Popular science fiction (movies, TV, books, etc.) often gets it wrong. This need not always be the case... and improving the science and technology can greatly increase the quality of the work. Just as most people would frown on a historical work that had President Lincoln calling General Grant on a telephone, or Roman centurians wearing wristwatches, many people rightly frown on science fiction that has obvious scientific flaws. Such is the mark of poor craftsmanship.
The President of A & E Engineering has performed some unofficial technical consulting on several science fiction projects, and has provided official assistance on one movie project. The movie (the screenplay was written by a well known author, and is apparently in the process of being shopped around for a studio to produce it) involved an alternate history in which the United States military produces a manned, armed suborbital spaceplane in 1944. In spite of the obvious difficulty that the technologists of the time would have had in producing such a thing, technical advise was given that allowed a realistic design to be produced, based upon somewhat similar real-world concepts produced by the US aviation industry just three years after the date of the story. Alternate concepts were produced which revealed different designs for the art director to choose from for aesthetics; but all retained the same basic sense of realism.
As well as the vehicle layout and internal design, information regarding the weapons system and the flight capabilities of the craft were also produced, and reportedly affected revisions of the script in a positive way. Also, historical research was performed that revealed not only serviceable, but aesthetically pleasing and impressive "space suits" were under test in the real world at the time of the story.
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If you have a science fiction program in development, whether book, movie, TV series, comic book or anything else, A & E Engineering can provide technical consulting at any level (answering a few questions to designing worlds, vehicles and technologies). We are aerospace engineers with our share of creativity and science fiction interest (okay, we're geeks).
