markrlondon wrote:
Who knows, maybe the author had a much, much better scifi-fan-satisfying explanation that I've simply forgotten.
One would hope so. I don't know about others, but I like having a bit of science in my science-fiction. Otherwise it's called fantasy. I can enjoy both, but genres are generally not interchangeable. Otherwise you end up with the last Indiana Jones movie, which as I understand it, people hated because they had come to expect supernatural elements from those movies, but got sci-fi instead in this particular installment. It's really hard to take genre and successfully turn it into the other.
markrlondon wrote:
That said, I seem to recall that the book was told from the perspective of its teenage protagonists and they may not have had access to any better explanation than what I remember. If so, that seems like an entirely plausible storyline to me.
I'll grant you that, but that sounds like a cop-out and lazy writing to me. Maybe people enjoy that sort of thing, but like I wrote - a sci-fi writer's gotta make some effort in giving a situation a plausible element, otherwise it's non-sense to me and I won't enjoy it.
