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Finished "Fantastic Voyage II" last night and it wasn't bad. It suffers
his normal "plodding plot" syndrome, though I think the Good Doctor is a
very competent writer. I'd put it a cut below "The Gods Themselves."
Yes, it is a rewrite rather than a sequel. Please correct me if I'm
wrong but I think that in the first Fantastic Voyage, Asimov first
consulted on the screenplay and then wrote the book.
I remember reading an article in which Asimov complained about the
idiots who do science fiction movies. In the first story, the
miniature ship and occupants had a limited amount of time before they
would spontaneously de-miniaturize. The results would have been
explosive had they still been inside the body when that happened. In
the movie, the ship was destroyed and left behind in the body while the
occupants escaped. Asimov could not make the screenwriters realize that
it was important to get the ship's wreckage out of the body. They just
gave him a blank stare and said, "But the ship was *destroyed*." This
error got fixed in the first book, of course.
I don't recall the details of the miniaturization process in the first
book but I think Asimov wrote this one because he figured out how to do
it while only bending the laws of nature. The trick is to locally
reduce the value of Planck's constant...
JP
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| RE: .1
>Please correct me if I'm
>wrong but I think that in the first Fantastic Voyage, Asimov first
>consulted on the screenplay and then wrote the book.
A slight correction: Asimov was contracted to do the novelization
of FV, but had nothing to do with the screenplay other than that.
He notes (in the current issue of IAsfm) that it's a common
misconception caused by the book being released months before the
movie. Asimov has further thoughts on both FV I and II (books and
movies) in the current IAsfm.
Fred
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| Relocated from inadvertantly duplicated topic.
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Note 657.0 Asimov's Fantastic Voyage II 3 replies
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I finally picked up a copy of Fantastic Voyage II, now that it's
out in paperback. I never really considered Fantastic Voyage (I)
as real Asimov, but he claims FVII *is* real Asimov, so a paperback
investment didn't seem too unreasonable.
Anyway, it's not great Asimov, and it's got some humdinger technical
oversights. I'm about halfway through it so far.
The idea is that by suitably changing Planck's constant you can
arbitrarily change the size of an object without running into all
the classical objections. I've seen this idea before in Rudy Rucker's
The Master of Space and Time, a rather more whimsical variation
on this theme, and a more enjoyable read than FVII.
Well, as a side effect of the miniaturization process, the
miniaturized object gets a lot of energy pumped into it, and as
a consequence, deminiaturizing an object takes some time so as to
allow the energy to dissipate in a nondestructive manner.
So, I have to wonder, what happens as the energy content of the
object increases while its size decreases. The energy density
increases rather dramatically, and eventually must reach levels
that have relativistic consequences. Asimov just ignores (at least
so far) this issue.
Also, he discusses the change in power to weight ratio for muscles,
and then drops it even though he miniaturizes his protagonists to
the molecular scale. Since muscle strength is proportional to
area, but weight is proportinal to volume, and as linear dimension
is reduced the cube to square ratio means the power to weight ratio
increases linearly with miniaturization factor. So at molecular
scale, we ought to be seeing Superman-like effects, but we don't.
Anybody else read this one?
len.
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| I'm about 40% into it now. I had some objections to the "science" content, but
not nearly so much as I object to the character of the main character, Morrison.
He just doesn't seem real to me nor does he react to the events around him as I
believe any man of science would. Nonetheless, the story has got me interested.
I'm not much of a SF fan (yet) and of the authors I've read Clarke is my
favorite.
Dave
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