On Sat, 13 Apr 1996, Erin Mills version 2.5 wrote:

All right! 
    Apparently I didn't make myself clear enough. "Aftermath" IS a 
STORY! I am NOT writing a political epic on the stupidity of nuclear 
war! If my facts are screwed up, SO WHAT!

	If your facts are not accurate, then, in a sense, you've betrayed 
your readers.  A storyteller presents a world that, presumably, follows 
certain laws of continuity and reality.  You can define these rules as 
you like (RT certainly plays fast and loose with the strength and 
uniformity of gravitational fields), but there must be a reason for 
changing each one from the "default" real-world setting.
	Changing a law of nature for a reason is one thing.  Changing a 
law of nature because you did not bother to look up the real-world 
results is something else.  Terry Goodkind is guilty of this in his book 
_Wizard's First Rule_; apples and all things red are poisonous in the 
middle realm of his world because he needed a conflict between his two 
romantic leads.  It doesn't work.  His choice of natural laws seems ad hoc.
	What I'm getting at is that if there is a real-world explanation 
for why a character acted a certain way, or why an event happened the way 
it did, then the author has the responsibility to look up that reason.  
They need not become an expert, and in fact, the rationale need never be 
explicitly mentioned in the writing.  It must be there, though, somewhere 
in the background, or the author appears, well, lazy.
 ______
{B-{=__
rmckenzi@euclid.ucsd.edu : The White-Robed Mathematician