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Suspension of Disbelief.

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Suspension of Disbelief.
Post by crewdude48   » Wed Sep 30, 2015 3:20 am

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Having seen some of the recent posts, something has been itching the back of my brain. They got me wondering, what people are having the hardest time believing about the Honorverse. It is quite obvious that some people here (not going to mention any names :D ) have big problems with the description of the construction methods, or computers, or things like that. I would like to know your biggest suspension of disbelief hurdle; what comes closest to pulling you out of the story?

For me, it is the prevalence of religion in the Honorverse. Most people seem to have one and actually believe in it. In the modern world, you see religion well into the process of atrophy and fading away in the more developed part of the world. Even when people hold onto their religion, it tends to become more cultural than actually religious. Heck, there is an entire branch of Judaism that doesn't actually believe in a god. I know it is Mr. Weber's world, and as he is a preacher, he and I are probably not on the same page at all, but I suspect that very little in the way of modern religions will survive in any sort of recognizable form even half as far into the future as the Honorverse.
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Re: Suspension of Disbelief.
Post by JohnRoth   » Wed Sep 30, 2015 7:14 am

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The things that affect me the most is where I have fairly deep knowledge, like genetics, economics, history and software. How the story projects those things another 2000 years into the future simply doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

RFC has a deep knowledge base in naval history, which I'm lacking, so all of the naval activity is simply: eh. My total military experience is showing up to be drafted during Vietnam and being told: go home, kid. We don't want you.

On the other hand, I'm very much an advocate of cyclic versions of history, such as Spengler, so projecting our current historical situation onto the far future makes me think: "West Mars."

As far as I'm concerned, it's a fantasy. I'm not mistaking it for anything resembling possible reality, so the historical and economic absurdities don't bother me. The places that irritate me have to do with the places where it's most real: genetics and software.
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Re: Suspension of Disbelief.
Post by cthia   » Wed Sep 30, 2015 7:49 am

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I won't go there on religion. I'm certain most of you know where I stand on that and I don't want to get this thread Duckked.

Other than that, I don't have much trouble believing most of anything that the author has internally laid out. I do feel that there would be much more automation both in building and operating ships.

However, externally my biggest problem is in mankind thinking that that far away from the Sol system that he would have time to be at war with himself. I think there would be so many alien species, many not so peaceful, and with technology that dwarfs our own that mankind would be fully united trying to survive.

That far away from the Sol system we won't be killing ourselves, there'll be plenty of alien species doing that for us.

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Re: Suspension of Disbelief.
Post by JeffEngel   » Wed Sep 30, 2015 8:48 am

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Eh, religions may have a thriving future as sheer, simple community practices. I think that's the core of many of them today. They're in less of a process of fading away than one of having their belief content driven into triviality. Granted, it doesn't seem that that's exactly what they've arrived at in the Honorverse. On the other hand, only Masadans seem to have a religion that is inclined to any conflict with any other, so maybe Honorverse religions are personally important without being aggressively dogmatic.

It's also worth noting that most of the cultures we see are marginal ones, developing/frontier societies way out there, apart from the Solarian center of human civilization. If we'd like a typical Honorverse planet and culture, among those we've seen, we ought to be looking at Beowulf.

The peculiarly advanced flexibility of labor and construction isn't something hard for me to swallow. After some 23 centuries, I don't expect to see a recognizable human culture at all, so the advances are the easy thing to believe. Relatively retarded medicine and computers are harder to believe than the gee-whiz economics.

Not having advanced aliens is easy. We have very little idea how common life (however you care to define it) and cumulatively progressive tool use is in the universe. We only know that it's probably not so common as to make it very likely it's already arrived here from somewhere else, because we'd expect to see it clearly if it had and we don't. If it's not arrived here now, it's barely more likely that it'd've arrived within 1000 light years of here in 2300 years, when those represent time scales that are still eyeblinks on the scale of the evolution of life. That the Medusans, for instance are as close to us technologically at this meager distance is the surprise, not that we're not swimming in Klingons.
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Re: Suspension of Disbelief.
Post by Somtaaw   » Wed Sep 30, 2015 9:07 am

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The point I'm really having to suspend disbelief, is that so far there have been zero encounters with star-faring aliens.

the natives of Basilisk, 'cats, and the handful of other alien intelligences that have been mentioned are one thing... but Fermi Paradox and the question of "where are they?"

It's one thing to have all the humans having scattered to countless millions of colonies, lots of failures which were generally attributed to lack of food or supplies, disease, or just plain "giving up and coming home".

