Do you know too much for the author's own good?

I hate the attraction that happens between a character and someone who does not have any redeemable quality, ie: Twilight. It makes no sense. All those tortured protagonists who barely speak and are extremely boring, yet have several romantic interests always looming in the horizon. Give me a break.
 
Quellist said:
I am, of course quite aware that saturn is a gas giant. And it still has immense gravity. If it was a rocky planet, that gravity would be far, far greater. Therefore, if life did exist, beyond bacteria, delicate plants and flying creatures simply would never evolve, they could not survive. If any complex organisms did evolve, they would need a huge power to weight ratio just to move.
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Interestingly the same was thought of deep ocean pressure. Technically these pressures would crush our bodies and yet fish and other organisms thrive at depths that we can't take. I believe you give life very little credit.

The same way that 750° F should not be a temperature that animals should be able to survive. Yet there are worms, echinoderms, crustaceans, and fish all living on and around thermal vents in the ocean floor.

Extremes in pressure, temperature etc are not deterrent to life. Organisms are able to evolve at far greater atmospheres, gravities, and pressures than one might imagine.

:)
 
Ocean pressure doesn't crush people - it crushes the air spaces. Fill those spaces with liquid and we can go very deep, too.

The animals living near the vents are not living in 750°F water. They live in the water that is mixing between the vent water and surrounding 31°F water. The highest temp any animal in the vent area can withstand is 176°F.
 
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Ihe said:
I hate the attraction that happens between a character and someone who does not have any redeemable quality, ie: Twilight. It makes no sense. All those tortured protagonists who barely speak and are extremely boring, yet have several romantic interests always looming in the horizon. Give me a break.
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And yet there are those people (mainly women) who marry men who are in jail for something serious and violent. (Been watching Criminal Minds quite a lot recently :) - assume that is accurate, but .....) Maybe the men have redeeming qualities but...


@danny - depends on how bad a day you are having
 
Montero, a problem can come when realism isn't actually seen as realistic. It's entirely possible, albeit unlikely, to survive having a sword rammed through your body [obviously, easier with a rapier than a broadsword] but if you put that in a book, especially one aiming for gritty realism, readers may well think their suspension of disbelief has been stretched too far.
 
RX-79G said:
Ocean pressure doesn't crush people - it crushes the air spaces. Fill those spaces with liquid and we can go very deep, too.
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This. Wheras gravity crushes a body against the surface of a physical body. If life evolved on a high G planet, it would have to be extremely strong in order to move. Delicate vegetation could not grow, and certainly small birds could not fly.
I am actualy a firm believer in the ability of life to evolve and survive under extreme conditions, just take tardigrades, they can survive the open vacuum of space.
But - physics. High G worlds maz have life. It just won't be delicate things. And at very high gravity, life simply wouldn't have the opportunity to get past extremely simple, imobile microscopic organhisms, and even they would be extremely unlikely.
 
ErikB said:
Extremes in pressure, temperature etc are not deterrent to life. Organisms are able to evolve at far greater atmospheres, gravities, and pressures than one might imagine.

:)
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High pressure yes, as explained above, however if that pressure gets too high (as on Jupiter and Saturn) then you have Hydrogen as a metallic liquid, and under those circumstances I suspect life might struggle a tad. At the bottom of the Marina Trench the pressure is in the order of 109 million Pascals, if you go deep enough on Saturn to shift from Hydrogen to liquid then you are talking about hundred of Gigapascals. I know you originally postulated a solid Saturn sized planet, but I think such a massive body would still have collected so much atmosphere that you'd still be at such pressures. I would think the best chance of life on such a planet would be life floating high in the atmosphere.

High gravity we just don't know. We haven't yet found life anywhere other than Earth and that's always 1g. :) But as @Quellist suggests simple life maybe, complex life unlikely. But that probably depends on just how high the gravity is that we're looking at.
 
thaddeus6th said:
a problem can come when realism isn't actually seen as realistic
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This.

Reality has the proof that something can happen: it happened**. Fiction has to hope that what it states is believed by the reader (i.e. it's a matter of faith and trust, not evidence).



** - And even then, some people remain sceptical (presumably assuming that whoever telling them something is lying/mistaken or has themselves been lied to).
 
I think there is a "sweet spot" - which is a bit fuzzy with error bars :) - of putting in enough detail to be interesting, but avoiding saying things that anyone who has actually done something that you are describing (when you haven't done it yourself) will pick up on it.
So maybe you are describing say refurbing a weapon you've never even handled in your life. You could go through all sorts of details, or you could do a more general - "he'd been working on it in his spare time for a while". Maybe in terms of details can have things about how he/she was so familiar with what they were doing, they were thinking about something else, noticing the neighbour's Mrs (or Mr) hanging out their washing and so on. This is just a random selected example. :)

Now, if for the purpose of the book you decide you want the details, do massive research, maybe go to an evening practical class on weapon refurb so you really do know the feel, the smell, the heft, the tricks, then more credit to you. But then you run into over-burdening the story with far more detail than it can support and the reader doing an "enough already". :) (Or never finishing writing your book because you do so much research..... :D which is also just fine and hope you are having fun. :D)
 
I'm not saying I necessarily stick strictly to the following :( , but....

If something contributes to a plot point, it has to be described to some extent, but only enough to do its plot-related job and to give the description some sort of plausibility. And the description given must either properly researched or (if there's no real-life equivalent) properly thought through.

And if something doesn't contribute to a plot point, then why** does it -- rather than things one understands or has thought through -- have to be described at all (or, if one wants it mentioned, described in other than vague (but still plausible) detail)?


** - Okay, some things might contribute to, say, the readers' understanding of a character (or a society), but wouldn't it be better to do this using those things of which one, as the author, has some sort of understanding?
 
Stephen Palmer said:
My editor has recently pointed out to me how very difficult it is to smash open a door by running your shoulder at it. I didn't know this. The character will use a crowbar instead. ;)
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I've tried this. Doors are remarkably good at being very sturdy. Which was good in one sense, as it was my front door at the time.

However the locksmith defeated it with a small stiff bit of plastic. Thank god for mortice locks.
 
Kerrybuchanan said:
Oh goody. Can I pick your brain sometime? My current WIP has an archaeologist as the main protagonist, but it's not a novel about archaeology. I'd love an expert opinion on how badly I've messed her up in some of my chapters. Would you consider swapping crits when the time's right?
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I am over ten years out of date but sure I'll look at it. ;)
 
RX-79G said:
Ocean pressure doesn't crush people - it crushes the air spaces. Fill those spaces with liquid and we can go very deep, too.

The animals living near the vents are not living in 750°F water. They live in the water that is mixing between the vent water and surrounding 31°F water. The highest temp any animal in the vent area can withstand is 176°F.
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Both high pressure and heat are adapted for by modifying the structure and chemistry of the cells. Surface animals will die in high pressure, not because they are crushed, but because things like the cellular wall mechanisms don't operate properly under high pressure. High-pressure life uses different chemical mechanisms. Likewise, in high temperatures, many of the chemical reactions and compounds that surface life uses are too unstable and break down. High-pressure life uses different reactions and compounds that, away from high temps, would be too stable.

On the subject of howlers, one of Connie Willis' books has human bodies being crushed in the lower atmosphere of Venus. there would be no crushing, just rapid decomposition in the heat.
 
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