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kengr ([personal profile] kengr) wrote2018-03-17 05:02 pm
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yet another apocalypse

March 17, 1998 6:15 pm PST
The Change occurs. Nanutucket Island sent back to 1250 BC
The rest of the world experiences a massive change in natural laws.
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ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)

Well ...

[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith 2018-03-18 05:06 am (UTC)(link)
I loved the Nantucket series.

The other half, however, killed every living thing on Earth at least twice in the first chapter and didn't even notice. I know Stirling can write better than that. I don't even want to know what went wrong there.
kengr: (Default)

Re: Well ...

[personal profile] kengr 2018-03-18 05:20 am (UTC)(link)
Well, I gave the credit to the alien space bats that changed the rules.

Stirling is *not* good with science. In one of the books he has someone trying to figure out the new rules, and he's measuring pressure in a test setup with both a pressure gauge and by stacking weights on a piston.

Which is totally silly, because pressure is *literally* the amount of weight pressing on an area. So after a couple of measurements you can tell that the gauge is still reporting pressure correctly and dispense with the weights.

I could go on...
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)

Re: Well ...

[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith 2018-03-18 05:49 am (UTC)(link)
I could barely stretch to consider that aliens might manage an apparent shift in natural laws on one planet. But not without consequences. My suspension of disbelief chewed through the straps and ran screaming into the night.
kengr: (Default)

Re: Well ...

[personal profile] kengr 2018-03-18 07:42 am (UTC)(link)
Well, there were side effects. Like the magic that pops up later.

And we are talking "hacking the universe's OS" level tech.
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)

Re: Well ...

[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith 2018-03-18 07:48 am (UTC)(link)
I never got as far as the magic. Had that shown up immediately, it would have posited an explanation of "break off fragment of universe and rotate from scientific to magical dimension." Which works in a story, if you don't care about plausibility.

But in reality, and I've done this accidentally in a fishbowl, if you bring universes of incompatible base structure close together, things go haywire. Which is why I won't do another Steamsmith fishbowl. :/ I suspect that, as with the previously mentioned scientific issues, a crash translation from scientific to magical dimension would kill everything.

Maybe the aliens did that and then resurrected it all. 0_o

It's just too much work trying to explain a dumbass premise poorly presented in the original.

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