By James L. Hill
Sights, sounds, smells, taste, and touch are what connect us to the world. Our senses are the pathways to our mind’s reality, but it not by our senses alone that we determine what is believable and what is not. We filter those sensory inputs with what we have learned about the world around us. For example, we know light travel faster than sound, so when we see lightning we expect to hear the thunder soon afterward. This fact we learned in school and even before then through observation.
Why is this important? Because some science fiction writers forget the basic facts when constructing their stories, they mix up the speed of sound with the speed of light. Our minds rejects what we know cannot be true, subconsciously we start poking holes in the story until the whole thing falls apart and the reader is lost. One of my pet peeves is when the character hears the object falling from the sky and turns to see it explode or crash to the ground. This irks me for two reasons; first anything falling from space like a meteor will be traveling at supersonic speed. The persons wouldn’t hear it until long after it passes them. Secondly, if they were close enough to hear the explosion or crash, depending on the size of the object (and in most sci-fi stories they are huge), the person would be killed by the shock wave that produce the sound of the explosion. Trust me; you wouldn’t want to be within walking distance of an event like that. The only way this scenario works is if the person sees the flash as the object enters the atmosphere, watches it streak miles over head and crash many miles from where they are, hearing only a low rumble of thunder.
Consider this passage from “The Rainmaker”, my short story about a crippled satellite:
Suddenly there’s a blinding flash in the western sky. Thunder rocks the lonely outpost. Patrick hits the window across the room just in time to see a bluish comet streak out of view. Six men rush into the room. “I think we just located IAPTCS!”
Ken Brooks is at the radarscope controls. “There’s nothing on the screen. I’m getting zero on the big dish. And I can’t pick it up on the remote units either.”
“Impossible,” Patrick retorts, “that sat just passed over head no more than fifteen miles up. I’m sure of that!”
From this short exchange you see how sight and sound follow each other giving a realistic chain of events. The boom heard and felt is from the satellite traveling at supersonic speed, it the effect of the air being compressed and then rushing in to fill the vacuum left behind.
In other scenarios the boom is the object itself being blown to pieces as the friction heats it. Most objects that get pulled in by Earth’s gravity will burn up in the atmosphere, quickly, quietly, as shooting stars. It is the Earth natural defenses against intruders from outer space. These objects are small and are so high in the atmosphere the sound never reaches us at the surface, but they are quite beautiful to see. They go unnoticed because of the light we generate and radiate out into space from our city. Go out into the wilderness, away from the city lights and you will see them streaking across the night sky. When larger objects are pulled in they can be seen burning over the city lights, usually drawing our attention when they explode lower in the atmosphere and rain down as small fragments of a much large body. And if the body is too large to be destroyed they create a creator like Meteor Creator in Arizona. Or they cause a blast so powerful it flattens an entire forest like in 1909 Tunguska event. The possibility of there being any eyewitness account to those types of events is zero.
So in science fiction it is imperative to get the facts straight and in the correct order, sight before sound and the larger the event the less likely you will find an eyewitness to tell the story. It is okay to bend the rules, and in some cases necessary to break the laws altogether (you can’t get anywhere in the universe obeying the speed of light), but don’t ask me to throw out logical order of things and hear the thunder then see the lightning strike.
Sights, sounds, smells, taste, and touch are what connect us to the world. Our senses are the pathways to our mind’s reality, but it not by our senses alone that we determine what is believable and what is not. We filter those sensory inputs with what we have learned about the world around us. For example, we know light travel faster than sound, so when we see lightning we expect to hear the thunder soon afterward. This fact we learned in school and even before then through observation.
Why is this important? Because some science fiction writers forget the basic facts when constructing their stories, they mix up the speed of sound with the speed of light. Our minds rejects what we know cannot be true, subconsciously we start poking holes in the story until the whole thing falls apart and the reader is lost. One of my pet peeves is when the character hears the object falling from the sky and turns to see it explode or crash to the ground. This irks me for two reasons; first anything falling from space like a meteor will be traveling at supersonic speed. The persons wouldn’t hear it until long after it passes them. Secondly, if they were close enough to hear the explosion or crash, depending on the size of the object (and in most sci-fi stories they are huge), the person would be killed by the shock wave that produce the sound of the explosion. Trust me; you wouldn’t want to be within walking distance of an event like that. The only way this scenario works is if the person sees the flash as the object enters the atmosphere, watches it streak miles over head and crash many miles from where they are, hearing only a low rumble of thunder.
Consider this passage from “The Rainmaker”, my short story about a crippled satellite:
Suddenly there’s a blinding flash in the western sky. Thunder rocks the lonely outpost. Patrick hits the window across the room just in time to see a bluish comet streak out of view. Six men rush into the room. “I think we just located IAPTCS!”
Ken Brooks is at the radarscope controls. “There’s nothing on the screen. I’m getting zero on the big dish. And I can’t pick it up on the remote units either.”
“Impossible,” Patrick retorts, “that sat just passed over head no more than fifteen miles up. I’m sure of that!”
From this short exchange you see how sight and sound follow each other giving a realistic chain of events. The boom heard and felt is from the satellite traveling at supersonic speed, it the effect of the air being compressed and then rushing in to fill the vacuum left behind.
In other scenarios the boom is the object itself being blown to pieces as the friction heats it. Most objects that get pulled in by Earth’s gravity will burn up in the atmosphere, quickly, quietly, as shooting stars. It is the Earth natural defenses against intruders from outer space. These objects are small and are so high in the atmosphere the sound never reaches us at the surface, but they are quite beautiful to see. They go unnoticed because of the light we generate and radiate out into space from our city. Go out into the wilderness, away from the city lights and you will see them streaking across the night sky. When larger objects are pulled in they can be seen burning over the city lights, usually drawing our attention when they explode lower in the atmosphere and rain down as small fragments of a much large body. And if the body is too large to be destroyed they create a creator like Meteor Creator in Arizona. Or they cause a blast so powerful it flattens an entire forest like in 1909 Tunguska event. The possibility of there being any eyewitness account to those types of events is zero.
So in science fiction it is imperative to get the facts straight and in the correct order, sight before sound and the larger the event the less likely you will find an eyewitness to tell the story. It is okay to bend the rules, and in some cases necessary to break the laws altogether (you can’t get anywhere in the universe obeying the speed of light), but don’t ask me to throw out logical order of things and hear the thunder then see the lightning strike.
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