Mad Biologist Carlo Artieri has an interesting post about the bad biology in recent monster movie Cloverfield. The biggest problem: "the monster violates the rules of rules of allometric scaling." Go read his post to find out what that means.
If that's not enough for you, Michael LaBarbera's Biology of B-Movie Monsters has a more detailed analysis of the biological problems with very big (and very small) creatures.
Tags:science fiction, biology
Monday, May 05, 2008
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It's too bad that the "fiction" piece of science fiction is not taken more literally. Does it really make a difference whether or not the monster meets our current theories of biology? Would Cloverfield be a better story if the monster were more real ?
ReplyDeleteI disagree with you that "fiction" necessarily means that the story elements don't have to be consistent with what we know about physics, biology and chemistry - science fiction that has plausible science is still literally "fiction".
ReplyDeleteWould a more "realistic" monster make Cloverfield a better story, though? Probably not. But would it be worse? Probably not either. So why not have a monster that could plausibly exist?
And I can't speak for Carlo, but the reason why I write about the biology in SF is that I find the topic interesting, not because I think that every story necessarily should be based on good science.