Why do so many readers lack the ability to separate fact from fiction?

Bramblethorn said:

"The Long Watch". Specifically the bit about plutonium toxicity; it's certainly not good for you, but from all I can find, Heinlein rather exaggerates its lethality.

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True, but keep in mind that the story was written in 1949. There had been several radiation deaths involving plutonium in Manhattan Project labs only three or four years earlier. Other writers of the time greatly underestimated the lethality of radiation. I'm inclined to cut Heinlein a bit of slack on that one.

TarnishedPenny said:

True, but keep in mind that the story was written in 1949. There had been several radiation deaths involving plutonium in Manhattan Project labs only three or four years earlier. Other writers of the time greatly underestimated the lethality of radiation. I'm inclined to cut Heinlein a bit of slack on that one.

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My memory may be shit but I don't recall Heinlein invoking viable, monstrous mutants as did many SciFi'ers of the era. I think he saw radiation as deadly, not transformative.

I'm reminded of authors two centuries ago writing of electricity as a mystical, almost magical force -- life-giving, life-changing, life-ending. The radioactive craze of the day, hey? Mr Frankenstein used electricity like magic. Godzilla came later.

Bramblethorn said:

I would put it slightly differently to that.

IMHO, fiction usually works best when it has some sort of internal logic and rules, so the reader has some sense of what is and isn't possible. A lot of art is about doing something clever within constraints.

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I agree with this. I don't think we disagree, so perhaps my previous statement wasn't put artfully or clearly enough.

The key is the word "constraints." A good story needs constraints of some sort. They can be scientific, or they can be something else. But if there's no constraint whatsoever, the story loses its sense of drama.

And you're right about the Force -- it's always been a vague concept and a deus ex machina device, but in the last Star Wars movie I thought they went too far with it.

SimonDoom said:

The key is the word "constraints." A good story needs constraints of some sort. They can be scientific, or they can be something else. But if there's no constraint whatsoever, the story loses its sense of drama.

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Not only stories; music too. 20th century composers acquired total control over sound and produced piles of crap, with few embedded gems. An artist's gotta know their limits, as Dirty Harry might have said in a lucid moment. Work within constraints, else cacaphony.

Hypoxia said:

Not only stories; music too. 20th century composers acquired total control over sound and produced piles of crap, with few embedded gems. An artist's gotta know their limits, as Dirty Harry might have said in a lucid moment. Work within constraints, else cacaphony.

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That's a more complicated issue, and I go back and forth on that one. You could include visual art in that, as well. Modern music and modern art reveled in throwing out all the old rules. Sometimes the results were great. Sometimes they were just perplexing. I don't think visual art and music are quite as naturally bound by constraints as a story is, but I agree they are, or should be, somewhat bound.

SimonDoom said:

That's a more complicated issue, and I go back and forth on that one. You could include visual art in that, as well. Modern music and modern art reveled in throwing out all the old rules. Sometimes the results were great. Sometimes they were just perplexing. I don't think visual art and music are quite as naturally bound by constraints as a story is, but I agree they are, or should be, somewhat bound.

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Even Picasso began with a firm grounding in realism, both in painting and plastic arts, before he experimented with cubism and surrealism. Know the rules before you break them.

Alice_Rosaleen said:

Even Picasso began with a firm grounding in realism, both in painting and plastic arts, before he experimented with cubism and surrealism. Know the rules before you break them.

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Indeed. Learn to draft BEFORE attempting abstractions. And we see reactions to unbridled expression, in minimal and consonant music. in figurative visual and plastic arts, in comfortable irony. Cacaphony gets old after awhile.
John Cage showed that music is any sound (or lack thereof) you can get audiences to listen to (and pay for), and Andy Warhol showed art to be anything you can frame or mount and get people to look at (and buy). Charles Ives (classically trained) was a totally free composer because he made his fortune in insurance and didn't have to worry about selling his music.But I digress.

