Thread: Russian Science Fiction - Recommended books?

Originally Posted by Throbert McGee

a rail-gun catapult to launch cargo from the Earth to the Moon, without using "magical" techno-babble. For this reason the novel is often regarded as exemplifying "hard" science fiction.

I remember those scenes from the book and I thought it was one of the silliest aspects of that book. Can anyone explain how that is scientific?


My fave Heinlein book is a kids adventure about two boys in a boarding school on Mars, who outsmart an evil corporation with the help of ancient Martians. Forgotten the name. Too bad it's totally unrealistic based on what's now known about the geology of Mars. No canals to skate on, and no exotic plants.
Love everything about Mars though - Red Mars series was fantastic, but gosh the amount of bizarre bias about Russians and other nationalities.

I realise that warp speed etc has no scientific basis, but my smart phone is probably on par with the pads from Star Trek Voyager!

Originally Posted by Hanna

I remember those scenes from the book and I thought it was one of the silliest aspects of that book. Can anyone explain how that is scientific?

Well, unlike faster-than-light travel, it doesn't blatantly violate known laws of physics; unlike telepathy, it doesn't suppose that there is some "fifth fundamental force" completely unknown to science; unlike the X-Men, it doesn't ridiculously ignore basic principles of how REAL gene mutations work; etc.

But the railgun described by Heinlein is a technically plausible extrapolation of known science. You could, of course, object that such a catapult is totally unrealistic from an economic POV -- in that it would be so enormously expensive to build that it could never pay for itself. You could also foresee that because it might take decades to build something so huge, someone might in the meantime invent a better and cheaper way to get stuff beyond Earth's orbit, thereby making the railgun project obsolete before it was finished!

There is, however, nothing inherently non-scientific or "magical" about the concept, as discussed in this Wikipedia article on Mass drivers.

Originally Posted by Hanna

My fave Heinlein book is a kids adventure about two boys in a boarding school on Mars, who outsmart an evil corporation with the help of ancient Martians. Forgotten the name.

Found it -- the title is Red Planet, first published 1949. The Wikipedia article notes that the native Martians here are physically and culturally very similar to the ones that would appear 12 years later in the much more adult-oriented Stranger in a Strange Land. (Apparently, SiaSL was originally proposed by Heinlein's wife in the late '40s as a kids-oriented "Jungle Book on Mars", so Red Planet may have been an early experiment in this direction.)