The asteroid heading for Earth
Well if the sip was travelling at huge speed and so was asteroid - why did they pass each other so slowly.
Also the asteroid looked large enough to be an extinction event.
I think in narratives this is called a stretch used to prolong a scene or event. Discourse time is faster than story time in this scenario. Discourse time and story time do not necessarily have the same time span passing by, nor do they have to have the same chronology. These things are often used in movies and TV shows, because they have to fit the whole story in about 90 minutes for most movies and 45 minutes for a normal episode.
Thanks for reply but I would say that in this example discourse time has been taken to its absolute limit.
In real time the whole event would have taken a tiny fraction of a second so the ratio between discourse time and real time would have been huge. Perhaps - as a ball park figure - a million to one. Something for the record books I feel.
Yeah, so, what?
You have books where something that happens during a couple of minutes going on through several chapters, extending dozens of pages.
In The Walking Dead, during 6 seasons only about 1,5 years went by. And season 7 will be within seconds after the season 6 finale. You find these stretches everywhere, for different reasons.
I would say in Starship Troopers it was for the effect and maybe trying to build up suspense, and for the viewers to know what might come.
Better just to leave it as a dramatic effect.
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