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Why Diane Duane should not write SF
Okay, I think I might feel moderately human and alive again. Which means I have energy to be cranky about Diane Duane's very bad habit of reading her religion onto physics.
It shows up in just about all of her books--the idea that "evil" equals "entropy". This means that she is essentially reading "evil" as "any energy that is not applied to useful work", and I'm sorry but that's pointing in directions that make my skin crawl. It's imposing extremely subjective valuation onto a basic thermodynamic principle which has no ethical dimensions whatsoever. Duane's formulation sets up humans (and a few really-not-alien-at-all species) as the entire measure of good and evil. Things that benefit us are good. Things that harm or even simply fail to benefit us as much as possible are bad.
It also leads to just plain bad science.
The most egregious example is probably in The Wounded Sky, wherein the Enterprise winds up in a space without entropy and everyone therefore stops experiencing "entropic" emotions like anger, hate, resentment, etc, leaving only the allegedly "non-entropic" emotions like joy, benevolence, etc. In physics terms, this is an absolute crock. All emotions are essentially entropic, just like all actions; they require energy consumption, and that results in energy scatter. If non-entropy could possibly be applied to emotions at all, a more likely outcome would seem to be a huge increase, or possibly decrease depending on the new laws of energy conversion, in intensity of all emotion. Universal physics doesn't play favorites according to the good/bad endorphin response of one flyspeck species.
If she wants to write thinly veiled religious screeds, which it seems clear she does, fine. But I object to dressing those out with the dignity of physics, which they have in no way earned, and contributing yet more to the sad tally of anthropocentric pseudo-science.
(Incidentally, why can't she bloody well write McCoy as being totally awesome without turning him into some blandly brilliant and "enlightened" Marty Stu? That pissed me off even more than the physics, which is saying something.)
It shows up in just about all of her books--the idea that "evil" equals "entropy". This means that she is essentially reading "evil" as "any energy that is not applied to useful work", and I'm sorry but that's pointing in directions that make my skin crawl. It's imposing extremely subjective valuation onto a basic thermodynamic principle which has no ethical dimensions whatsoever. Duane's formulation sets up humans (and a few really-not-alien-at-all species) as the entire measure of good and evil. Things that benefit us are good. Things that harm or even simply fail to benefit us as much as possible are bad.
It also leads to just plain bad science.
The most egregious example is probably in The Wounded Sky, wherein the Enterprise winds up in a space without entropy and everyone therefore stops experiencing "entropic" emotions like anger, hate, resentment, etc, leaving only the allegedly "non-entropic" emotions like joy, benevolence, etc. In physics terms, this is an absolute crock. All emotions are essentially entropic, just like all actions; they require energy consumption, and that results in energy scatter. If non-entropy could possibly be applied to emotions at all, a more likely outcome would seem to be a huge increase, or possibly decrease depending on the new laws of energy conversion, in intensity of all emotion. Universal physics doesn't play favorites according to the good/bad endorphin response of one flyspeck species.
If she wants to write thinly veiled religious screeds, which it seems clear she does, fine. But I object to dressing those out with the dignity of physics, which they have in no way earned, and contributing yet more to the sad tally of anthropocentric pseudo-science.
(Incidentally, why can't she bloody well write McCoy as being totally awesome without turning him into some blandly brilliant and "enlightened" Marty Stu? That pissed me off even more than the physics, which is saying something.)