Oh my goodness, I didn't realize we had the same mother!
She can take SOME not-Earth books. For instance, she really loves a lot of the more classic fantasy like the Narnia Chronicles or LotR. Even the (first movie) Matrix.
Her main problem seems to be (beside having distaste for some the more farfetched concepts like tentacle-faced people, etc) that science fiction (and fantasy too) lends itself too easily to a deus ex machina intervention.
"They can just have a cop-out at the ending. - Oh, yeah, it turns out they're all allergic to water/the common cold/whatever."
I tried to tell her that - first of all, she needs to upgrade her science fiction examples since H.G. Wells, - but also, that it's NOT a cop-out to have something like that be in the end result if it was explained and laid out in the original rules set up as part of the 'verse created within the story.
Any more that "the butler did it" (or in modern movies - the chief of police/his old partner/etc) is a cop-out in a mystery if the evidence and motivation has been laid out there since the beginning.
I think it's mostly she has issues with the cheese factor of spaceships/time travel/blue skin or giant flying bison.
She can take SOME not-Earth books. For instance, she really loves a lot of the more classic fantasy like the Narnia Chronicles or LotR. Even the (first movie) Matrix.
Her main problem seems to be (beside having distaste for some the more farfetched concepts like tentacle-faced people, etc) that science fiction (and fantasy too) lends itself too easily to a deus ex machina intervention.
"They can just have a cop-out at the ending. - Oh, yeah, it turns out they're all allergic to water/the common cold/whatever."
I tried to tell her that - first of all, she needs to upgrade her science fiction examples since H.G. Wells, - but also, that it's NOT a cop-out to have something like that be in the end result if it was explained and laid out in the original rules set up as part of the 'verse created within the story.
Any more that "the butler did it" (or in modern movies - the chief of police/his old partner/etc) is a cop-out in a mystery if the evidence and motivation has been laid out there since the beginning.
I think it's mostly she has issues with the cheese factor of spaceships/time travel/blue skin or giant flying bison.
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