ObTopic: The same total-artistic-control techniques allow manipulation. Can we discern fakery from reality? Shooped images show anyone, anywhere, doing anything. People have trouble with facts because we're immersed in deliberate fictions. Factoids rule, alas.

On further reflection...

Sci-Fi and Fantasy require, to some degree, suspension of reality and acceptance of alternate realities.

Hobbits, dragons, magic of any sort, warp speed, phasers and light sabres, transporter rooms, ansibles, elves and drow, antigravity, shields, spindizzies, Barsoom, colonies on Venus, riverworlds, orcs, mind melds, galactic emperors with imperial space navies, the Voice, interstar jumps, the Howards, Kzinti - none of them are real, yet all of them are important pieces of those alternate realities and none of those alternate realities would be as enjoyable without them.

Those boundaries or constraints are the responsibility of the author. If he or she needs a universe in which mass increases with speed, it's up to them to write it properly. If they succeed, it's likely a good yarn. If they don't, it's likely pulp.

Think Terry Pratchett's enormously successful Discworld series. The central thesis, as I see it, is that magic exists. With that, just about every otherwise-implausible thing becomes possible.

Does Heinlein's misjudgement (by whatever name you wish to assign it) over the toxicity of Plutonium really matter that much when weighed against the story's central theme of loyalty and duty-before-all self-sacrifice? I can understand that it might be found jarring by some, but to me it is a trivial matter, one of those minor bricks in an alternate universe.

Someone (Lazarus Long, IIRC) once said that a lady should remove her dignity with her clothing and then do her whorish best. I think, if one is to benefit fully from fiction, there are times one needs to remove one's hard-headed judgement and simply do one's best to enjoy it.

My two kopeks, anyway.

TarnishedPenny said:

On further reflection...

Sci-Fi and Fantasy require, to some degree, suspension of reality and acceptance of alternate realities.

Think Terry Pratchett's enormously successful Discworld series. The central thesis, as I see it, is that magic exists. With that, just about every otherwise-implausible thing becomes possible.

My two kopeks, anyway.

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The Discworld's magic ?
Ah, but you see, the Wizards are taught not to use magic, for it requires 'control' because nothing is free, even magic.
This may not include the magic as practised by Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and so forth.

Were this thread about manners, it might be titled:
Just a thought.

Hypoxia said:

Were this thread about manners, it might be titled:

Why do so many lack the ability to separate tact from friction?​

Just a thought.

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And it still works.

I like Heinlein's The Glory Road because of the way the hero has to learn the parameters of the world he is catapulted into. He has no idea how things work and often gets it wrong.

As he learns, so does the reader.

TarnishedPenny said:

On further reflection...

Sci-Fi and Fantasy require, to some degree, suspension of reality and acceptance of alternate realities.

Hobbits, dragons, magic of any sort, warp speed, phasers and light sabres, transporter rooms, ansibles, elves and drow, antigravity, shields, spindizzies, Barsoom, colonies on Venus, riverworlds, orcs, mind melds, galactic emperors with imperial space navies, the Voice, interstar jumps, the Howards, Kzinti - none of them are real, yet all of them are important pieces of those alternate realities and none of those alternate realities would be as enjoyable without them.

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For the most part, I agree. And if Heinlein had changed the plutonium to something a little more fictional, that would've been fine. The problem arises where something's intended to be "real science", and isn't.

Think Terry Pratchett's enormously successful Discworld series. The central thesis, as I see it, is that magic exists. With that, just about every otherwise-implausible thing becomes possible.

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Does it, though?

Pratchett defined a lot of rules about what can and can't happen in his world. For example: conservation laws prevent wizards from creating something out of nothing; belief has power; under Holy Wood magic, if you crash into a barn, there will be a shower of clucking chickens even if that barn has only ever been used for storing cabbages; million-to-one chances will happen nine times out of ten; cast-off teeth and toenail clippings give power over their owner.

