Oz? I believe the explanation is “A wizard did it”.
Also . . . for no reason ever explained, it appears that only Englishmen can do any magic of any kind. There is “English magic” and there is nothing else, no other country (and we see many others, including colonial Louisiana) has any or ever has had. (Napoleon tries to hire his own magician, but the one applicant mentioned turns out to be a fraud.)
In one of the later novels, I think it was Heretics of Dune, it is established that the sandworms are not native to Arrakis (where they came from and how they got to Arrakis is not clear), and that sandworms will turn any planet where they are introduced into a desert planet.
Well, yeah. But, you know, Oz. The idea that it should make sense makes no sense, I mean, it’s not even the Discworld, it’s written for children.
And the Earth was a big ball of ice for a few tens of millions of years at one point…
The Fairy Queen Lurline, to be more accurate.
Yeah, it’s bizarre because Dan Simmons looks like a Lefty, lives in a Lefty town, and held a number of Leftist opinions (and still does re: gun control, abortion, and other issues.) But the man just hates himself some Muslims…
OTOH, I like Atlas Shrugged. It’s the only apocalyptic novel I can think of where society falls apart because of a philosophical crisis. Of course, I’m helped in my assumption that all pieces of fiction takes place on Earth’s that looks like ours, but is not, so I don’t worry too much if people act implausibly or have crazy beliefs or give 60+ page-long speeches. 
Yeah, it won’t happen in our world but I’m not reading about our world.
Heh…I was just scrolling down to post that… 
What makes it even weirder is that he wasn’t always that way: his masterpiece, the Hyperion novels from the early 1990s, features a heroic Palestinian Muslim super-soldier as one of its central - and most compelling - characterd. If you asked me *then *what religion he hated , I certainly wouldn’t say Islam. The Catholic church, on the other hand…
I think 9/11 broke something in him.
There was a whole lot of that going around…
Simmons wrote a short story, published before Hyperion, about Flashback. It was set in an America beginning to seriously stumble because of the severity of the nation’s Flashback addiction and had the following things similar to the (much later) novel:
- Japanese bad guys
- Blaming the President
- The country crumbling under the debt load
Otoh, a few differences were:
- Nothing about Islam
- Reagan took the blunt of the blame, not Obama
So he has always had a thing about the national debt and Japanese ownership of American assets, even in the late 80s when such fears were in vogue. Looks like he never got rid of them and decided to expand the story to encompass full-blown xenophobia.
(I forgot to mention: In the book, all those 22 million Mexicans settled in the American SW (CA, AZ, NZ) and, in the course of the novel, they revolted, making Los Angeles part of a new Hispanic country. I don’t think the book concerned itself with the inevitable Japanese response, or that Dan even thought about the fact that, perhaps, the Japanese would be upset at losing the second largest city in the country.)
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra (in other words, the Star Trek world in which people talk only in metaphor). How do you ever develop spaceflight if you are forced to say “no, I mean’t the .85 millimeter calipers, not the .9 millimeter calipers” in the form of a metaphor? (etc etc etc)
Fantasy RPGs are terrible for this. In the worlds of Baldur’s Gate and Fable, free teleportation exists, yet is only used for adventurers saving on shoe leather: meanwhile trade is carried out by motley bands of pedlars carting their goods through the wilderness, prey to every ravening bugbear and oogy-boogy, and requiring nonstop help from lone ne’er-do-wells with swords. It hasn’t apparently occurred to any merchants that they could stick the stuff straight into in the teleports, all the brigands would starve and everybody else would get rich.
What standards are we using here? E.g., is something as silly-and-who-cares as Flash Gordon’s Mongo or John Carter’s Barsoom simply outside the discussion?
I’m surprised I’m the first to mention A Song of Ice and Fire - the winters last how long? The summers last how long? How does that… work in terms of growing stuff? How on earth are any of these people going to live through the winter? Even if there weren’t a war on?
I believe it’s mentioned in passing that one of the things you do is save up lots and lots of grain so that people will be able to survive multi-year winters. (Of course when there’s a war going on and lots of refugees are eating up your grain surpluses you’re kind of screwed… but in the general case it’s a question that has an answer.)
(It’s also unclear at this point whether a 5-year winter means 5-years-snowed-in or just 5 years of much lower crop yields.)
The planet in Pitch Black. So the sun only goes down every 20 years, but when it does there’s enormous winged creatures, that can’t exist in the light, that un-hibernate and wreak havoc. How did that animal evolve under those conditions?
“Tagord, in woodshop.”
For that matter, if you only speak in metaphor, how do you communicate the stories that form the metaphors in the first place?