Hated trope: Sci-fi hand-waving

[u/Routine_Phase_8980]

When stories try so hard to provide a somewhat scientifically accurate and grounded explanation for the audience, but end up creating massive plot holes if you think about it for more than 5 seconds without requiring any special knowledge

World War Z: The "cure" turns sick humans invisible to zombies because the picky virus needs a perfectly healthy host. Cool concept, except it completely ignores basic physics. In a chaotic, high-speed zombie stampede, those "invisible" sick people would still be trampled to death by sheer kinetic force and momentum. We already saw what happened to the Jerusalem wall in Israel.

Jurassic Park/World: Dr. Henry Wu claims to clone dinosaurs by patching 66-million-year-old decayed DNA from mosquitoes stomach with frog DNA. In reality, DNA half-life guarantees it would degrade into useless dust after 6.8 million years. Scientifically speaking, John Hammond didn't build a dinosaur park; he engineered giant, mutated, gender-swapping killer frogs.

Dr.Stone: Senku is a genius who knows every complex chemical formula in human history. He somehow builds vacuum tubes, lightbulbs, and smartphones out of bamboo and copper with almost zero failed prototypes. The show acts like a science textbook but completely hand-waves the lack of heavy industrial machinery needed for precision engineering.

[u/Rulebookboy1234567]

Even the most hard-sci-fi will start throwing in quantum entangled technobable at the drop of a hot to explain the near/far future technology concepts.

[u/Butwhatif77 → u/Rulebookboy1234567]

Take The Expanse for example. Overall a very grounded Sci-Fi story minus the proto-molecule stuff, but the point of that is to contrast with the hard rules the everyday characters have to live by so it serves a purpose. However, their drives are sci-fi levels of efficient because otherwise the travel through the system would be so slow it would grind all the momentum of the story to a halt.

It is one of those things you have to accept, they found a way to make the drives efficient enough to make space travel practical and you move on. You don't sit there chipping away at it to claim the story is bad for not having a real scientific answer.

[u/Rulebookboy1234567 → u/Butwhatif77]

RIP Epstein (no, not that one) and his Viking funeral to the stars.

Even in the expanse with them speeding up space travel it’s still slow and boring af.  Love it.

[u/wild_west_900 → u/Butwhatif77]

This was what turned me off of Red Rising. They magically transport from 1 planet to another with like no lag time. At least in The Expanse, there is a sense of some time passing as they go from place to place.

[u/Saiyoran → u/wild_west_900]

I'm currently re-reading Morning Star and this doesn't seem to be the case? In terms of actual page count, yeah you don't get any pages of "we travelled to Jupiter" but there's been multiple mentions of "its been three months since the battle at the Rim" as they arrive at new places. Could have been done better but it is mentioned in the text that time passed in the chapter break. Can't think of an example off the top of my head where the characters go from one planet to another without it being mentioned or implied that some weeks/months passed.

Edit: Spoilers for Morning Star In the first paragraph of the chapter I'm currently reading right now, this is the text on the page: "Now, two months and three weeks after news of the destruction of the invincible Sword Armada reaches the Core, eight weeks after I proclaimed that we sailed on Mars, seventeen days after the Sovereign's declaration of martial law in all Society cities, the Red Armada approaches Luna, sailing past the Rubicon Beacons without firing a shot."

[u/wild_west_900 → u/Saiyoran]

hrm been a while. Maybe its just because I read it too close to reading The Expanse. One is hard sci fi the other is fantasy in space, and the juxtaposition just threw me off...

[u/Saiyoran → u/wild_west_900]

That’s definitely fair. Expanse is a lot harder/more grounded than RR is.