Hard Science at Work
By RazzaTazz 23 Comments
Batman and all Batman related titles span a number of different genres - suspense, espionage, martials arts, detective, action and advenure. One I think that a lot of Batman fans forget about though is science fiction. There are of course a few aspects of Batman which are specifically in the realm of what we generally call science fiction - mostly his villains Poison Ivy, Clayface and Killer Croc. However, there are really two kinds of science fiction, hard science fiction and soft science fiction. Soft science fiction is that science fiction with little actual ties to science. The most prominent examples would be Star Wars or Star Trek. In comics this is evident in a lot of places fromSuperman to Silver Surfer. The other kind of science fiction is hard science fiction, or fiction based on somewhat factual science which is still beyond our capacity. for instance Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea seemed fantastical when it was published, but now submarines can circumnavigate the globe without surfacing just as the Nautilus did. Hard science still leaves room for the unknown, for instance future technology which may become available. The space elevator which is a relatively common device in science fiction is theoretically possible, as are theoretically the clones dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. This is the realm where most of Batman science fiction resides, be it the batsuit, the state of the art batmobile, his inexplicable swing lines, pretty much the entire batcave or thousands of other devices he has at his disposal. In the book "The Science of Superheroes" the author describes just how hard the science in Batman is, so real is it that often siome of the devices he uses are only a few years ahead of their. It is still interesting to think though that whenever we are reading about the hero that most of us think is the most realistic, that in fact we are reading science fiction.
23 Comments