After seeing yet another work of SF where absolutely any sense of scale is missing (specifically Mass Effect) i thought i'd write a little post on this.
What exactly do i mean by sense of scale? Everything.
From the pitiful number of ships the so-called fleets in Mass Effect consist of to the hilarious mismatch of stated and seen distances in Andromeda.
My request to everyone writing SF is to think it through. Extrapolate. When writing a scene, don't copy from something similar in today's world, but try to put yourself really into the world you created.
For example the mentioned fleet sizes in Mass Effect. This is something where we can actually take a look at Star Wars. An ISD would approximately four times as big as a current-day Carrier. The US alone keeps nearly a dozen of them around, and can easily construct one in about five years. Imagine what the ouput of earth could be if the whole planet was unified and at western industrialisation levels. And now imagine talking about an interstellar civilization spanning multiple star systems. A SF novel where such civilizations fight wars with one or two dozen starships each as in StarTrek (Or Mass Effect) is like a Tom Clancy novel where people throw rocks at each other. Star Wars gets the scale of an interstellar civilization a little better, though the stated size is so huge that the conflicts we see are ridiculous again.
Sidenot: Yes, on could argue that a starship is more difficult to produce than a primitive wet ship. But production technology gets more sophisticated as well, and anyway, military technology doesn't get built at the highest possible level, but at the highest cost-efficient level.
My other example: Distances. Space is big. Really really big. So big, that it's nearly unimaginable. So, things that are not going to happen are for example people lying in wait to ambush you from behind a planet. (No, this is not about stealth in space) Or people running accidentally into planets or suns. Space is for all intents and purposes a perfect vacuum. Planets and even stars are just small statistical errors which would be ignored as errors of measurement if they weren't individually so big. We're used to thinking of stars and planets as huge balls, when they're just tiny spots. The distance between the sun and the earth for example is 12.500.000 times the diameter of the earth. Even the earth and the moon, despite being BFF, are separated by 32.000 times the diameter of the earth.
This applies to many other things, from speeds and energies to population numbers.
In conclusion, some authors who get these things (or some of them) right.
Peter F. Hamilton. Namely the commonwealth books. He manages really well to give the impression of an actually BIG interstellar civilization, spanning many widely different planets. (none of which are planets of hat people)
Neal Asher does the scale of warfare thing pretty well.
Iain Banks is probably the author who does this best of all. The scope of his books is visionary (and Orbitals are so much cooler than the Ringworld)
What exactly do i mean by sense of scale? Everything.
From the pitiful number of ships the so-called fleets in Mass Effect consist of to the hilarious mismatch of stated and seen distances in Andromeda.My request to everyone writing SF is to think it through. Extrapolate. When writing a scene, don't copy from something similar in today's world, but try to put yourself really into the world you created.
For example the mentioned fleet sizes in Mass Effect. This is something where we can actually take a look at Star Wars. An ISD would approximately four times as big as a current-day Carrier. The US alone keeps nearly a dozen of them around, and can easily construct one in about five years. Imagine what the ouput of earth could be if the whole planet was unified and at western industrialisation levels. And now imagine talking about an interstellar civilization spanning multiple star systems. A SF novel where such civilizations fight wars with one or two dozen starships each as in StarTrek (Or Mass Effect) is like a Tom Clancy novel where people throw rocks at each other. Star Wars gets the scale of an interstellar civilization a little better, though the stated size is so huge that the conflicts we see are ridiculous again.
Sidenot: Yes, on could argue that a starship is more difficult to produce than a primitive wet ship. But production technology gets more sophisticated as well, and anyway, military technology doesn't get built at the highest possible level, but at the highest cost-efficient level.
My other example: Distances. Space is big. Really really big. So big, that it's nearly unimaginable. So, things that are not going to happen are for example people lying in wait to ambush you from behind a planet. (No, this is not about stealth in space
) Or people running accidentally into planets or suns. Space is for all intents and purposes a perfect vacuum. Planets and even stars are just small statistical errors which would be ignored as errors of measurement if they weren't individually so big. We're used to thinking of stars and planets as huge balls, when they're just tiny spots. The distance between the sun and the earth for example is 12.500.000 times the diameter of the earth. Even the earth and the moon, despite being BFF, are separated by 32.000 times the diameter of the earth.This applies to many other things, from speeds and energies to population numbers.
In conclusion, some authors who get these things (or some of them) right.
Peter F. Hamilton. Namely the commonwealth books. He manages really well to give the impression of an actually BIG interstellar civilization, spanning many widely different planets. (none of which are planets of hat people)
Neal Asher does the scale of warfare thing pretty well.
Iain Banks is probably the author who does this best of all. The scope of his books is visionary (and Orbitals are so much cooler than the Ringworld
)
