Competence erotica
I saw the film of The Martian recently, and noticed that several reviewers called it competence porn. There's Apollo 13, too, which until The Martian came out is one of the few examples of a film with adventure and excitement but no bad guys. More recently, there's James May's The Reassembler, three short TV episodes of nothing more than James May putting disassembled things back together (a petrol-engined lawnmower, a 1950s phone, an electric guitar) in his shed. And I saw this morning that Elon Musk's SpaceX team have successfully landed the main stage of a reusable Falcon 9 rocket on a floating platform in the middle of the ocean, after it had successfully launched a package off to the International Space Station.
I'm not sure my conception of what I love about all those things is "competence porn" in quite the way other commentators use it. They seem to tie it in with Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch incarnation, but also Conan Doyle's), and say it's about people doing amazing feats that we ordinary mortals could not possibly do.
That's a big difference, for me. I like this stuff precisely because I can imagine myself doing it - at least, the best, most competent sort of myself. Sure, I totally couldn't land a used rocket on a floating platform in the middle of the ocean. But even Elon Musk can't do that on his own. I certainly could contribute usefully to a large team who did it. And while James May is clearly way more competent with physical machinery than I am (especially things with engines), I would guess I'd be just as good as him at reassembling an electric guitar, and I think I might even be better at soldering than he is, and am almost certainly better at electronic/programmy stuff. Similarly, I would struggle to do all of what Mark Watney does on Mars, but I certainly could do many bits of it, and could be a useful contributor to the rescue efforts.
(One of the rare bits that frustrated me about the film was where a lone guy at JPL comes up with the idea of sending the Ares III slingshotting round the Earth to get it back to Mars to rescue Mark Watney. I would bet that at least half of the people involved at NASA would think to consider that as a possibility. Especially given that a similar trick was part of how the Apollo 13 astronauts were saved. And yes, the calculations to be certain of its trajectory are difficult - but again, loads of people at NASA would think to and be able to knock it up in Kerbal Space Program to get a rough idea of whether it was feasible or not. Also, I am not at all sure the calculations would take anything like as much computational power as implied in the film. Anyway.)
I love Sherlock Holmes. But in (almost?) all his incarnations, he's really a fraud, an impossible fiction. The story - and Holmes himself - claims to be all about rationality, deduction, logic. But if you look carefully, it is the most over-the-top romantic wish-fulfilment fiction going. Later detective fiction sometimes tried to work with "fair play" rules, such that the reader could conceivably deduce the answer from the information given. Perhaps the apotheosis of this tendency is in Have His Carcase, where Dorothy L. Sayers has Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey go step-by-step through cracking a Playfair cipher. But Conan Doyle - and Moffat & Gatiss - fly entirely free of such constraints. The explanations and rationales are hand-wavy, tech-the-tech post-hoc rationales for the satisfying emotional narrative structure. You are not expected to understand this, just admire the awesomeness. Much if not most science fiction is very much in this vein. As I said, I love it very much (at least, some of it), but it is very much not same the thing that I like about the competence stuff above.
Take two examples. First example: Holmes sometimes deduces critical facts from the precise colour and texture of the mud on someone's footwear. There is no way the reader can reproduce or even follow his reasoning. He knows stuff that you cannot know. And, in fact, can't be known. Mud really isn't that distinctive in real life. You might get somewhere with serious modern analytical chemistry, but my guess is that within-location variability in composition would be too high to make it work. Second example: Mark Watney is short of water on Mars. So he makes it by decomposing hydrazine from the rocket in to nitrogen and hydrogen over a catalyst, and then burning the hydrogen in air (oxygen). These are all real chemical reactions that you can probably do yourself if you're careful. Very careful, come to think of it. I really wouldn't recommend it - Watney nearly blows himself up in the film, and I suspect the process is way more hazardous than the film suggests. Hydrazine is energetic stuff - it is literally rocket fuel - and ISTR it's pretty poisonous too. Burning hydrogen is also not something for the faint of heart. But it's all real science.
In the first example, Holmes is brilliant in ways that you are not and cannot be. In the second example, Watney is brilliant in a way you could be if you knew more chemistry. Both are fun, but only the latter is something you can learn from.
So, to differentiate it, I'm going to declare the stuff I'm talking about here to be competence erotica. In practice, "erotica" often means "porn I like", or sometimes "porn I disapprove of less". To be clear, I don't disapprove of the magic-rational stuff: I love it. But it's not about competence, it's about magic. I also have a passion for competence erotica, where I can imagine myself - my aspirational, most competent self - in to the situation, and humans do astonishing things by thinking clearly and doing stuff well. I don't have to suspend my disbelief and ignore what I know already. In fact, the more I can connect it to what I know already, the more I'll learn.
My rules for competence erotica: It has to make rational sense and be comprehensible. Ideally, it's real-world stuff, but near-future hard sf is also Ok. The people involved should be very competent at what they do, but not superhumanly so. Unexpected challenges and setbacks are fine; deux ex machina resolutions are not. At no point should the audience be moved to shout "why don't you just [do the obvious thing]?!". Technical detail and complexity is good, but only if it is true. It's Ok for some things to go over the head of an average reader or viewer, but it's not Ok for them to make no sense to an expert.
