(no subject)

[armb]

As well as watching the film, I read Clive Cussler's Trojan Odyssey. Some of it was a bit silly, which comes with the genre (apparently the battle of Troy was at Wandlebury in the Gogs, defending Cornish tin mines from European Celts who had chosen the Wash as a convenient invasion point to attack Cornwall, with the Devil's Ditch near Newmarket being part of the defenses (oh, and Cambridge being a coastal town, based on the prologue), one feature seemed to be poorly written - we have a storm that behaves strangely, and a villain involved in a weather control plot, but the storm's unusual behaviour is apparently just chance - lots of people comment how strangely it behaves, but there is no link to the weather control bit of the plot, but the really annoying bit was a fuel cell that runs on nitrogen and oxygen, which is going to be used on a massive scale. I wondered why the protagonist didn't immediately worry about pollution by nitrogen oxides, but it turns out this thing explicitly takes in atmospheric nitrogen and oxygen, and produces energy and water, just as if it was running on hydrogen like most fuel cells, or as if fission of nitrogen into (heavy) hydrogen didn't require vast amounts of energy. And no-one finds this strange. He'd obviously done some research, why couldn't he have run that past someone with the first clue about the technology?
As someone (and Google doesn't tell me who) said "I'm willing to suspend my disbelief, but not hang it by the neck until dead".

Comments

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Cussler's science is usually crap, why are you surprised?

[armb.livejournal.com]

I can't actually remember what I've read of his before, if anything. If that's typical I doubt I'll read any more. I was expecting and prepared for a certain amount of crap science, but that just seemed excessive. I mean the solar power scheme in the film version of The Man With the Golden Gun (which I happen to have seen recently on video) was silly, but not that bad - or maybe I just have lower expectation for a James Bond film than something pretending to be a techno-thriller.