Expanding

 I started watching The Expanse. Liz was interested, so we started the pilot episode. I was not having much success at suspending disbelief, because they had "ordinary" people living in huge complexes in the asteroid belt, people with minimal education and no common sense, and not having them all die quickly, which seems the obvious fate of your average American in space. Plus the idea that in a world run by engineers, scientists, and other professionals, the "belters" were an underclass being exploited by "inners", meaning people living on Earth and Mars. It is a comical absurdity. I turned it off.

A week or so later, after hearing a friend praise the show, I tried again. I learned a little more about the show and the different populations, but I still see the whole thing as a combination of advanced technology and science, and working class jerks picking fights like you see in sitcoms about "average" people, which is still a big gap to cross. The idea is, I guess, that scientists, engineers, and astronauts (who are trained as scientists and engineers, but often with military training and piloting skills thrown in) went out into the belt and built stations which could serve as bases for the work of extracting resources from asteroid and the outer planets. So far, so good. But they had families. And the later generations some how missed out on training and education, and became space bums, as if any community in space could support such people. No wonder the rate of murder by "spacing" is so incredibly high. Incredibly. Unsupportable death rate seems obvious from the first few episodes.

Then it gets worse for a few reasons. One is that the basic premise is that some guy from Earth, who runs a private business that includes making warships that no one in the solar system knows about, except that everyone sort of does, only they haven't made the connection between this huge company that contracts for advanced weaponry and attacks on ships and stations by unidentified warships that neither Earth nor Mars claim, but couldn't have been built in the Belt. But I suppose since no one has any education, maybe that is possible. For a week or so, until every station in the whole Expanse has sprung leaks that no one can plug because they don't know how to do anything except shove people in airlocks and push the activation buttons.

Another is that a secret base has discovered some "protomolecule" that doesn't follow the laws of physics. Its abilities emerge over time in the narrative. But a protomolecule would be something like a pile of atoms that haven't formed any bonds yet. Or subatomic particles that haven't condensed into recognizable matter. The idea seems to be that these protomolecules can enter normal matter, including living things, and change behaviors, becoming sentient somehow, and operate magically, since they don't follow the laws of physics as we know them. That isn't science fiction. It is fantasy.

And then the science goes away. Finding that this protomolecule is taking over dead bodies, with the help of what are presented as very sane scientists who injected live people, and restructuring Eros, an asteroid several times larger than the one that destroyed the dinosaurs and most living things in their time. Fear of the power of the protomolecule inspires an attack on Eros, but the protomolecule moves Eros out of the way. That is remarkable enough, but soon after, the protomolecule starts accelerating Eros toward Earth, and is apparently so fast, Earth has to react immediately or face complete destruction. In the interplanetary chase that follows, a Martian ship run by belters with an Earther captain follows, at about 15 G's, but Eros keeps accelerating even faster. I didn't calculate the energy involved in accelerating a mass that large at that rate, but it would be, well astronomical. And in what seems like minutes, but may be an hour or more in their time, Eros bypasses Earth and crashes into Venus instead.

It takes our probes and exploration vehicles months to get from Earth to Mars, not minutes. The missiles sent to destroy Eros took less than an hour to get past Mars to the asteroid belt. I'm almost tempted to check the distance, and see how far into relativistic speeds these missiles would have to accelerate to cover so much distance.

But I keep watching. I also read Harry Potter books every summer for a few years. Those stories are uneven and have contradictions throughout. I lost track of how many times Harry and his classmates were "introduced" to knowledge about werewolves. And all those references to werewolf cubs, which don't, in fact, exist within the frame of the story, because werewolves are created by other werewolves biting and turning humans. A little consistency would make for a better read. And in sci fi, a little consistency with actual physical reality would make is more about science and speculation of where that could lead than about total fantasy because no one bothered to check to see if the presentation broke fundamental laws of science. Even if you create some fantasy particle that is exempt from every law of physics, especially the laws of conservation, your scientists and their tools should still resemble known reality, or you aren't writing science fiction.

So maybe tonight I'll opt for British mysteries. They may bend a few rules, but, hey, there is a real case of a British copper being arrested and charged with the murder of a woman who disappeared on her way home in London, so the shows have the occasional basis in reality. Their writers have standards.