61Cygni wrote:Werrf wrote:There is a space between "fantasy nonsense" and "completely accurate in every detail". It's known, at least in some circles, as the Mohs Scale of Science Fiction hardness. I put the Honorverse at a solid 3 or 4 (somewhere between "Physics plus" and "One big lie"). Doctor Who is a solid 1 ("Science in genre only"), and Star Trek just about scrapes a 2.
I have to wonder, though, if the Honorverse's tech is not what you like, why are you reading them?
Because there is much else to like about them, starting with the characters. The magic tech by itself isn't solely going to turn me off, just saw it as a lost oppurtunity. And to give Weber some credit, at least there aren't any Trek-style transporters (what do you call being broken down into sub-atomic particles? Death). Also, I love the graphic descriptions of the ship combat in the early books, all those high-powered energy weapons wreaking the same kind of havoc that cannonballs and grapeshot did on the wooden ships of the Age Of Sail, where "splinters" caused most of te injuries and deaths. It's unfortunate that we're probably not going to see that kind of stuff in the movie as a PG-13 rating will be desired. Lots of the usual shaky cam and sparking consoles instead, grrrr...I want R-rated combat!
As I've said repeatedly, it's early days yet. But having said that, Evergreen very much wants to maintain the sense of fleet combat at vast distances. We've got a new screenwriter working on a starting over screenplay, and he and I have had time for only a fairly brief conversation at this point, but I strongly expect them to follow the same pattern we were following when we were looking at OBS last year. What was happening then was that they were sending me the script and I was giving them a point-by-point critique of it, to which they were actually listening and incorporating many of the points I was raising into the next iteration of the script. When the weaknesses (from a cinematic perspective) of OBS became sufficiently clear that we shifted to HotQ, we found ourselves with a clean sheet of paper, and I do not yet know precisely what's going to be put down on it for the first draft. Evergreen is very insistent, however, on maintaining the feel, the characters, and the technology of the books. All of us know there are many a slip betwixt cup and lip, but I am entirely satisfied at this point about Evergreen's intentions and the technical capabilities they're bringing to this project.
and, Mangy Fur the Smart Alick Spacecat.