Are there any other good examples of competence erotica?
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/316218.html, where there are
comment(s) not shown here.
I'm not sure my conception of what I love about all those things is "competence porn" in quite the way other commentators use it. They seem to tie it in with Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch incarnation, but also Conan Doyle's), and say it's about people doing amazing feats that we ordinary mortals could not possibly do.
That's a big difference, for me. I like this stuff precisely because I can imagine myself doing it - at least, the best, most competent sort of myself. Sure, I totally couldn't land a used rocket on a floating platform in the middle of the ocean. But even Elon Musk can't do that on his own. I certainly could contribute usefully to a large team who did it. And while James May is clearly way more competent with physical machinery than I am (especially things with engines), I would guess I'd be just as good as him at reassembling an electric guitar, and I think I might even be better at soldering than he is, and am almost certainly better at electronic/programmy stuff. Similarly, I would struggle to do all of what Mark Watney does on Mars, but I certainly could do many bits of it, and could be a useful contributor to the rescue efforts.
(One of the rare bits that frustrated me about the film was where a lone guy at JPL comes up with the idea of sending the Ares III slingshotting round the Earth to get it back to Mars to rescue Mark Watney. I would bet that at least half of the people involved at NASA would think to consider that as a possibility. Especially given that a similar trick was part of how the Apollo 13 astronauts were saved. And yes, the calculations to be certain of its trajectory are difficult - but again, loads of people at NASA would think to and be able to knock it up in Kerbal Space Program to get a rough idea of whether it was feasible or not. Also, I am not at all sure the calculations would take anything like as much computational power as implied in the film. Anyway.)
I love Sherlock Holmes. But in (almost?) all his incarnations, he's really a fraud, an impossible fiction. The story - and Holmes himself - claims to be all about rationality, deduction, logic. But if you look carefully, it is the most over-the-top romantic wish-fulfilment fiction going. Later detective fiction sometimes tried to work with "fair play" rules, such that the reader could conceivably deduce the answer from the information given. Perhaps the apotheosis of this tendency is in Have His Carcase, where Dorothy L. Sayers has Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey go step-by-step through cracking a Playfair cipher. But Conan Doyle - and Moffat & Gatiss - fly entirely free of such constraints. The explanations and rationales are hand-wavy, tech-the-tech post-hoc rationales for the satisfying emotional narrative structure. You are not expected to understand this, just admire the awesomeness. Much if not most science fiction is very much in this vein. As I said, I love it very much (at least, some of it), but it is very much not same the thing that I like about the competence stuff above.
Take two examples. First example: Holmes sometimes deduces critical facts from the precise colour and texture of the mud on someone's footwear. There is no way the reader can reproduce or even follow his reasoning. He knows stuff that you cannot know. And, in fact, can't be known. Mud really isn't that distinctive in real life. You might get somewhere with serious modern analytical chemistry, but my guess is that within-location variability in composition would be too high to make it work. Second example: Mark Watney is short of water on Mars. So he makes it by decomposing hydrazine from the rocket in to nitrogen and hydrogen over a catalyst, and then burning the hydrogen in air (oxygen). These are all real chemical reactions that you can probably do yourself if you're careful. Very careful, come to think of it. I really wouldn't recommend it - Watney nearly blows himself up in the film, and I suspect the process is way more hazardous than the film suggests. Hydrazine is energetic stuff - it is literally rocket fuel - and ISTR it's pretty poisonous too. Burning hydrogen is also not something for the faint of heart. But it's all real science.
In the first example, Holmes is brilliant in ways that you are not and cannot be. In the second example, Watney is brilliant in a way you could be if you knew more chemistry. Both are fun, but only the latter is something you can learn from.
So, to differentiate it, I'm going to declare the stuff I'm talking about here to be competence erotica. In practice, "erotica" often means "porn I like", or sometimes "porn I disapprove of less". To be clear, I don't disapprove of the magic-rational stuff: I love it. But it's not about competence, it's about magic. I also have a passion for competence erotica, where I can imagine myself - my aspirational, most competent self - in to the situation, and humans do astonishing things by thinking clearly and doing stuff well. I don't have to suspend my disbelief and ignore what I know already. In fact, the more I can connect it to what I know already, the more I'll learn.
My rules for competence erotica: It has to make rational sense and be comprehensible. Ideally, it's real-world stuff, but near-future hard sf is also Ok. The people involved should be very competent at what they do, but not superhumanly so. Unexpected challenges and setbacks are fine; deux ex machina resolutions are not. At no point should the audience be moved to shout "why don't you just [do the obvious thing]?!". Technical detail and complexity is good, but only if it is true. It's Ok for some things to go over the head of an average reader or viewer, but it's not Ok for them to make no sense to an expert.
Are there any other good examples of competence erotica?
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/316218.html, where there are
comment(s) not shown here.