developments, not measurements. It won't help you to understand a cat to measure its individual hairs. You take the calipers, I'll take the purrs.

But if an author says a cat's hairs are five miles thick, I'm going to get an awfully funny picture of that cat.

[Dragonlily]

Oh, yes, Cali-pur-nia. She always was a little odd.

[duchess of malfi]

I do not have a strong background in either math or physics, so I have never really understood where people are coming from when they say that math/physics mistakes take away from their enjoyment of a science fiction book (not just the Gap, but any science fiction book). Something "wrong" would have to be really really really basic and jarring for me to even know it is there...

However, I recently read what I suppose you could call an "anthropological" science fiction book. I am no expert on anthropology, but have had some college classes in it...and when the author of this particular book had a Cro-Magnan body and a Neanderthal body pulled out of a glacier in Alaska it blew my mind (in a very bad way) and it really did affect my enjoyment (well, in this case nonenjoyment ) of the book as a whole. It really can be very distracting to come up against something that is just dead wrong and have a whole book woven about it.

[Warmark Jay]

I do not have a strong background in either math or physics, so I have never really understood where people are coming from when they say that math/physicis mistakes take away from their enjoyment of a science fiction book (not just the Gap, but any science fiction book).

Ditto. I think there are sci-fi purists, for whom the science is the thing, rather than the fiction. To me the "hard" sci-fi books are usually a chore, as the authors (especially those that have "day jobs" in the sciences) tend to focus on concepts rather than plot and character development. There are some exceptions; David Brin is a bonafide rocket scientist (among otherthings, he's taught astrophysics at UCSD) who is a pretty good storyteller.