But there's not a single system, that was claimed by a non-human intelligence, that's been mentioned.
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Re: Suspension of Disbelief.
Post by FLHerne   » Wed Sep 30, 2015 9:48 am

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For me, it's got to be the mind-control nanotech.

The advanced-but-rubbish computers are a bit irritating, but they're needed to let the cast punch buttons dramatically and make the prolonged missile-counting scenes a bit more human. The interstellar logistics fall over when prodded at closely, but all those tramp freighters and shipping lines make the universe nice and busy.

The nanotech just doesn't fit - they can't make decent AI or even smart control software given tons of molycircs, it takes months or years to get used to replacement limbs, but you can puff a few nanomachines up someone's nose, monitor what they're doing accurately, and then produce fine motor control on demand? :twisted:

As I wrote in my other post, Honorverse automated heuristics are pathetic - computers seem unable to recognise the most obvious and predictable things without human intervention - when implemented on a shipful of known hardware with purpose-built sensors. But you can reliably trigger this nanotech while reading information out of a human brain with no setup and no storage space and as much computational hardware as fits in a puff of vapour.

Oh, and the unfakeable tongue-barcodes. We're repeatedly told they have molecular-level construction, nanotech assembly, regenerative growth...it doesn't matter how it's coded for genetically; if you can build things down to the atom you can fake it anyway! Since most people just look at the things, you don't even need to do that. :roll:
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Re: Suspension of Disbelief.
Post by Aegis99   » Wed Sep 30, 2015 11:43 am

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For me it's the fact that somehow humans managed to come up with the babies to populate thousands of worlds with populations into the billions. It's pretty clear that the major controlling factor of human population growth is the level of female education (absent the use/threat of force). If your women are educated enough to contribute to a star-faring civilization (college minimum) then you are going to really struggle to just maintain replacement level baby production, much less manage to fill up thousands of planets.

I'll grant exceptions like Grayson and Masada. But I don't buy that a wealthy, well educated, gender-equal society like Manticore could get a population into the billions, even in a few centuries. Manticore has spent twice as long as a wealthy technological society than the US has existed at all. Here in the US we didn't really become a wealthy and educated (or at least women getting educated) until just over a century ago, and we're already only barely at replacement.
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Re: Suspension of Disbelief.
Post by munroburton   » Wed Sep 30, 2015 1:58 pm

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Aegis99 wrote:For me it's the fact that somehow humans managed to come up with the babies to populate thousands of worlds with populations into the billions. It's pretty clear that the major controlling factor of human population growth is the level of female education (absent the use/threat of force). If your women are educated enough to contribute to a star-faring civilization (college minimum) then you are going to really struggle to just maintain replacement level baby production, much less manage to fill up thousands of planets.

I'll grant exceptions like Grayson and Masada. But I don't buy that a wealthy, well educated, gender-equal society like Manticore could get a population into the billions, even in a few centuries. Manticore has spent twice as long as a wealthy technological society than the US has existed at all. Here in the US we didn't really become a wealthy and educated (or at least women getting educated) until just over a century ago, and we're already only barely at replacement.


Prolong may explain some of the large increases. The first generation(which includes Hamish Alexander, amongst others) may not have changed their childraising patterns out of cultural inertia.

As for educated women slowing down reproduction, that may be due to them learning our planet is overpopulated/underresourced/your term of choice. We don't know what educated women would do on rich, abundant colonies when the "overpopulation pressure" message is removed or even replaced by "we need more kids."
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Re: Suspension of Disbelief.
Post by JeffEngel   » Wed Sep 30, 2015 2:08 pm

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munroburton wrote:As for educated women slowing down reproduction, that may be due to them learning our planet is overpopulated/underresourced/your term of choice. We don't know what educated women would do on rich, abundant colonies when the "overpopulation pressure" message is removed or even replaced by "we need more kids."

Indeed. Those rich, abundant colonies are also going to have natural resources literally dirt-cheap, processed with machinery that lasts pretty much forever (so ongoing costs are dinky), living space that's wide open even before counter-grav towers, stupendous childcare provisions, short work weeks, and a lot of work that won't even take a parent away from the child if that's their preference.

People would be well able to take wonderful care of plenty of children. The whole cost calculation would be radically different.
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Re: Suspension of Disbelief.
Post by HB of CJ   » Wed Sep 30, 2015 2:10 pm

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Pretty much the same. I also think tech would be a bunch more advanced in over 2000 years. That and the apparent lack of very long range explorations with interesting discoveries regarding the aforementioned distant intelligent friend/foe/alley aliens. Also not sure about the religion. I would think (respectfully here) mankind would grow out of it. Just me.
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