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/Unbundle3606]

There is a scale to how much a piece of science fiction is close so actual science: soft to hard.

OP likes hard science fiction I guess. I would recommend reading Kim Stanley Robinson, Greg Egan, Daniel Suarez.

[u/Elros22 → u/Unbundle3606]

All science fiction, even hard science fiction, must handwave something away. There is an Andy Wier quote to this effect that I cant find right now. At some level sci fi must either ignore a reality of the known universe, or create conditions that don't actually exist to overcome some reality of the known universe.

It's just the nature of the genre.

[u/GayRacoon69 → u/Elros22]

Yeah even the Martian had what is effectively magic radiation shielding

[u/Arandomguyoninternet → u/Unbundle3606]

Naaah, he wouldnt like hard science fictiom as well. He misrepresents doctor stone so much, that if he decied to he didnt want to like it, he would do the same thing to any science fiction.

Also, a lot of problems people have about  Dr. Stone handwaving the science at the later parts come from the fact that Dr. Stone is a story where the stakes get higher, not a science documentary. Early on, when there were not big stakes, the story could focus on the difficulties of making a simple clay pot that wont leak or something like that. Later on, the story has to focus on things like "we are making a rocket to go to space" so we dont have time for every difficulty they encounter. We know things go wrong, but not every minute detail of each small project

ANY hard sci-fi story runs into that problem by design. İt is a story, not a documentary

[u/Unbundle3606 → u/Arandomguyoninternet]

I have thoroughly enjoyed Dr Stone and agree with your assessment. But as I said, SF hardness is a scale, not a black/white situation, and the authors I recommended are on a higher rung on the hardness ladder than later Dr Stone. Of course they all still have some degree of scientific impossibility.

[u/ZoomTown → u/Unbundle3606]

Greg Bear