So, first of all Losers in Space is now out there and available for purchase at
Amazon, B&N, and any old indie bookstore you can find via Indiebound.
Nina and Ron Else — Nina is the person who used the phrase
to describe me that named this blog — are holding a reading/signing/general
purpose hanging out at Who Else? Books, here in Denver, which is lat 200 S
Broadway (a couple blocks south of the Mayan Theatre) on Saturday the 14th of
April, at 3 pm, and I'll be there, demonstrating that I can hold a book right
side up and spell my name correctly.
Those of you in the Denver area should come on by; I'm planning to shave
and wear a clean shirt!
Now, about that crow ....
Losers in Space is
deliberately very, very hard SF, i.e. get-the-science-right stuff, mainly
because I'm somewhat saddened by the way that "geek" has morphed from
meaning "a socially clueless dork who thinks chemistry class is
exciting" (i.e. a valuable person who will someday make us all better off,
just by pursuing his/her passion for understanding the world) into meaning
"a member of an alternative fashion/status clique who knows a shitload
about Batman," (i.e. a hip consumer who may eventually also branch out
into knowing a lot about Harry Potter or alternative rock, and whose existence
will make the pop culture distributors slightly richer).
So I did my damnedest to load it up with geek appeal,
including creating the "Notes for the Interested," which are what I
wished sci-fi books had when I was eleven—a quick, easy way to find the
interesting infodumps and skip over all that adventure and relationship
stuff. (Or one might say, a quick
way to read like a geek and not like the boys or girls of the publisher's
imagination).
So I claimed in the introduction that I had done everything
I could do to make the science as accurate as possible.
Well, I didn't quite do everything I could do.
(Now spitting out black feathers ...)
If you look at Note for the Interested #13, which begins on
page 167, there's a whopper of an error in there. Most of the initial stuff about how radio and microwave
communication works is still right, so that's okay
But I screwed up massively with respect to the super-special
amazing antenna that (spoiler not necessary to specify, go read the book).
Sub-millimeter waves (or terahertz, see the book for why
those are the same thing) actually fall on the electromagnetic spectrum in the
region between very short wave microwaves and very long wave infrared. To use them for communication over
interplanetary distances, therefore, the difficulties would be something like
the difficulties of using microwaves and something like the difficulties of
using light, and in both cases, that means you need a really big antenna or
lens.
An antenna is a conducting surface that works by letting the
electromagnetic waves induce a current in it; a lens is a nonconductor that
refracts the electromagnetic waves into a small, intense image. Either way, the bigger the antenna (if
the submillimeter wave communication is more like microwaves) or the bigger the
lens (if the submillimeter wave communication is more like infrared light), the
more signal you would get, and in fact, contra what the book says right there
on page 172, it is indeed something you could knock together out of wire, or
perhaps clear plastic. So I made
Susan and Glisters into Very Bad Geeks, and if Derlock were not an uninterested
psychopath, he'd have been sneering in their faces.
The (wrong) detector (the feet are really chewy but not as
dry as the feathers) I describe borrows various aspects of the x-ray telescope,
cell phone towers, and some other things I researched. If I had been working much further up
the spectrum – at about the boundary between far-ultraviolet and
very-soft-x-rays – it might have been plausible, because up at those super
short wavelengths and high frequencies, electromagnetic radiation tends to
behave more particley and less wavy, and the gadget I describe is a particle
detector.
How'd I produce such a screw up? I didn't run it by Howard Davidson soon enough to be able to
revise the book when he said "Uh, whoa." And so, alas, here I am, dining upon crow. (That beak is crunchy).
Which, I hope, will cause bejillions of young readers,
encountering this, to aspire to read and write more hard sf, because of the
pleasures of catching an old poop who doesn't know what he is talking about! So if
this tricks you further into the hard sf world ... well, great. Thank Howard for it. I'll be over here finishing off the
crow.