The laws of nature in Discworld are very different to our own, but they're still quite constraining in their own way, and a lot of his stories require characters to come up with creative solutions within those constraints. Something like "Hogfather" is a good example - if you want to kill a god, you can't just walk down to the magic shop and buy a +10 sword of godslaying, you have to do it within the rules. (Similarly, LotR is in some ways much more rule-driven than the real world; anybody can imagine dozens of possible ways to neutralise an enemy IRL, but in LotR "drop the Ring in Mount Doom" is the only option on the table.)

Most F/SF is in the same vein, with "reality" constrained pretty tightly one way or another. There are exceptions, but they're rare; the best example I can think of is Sheckley's "Mindswap" and that's pretty obscure these days.

Does Heinlein's misjudgement (by whatever name you wish to assign it) over the toxicity of Plutonium really matter that much when weighed against the story's central theme of loyalty and duty-before-all self-sacrifice?

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I believe I did say that it's my favourite of Heinlein's stories, despite that particular error. It's an excellent story, and it could have been better; neither of those points negates the other.

But my irritation with that particular error isn't about how it affects the story. It's that a significant number of Heinlein's fans seem to have accepted that misinformation as fact, and then started circulating it in non-fictional contexts, like discussions about real-world nuclear power.

I'll submit that The Long Watch (which is available to read online) was exactly what imperious, science-sloppy editor John Campbell wanted. He desired a radiation-peril story for AMAZING and Heinlein delivered, for cash. That's how it worked then.

Hypoxia said:

I'll submit that The Long Watch (which is available to read online) was exactly what imperious, science-sloppy editor John Campbell wanted. He desired a radiation-peril story for AMAZING and Heinlein delivered, for cash. That's how it worked then.

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I wish that was how it worked now. Someone told you what they wanted, and then paid you for writing it, then published it, and people read it. Sounds like the golden era of writing.

JasonClearwater said:

I wish that was how it worked now. Someone told you what they wanted, and then paid you for writing it, then published it, and people read it. Sounds like the golden era of writing.

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BUT - Some authors still got pilloried for 'prostituting their art' by writing for the money.

Anthony Trollope was one. The London and Edinburgh cliques of critics hated him because he admitted he wrote to make money.

An Australian author Arthur Upfield who wrote the Inspector Bony (or Boney) detective stories was constantly attacked by the Australian critical establishment for poor English and writing just for profit.

Both of them outsold their critics by hundreds of thousands of books, and made more money too.

oggbashan said:

BUT - Some authors still got pilloried for 'prostituting their art' by writing for the money.

Anthony Trollope was one. The London and Edinburgh cliques of critics hated him because he admitted he wrote to make money.

An Australian author Arthur Upfield who wrote the Inspector Bony (or Boney) detective stories was constantly attacked by the Australian critical establishment for poor English and writing just for profit.

Both of them outsold their critics by hundreds of thousands of books, and made more money too.

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Exactly. It's like taking acting roles that make you rich and famous enough, that you can afford to take the roles you want [Johnny Depp, for instance]. Or write what you want, like most famous authors out there. Everyone needs money. I'm not really into the starving-artist idea. You make money, then you write what you want. You play covers, until your original work takes off.

Or, you live on a bug-infested couch and hope for the best.

"Only a fool writes, if not for money."
--Dr Johnson

Many fools hereabouts. Watch where you step.

Meanwhile John Campbell was noted for paying his writers and notorious for dictating exactly what he wanted, returning many submissions with long demanding notes and pushing his own quirks. Result: The Golden Age Of Well-Written Science Fiction. And too much telepathy, Scientology, mutation, and pop psychohistory. But it was fun.

I like one Campbell pet theory. Humanity evolves through three stages: barbarian, peasant, and citizen. Barbarians ravage the landscape and rule till peasants band together, promote kings, and raise armies. Peasants and their kings and armies rule till citizenry build cooperative civilizations, vast complex machines serving many ends.

