I recently saw the film Inception for the first time — I'm not sure why I didn't watch it when it came out, but I didn't. It's a great movie, and it helped me to understand a key difference between science fiction films and novels.
A perennial gripe about SF in movies is that films sacrifice science and plausibility for spectacle. That's true, and I think that's kind of the point. A film is, after all, a visual experience. Showing an amazing shot (like Inception's tilting and zero-gravity hotel, or a fight between people moving in different directions in time in Tenet) is the goal, and the script and storyboard are created to allow that.
Of course a novel can have amazing spectacles, too. Larry Niven's classic book Ringworld is full of marvels — a stellar flare turned into a weapon, teleport sidewalks, flying cities, a giant mountain with a secret at the top, moving planets, and of course the titular ring itself.
But Christopher Nolan, the director of Inception, has one huge advantage that Larry Niven doesn't. He can show you his amazing spectacles, right up there on the screen with Hans Zimmer music playing. Your brain accepts it as real, simply because your brain is accustomed to accept what you see as real.
Larry Niven can't do that. He has to use other methods to fool your brain into accepting his marvels. For a novelist one very effective tool of trickery is plausibility. In a novel you fool the reader's brain by making everything seem so real and scientifically possible that their disbelief gets suspended.
However, these tools work on different aspects of belief. Visuals get accepted right away ("seeing is believing"), but when the viewer leaves the theater there will be some discussion and nitpicking. "Why didn't they . . . ?" Getting the audience to accept written marvels may take more persuading, but the result is more permanent.
So I'm going to stick to my own conviction: that there's no reason to put these things in opposition. Good writing or good visuals are not antithetical to sound science and plausibility. You can have both, and you should. Imagine if Christopher Nolan's movies didn't have to include a character telling the protagonist (and the audience) "Don't think about it too much."
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