Competence erotica

[drdoug]

I saw the film of The Martian recently, and noticed that several reviewers called it competence porn. There's Apollo 13, too, which until The Martian came out is one of the few examples of a film with adventure and excitement but no bad guys. More recently, there's James May's The Reassembler, three short TV episodes of nothing more than James May

Comments

[hirez]

Hello. (Blame the splendid Mr. Ducker for me wandering in)

Roadkill and Hotrod Garage are for me competence erotica, because they're both real. That is if you like to watch people spanner noisy old US cars on the Youtube. They're the wierd opposite of, er, any car programme on the telly.

[resonant]

A Succession of Bad Days, by Graydon Saunders

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25635541-a-succession-of-bad-days

In a world with magic that can fail in very interesting ways, surviving sorcerers decide to train students methodically instead of letting them learn through trials-and-deadly-errors. Much better than my description makes it seem.

[resonant]

https://www.goodreads.com/series/43084-wiz

The Wiz series, by Rick Cook.

A computer programmer gets transported to a world where magic works. He figures out that it operates systemically and repeatably. Instead of people making spells from scratch after years of trial and error, he develops a compiler so anyone can write, compile, and execute a spell.

[resonant]

"The Cross-Time Engineer" series by Leo Frankowski is my guilty pleasure. I hate the protagonist, I hate the author, but like the series. I even bought the dreadfully unreadable ones published posthumously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_Stargard#The_Cross-Time_Engineer

An engineer gets thrown back to the year 1231, in Poland. He introduces steam engines, railroads, aircraft, factories, chemical weapons, standardized weights and measures, and so on.

[brixtonbrood]

It doesn't have the lovely sheen of plausibility that The Martian has, but Cold Comfort Farm brings aggressive competence and logic to DH Lawrence emotional territory.

The Day Of The Jackal (the book, because you get more detail) is good - both sides are at the top of their game.