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“You’ve also got a character on the next page claiming that lasers are less effective in space, which is backward—air absorbs the laser, making it less effective in atmosphere than it would be in space.”
“This is perfect,” he said, typing. “This is exactly the stuff I need.”
Yeah, we’ll see, Esther thought, scanning her notes. She hadn’t even gotten to the big problems yet. “Okay, so, that whole part where they’re talking about crashing the ship into the asteroid to set off the nuke…”
He looked up, nodding.
“Yeah, that’s a no-go.”
His brows drew together. “It wouldn’t work?”
She shook her head. “In order to set off a nuclear chain reaction, the core needs to be compressed in a perfectly symmetrical implosion. The crash would smash the core to pieces, releasing a cloud of plutonium dust, but it wouldn’t cause a full-blown nuclear explosion like you want.”
He chewed on his lip. “Hmmmm.”
“Also,” she continued, “one warhead isn’t going to do what you need it to do. The most powerful thermonuclear device ever tested was fifty megatons—but to get an object as massive as your asteroid moving off course, you’d need something like a hundred million megatons. That’s just a ballpark, you understand. I haven’t done the actual math.”
He rubbed his knuckles over his chin, frowning. “So, you’re saying my asteroid is too big?”
“Little bit. The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs was only ten kilometers in diameter—that’s roughly the size of Mount Everest, with a mass of a trillion tons.”
“Okay…” He blew out a frustrated breath and grimaced. “So, I’ll make the asteroid smaller.”
Esther shook her head again. “Even at ten kilometers, you’re not going to be able to budge the thing out of orbit with one bomb. You’d need thousands of bombs. More than any single payload would be capable of delivering.”
His shoulders sagged as he closed his eyes, rubbing his temples. “Oh.”
“But there’s a much bigger problem with your story,” Esther said, bracing herself for the worst part.
He turned his head, giving her a wary look. “What?”
“You’ve basically written Armageddon.”
“I’ve never seen it.”
“Yeah, I can tell, because you’ve used the exact same premise. Piece of advice—if you’re going to write a genre movie, you should probably have at least a passing familiarity with the tentpole films of the genre.”
“I’ve seen the tentpole films of the genre,” he said, sounding defensive. “2001, Blade Runner…”
“But you didn’t write any of those movies, you wrote an asteroid movie. You need to be familiar with Armageddon.”
“But Armageddon is crap. It’s a stupid action movie in space.”
“Yes, it is,” she agreed, waiting for him to pick up on what she was saying.
She could tell the moment it sank in, because his whole face went hard. “Mine’s nothing like that. It’s a psychological thriller with a deep philosophical message at its core.”
“Yeah, the thing is,” Esther said slowly, “I’m not sure that’s actually a selling point. Like, at the beginning, it feels like you’re setting up a typical sci-fi disaster film—a fairly derivative one with the same premise as Armageddon and Deep Impact, by the way. But once the plot moves into space, it takes a sharp left turn into some kind of slasher flick. Then toward the end, all the action grinds to a halt, and you’ve got characters delivering ponderous monologues on the meaning of life. And that ending—what is that? I don’t even understand it.”
“It’s intentionally ambiguous,” he said, like that somehow made it good.
She tried to refrain from rolling her eyes, with only limited success. “It’s certainly that.”
“It’s a commentary on post-structuralism.”
“It’s unsatisfying. The whole thing is a mess, basically.”
He slammed his laptop closed. “You’re saying you hated it,” he said in a rigid voice, refusing to look at her.