Okay, I over-simplified that. But closed dictatorships aren't civilized and can't survive contact with the outside world. That's the USSR lesson. And I'll stop here; anything further belongs on the Politics Board.

Before we leave RAH's mistakes, and he made lots, remember, in 1949 plutonium might as well have been Fictionite or Unobtanium. As someone pointed out above, in Sci-fi / Fantasy you need a set Universe with rules.

Just like conventional fiction. If Sam Spade or M. Poirot suddenly used a phaser or magic to solve a crime, nobody would accept it.

You cannae mix matter and antimatter cold, Mister Spock!

You have to invite a Vampire in.

Kryptonite does weird things to Superman.

Gandalf knows more than he's saying.

Lazarus Long is still alive, and out there somewhere being awesome. Maybe in a kilt.

Deckard IS a replicant. Maybe. Or not. Ok that one's a problem.

"If I wanted facts, I'd beat them out of you!"

I read that somewhere.

I think it was Pablo Picasso who said, "Computers are useless. All they give you is answers." Fun writing is all about questions. WHY is this shit going on? WHY the fuck should we care? WHO dunnit? WHERE is the McGuffin? HOW long can s/he stay hard / wet? WHEN is this gonna end? WHAT the fuck was that? Our setups and solutions are hopefully entertaining.

I think Heinlein was trying to describe a criticality reaction- a sudden deadly burst of radiation that can occur when too much plutonium is kept together and becomes unstable. Plutonium and all its decay progeny can be made lethal rather easily in the right (or wrong) circumstances.

A nightmare scenario I'm amazed hasn't occurred yet: A nefarious nogoodnik carefully places an ounce of not-hard-to-get plutonium powder in a thin helium balloon and casts it adrift in a westerly breeze in Santa Monica. It quickly rises, pops, and spreads death over the Los Angeles basin, killing millions. Heinlein didn't much exaggerate the lethality.

So, how many of you used your food replicators today?

Hypoxia said:

A nightmare scenario I'm amazed hasn't occurred yet: A nefarious nogoodnik carefully places an ounce of not-hard-to-get plutonium powder in a thin helium balloon and casts it adrift in a westerly breeze in Santa Monica. It quickly rises, pops, and spreads death over the Los Angeles basin, killing millions. Heinlein didn't much exaggerate the lethality.

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Or that of dealing with a plutonium core, which is what Heinlein was writing about, and there have been many deaths relating to that already. Plutonium finishing plants have released large amounts of powder into the air before, much more than any balloon.
I wish countries would try to switch to thorium reactors. The only truly safe nuclear option out there that doesn't leave dirty-bomb waste behind.

OP: I suppose one of the most direct answers to why readers lack the ability to separate fact from fiction is they've suspended their disbelief to read your story, and they expect you to present the facts as needed so they don't have to worry about researching the concepts themselves. It's actually a compliment in a way.

Alice_Rosaleen said:

Or that of dealing with a plutonium core, which is what Heinlein was writing about, and there have been many deaths relating to that already. Plutonium finishing plants have released large amounts of powder into the air before, much more than any balloon.

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But probably not upwind of major population centers. John McPhee's CURVE OF BINDING ENERGY scared me about that.

I wish countries would try to switch to thorium reactors. The only truly safe nuclear option out there that doesn't leave dirty-bomb waste behind.

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True but thorium has disadvantages {discussed here} and not many reactors are in operation now. India seems to be doing the most there.

OP: I suppose one of the most direct answers to why readers lack the ability to separate fact from fiction is they've suspended their disbelief to read your story, and they expect you to present the facts as needed so they don't have to worry about researching the concepts themselves. It's actually a compliment in a way.

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Is it better to write with the assumption that your audience is smart, or dumb? Educated or not? How much should you explain? How many classical quips can you squeeze in?