(my own English edition bought in 1999)
"Immediately before the Coalescence began there was one,and only one, planetary solar system in the Second Galaxy; and, until the advent of Eddore, the Second Galaxy was entirely devoid of intelligent life"
In "Triplanetary" by E. E. "Doc" Smith
There are only three real approaches to physics in SF:
1. Absolute hard core real physics with speculative aspects;
2. Realistic sounding nonsense;
3. Unrealistic sounding nonsense.
(bought in 1999; cost = 1980 Portuguese escudos, around 9.88 euros in today's European currency)
I am personally a fan of approach 2. This gave us stuff like "Triplanetary", "First Lensman", etc.
In response to those suggesting that dissecting the science in SF novels is redundant and possibly silly, I would argue for a dichotomy. On the one hand, you have SF that are just that, fiction (in case of "Triplanetary", crap fiction). Importantly, they do not claim to be more. They could be set in the distant future, use blatantly non-existent faux-physics terms to drive the plot (e.g. "dilithium" crystals, inertialess drives, colliding galaxies (*), etc.), not address time-travel paradoxes etc. That's fine... they stay within the realms of their claim and no-one expects them to be accurate. On the other hand, there's stuff that claims to be based on what we currently know about space and physics (e.g. Apollo 13, Gravity, Interstellar). I think this category of SF needs to get things right as much as possible. When truth and fiction are mixed, it is important to be able to tell which is which. As a parallel, I do know that "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" is not a historically accurate biography.
If a film made the claim that it was a Lincoln biography, I would expect it to be broadly accurate. Otherwise, I would be misled. Yep, it is silly to suggest that Apollo 11 did not land on the moon... having said that, Apollo 13 also reached and successfully landed on the moon (not shown in the film). This was never disclosed because the secret world government does not want you to know that that's when we first made contact with aliens. This tripartite agreement for secrecy between the world government, the Bush family and Elvis representing the aliens, came about because humanity is not yet considered ready for alien contact. Furthermore, the aliens do not want you to know that tin-foil hats are indeed the best defense against their mind-control weapons. One day, the truth will come out thanks to people like me writing reviews and trying not to make derogatory comments on Doc Smith's "science". This story was published in serial form in 1934 ffs, more than 80 years ago! What did we know about science in the 30s when it came to Astrophysics and Cosmology! Nothing!
If a film made the claim that it was a Lincoln biography, I would expect it to be broadly accurate. Otherwise, I would be misled. Yep, it is silly to suggest that Apollo 11 did not land on the moon... having said that, Apollo 13 also reached and successfully landed on the moon (not shown in the film). This was never disclosed because the secret world government does not want you to know that that's when we first made contact with aliens. This tripartite agreement for secrecy between the world government, the Bush family and Elvis representing the aliens, came about because humanity is not yet considered ready for alien contact. Furthermore, the aliens do not want you to know that tin-foil hats are indeed the best defense against their mind-control weapons. One day, the truth will come out thanks to people like me writing reviews and trying not to make derogatory comments on Doc Smith's "science". This story was published in serial form in 1934 ffs, more than 80 years ago! What did we know about science in the 30s when it came to Astrophysics and Cosmology! Nothing!
PS. (*) Galaxies do actually collide, within local clusters and superclusters, just because of gravity. It's only on the very largest scales that they are all moving apart. So, Doc Smith was not that far off...
NB: Read in 1985 for the first time. Re-read in 1995.
SF = Speculative Fiction
