Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale/Quotes



"Do these people have no concept of scale, distance or time? And I'm talking about the assholes who wrote this script, not the Kilrathi."

- Spoony, the Wing Commander movie

"Right now, on your computer screen, are approximately 10,000 galaxies.

Each of those galaxies contains anywhere from ten million to one trillion stars.

The average star is roughly a million times the size of Earth.

And yet, with all that junk, the Universe is more than 90 percent empty space.

All of that, in this tiny photo. A photo that took 400 orbits and 800 exposures to take.

And the kicker? The photo covers one thirteen-millionth of the entire night sky."

- Cracked

"By way of summary, the 115,128 networked, civilized star systems of the 31st-century Milky-Way Galaxy (population: 10,283 trillion and four. No... wait. Five. Err... three. Crap. Hold still.) "

- Schlock Mercenary, April 15, 2002

"Space is not really big. Space is just something to be big in."

- Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

"Jonas: The actual answer is slightly more than one atomic mass unit. Slightly more than one atomic mass unit.

Emma: Wait a second! That's not even a real answer. "Slightly more?" That's... I gave-

Jonas: Well, that's all for this week!

Emma: Wait, I gave one sixteenth of a pound! "Slightly more" is vague!"

- Lonely Girl 15 episode "Emma's Choice", on the mass of a proton

"Space. It's huge. So huge, in fact, that if you'd lost your car keys in it, they would be almost impossible to find."

- Quark, Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack In Time (ironically, a major offender in department of distance)

"Anyway, fantasy cartography is a pet peeve of mine; i think most fantasy cartographers forget that peasants and armies on foot can't travel a hundred miles an hour."

- D.Archon, rpg.net

"Scale in Transformers is, not to put too fine a point on it, screwed."

- The first line of the Transformers Wiki's article on scale.

"Ayup. Yes indeedy. Yuup. N-nothing. Lots and lots of n-nothing!"

- One of random talk lines in Vega Strike (LIHW faction).

"We can't search this whole planet on foot!"

- Captain Kirk, "The Man Trap"

"“When we showed George Martin The Wall,” says lead designer Sylvain Sechi of introducing the books’ author to the giant, miles-long icy structure/metaphor that protects the land of Westeros from the wildlings (and worse) that lurk up north, “he says ‘that’s a very, very big wall.” Upon their explaining to him that they’d made it to scale according to his description, he replied that “I wrote it too big!”"

- Game of Thrones videogame lead designer Sylvain Sechi, as quoted in Rock Paper Shotgun