Board Thread:The Last Sovereign Discussion/@comment-25941257-20170825174215/@comment-31763506-20170920021920

@Cyber:

Quick Quick Version we can agree on: "An apparently internally self-consistent fantasy universe can exist as long as you don't ask questions that didn't occur to the author."

I'd note though that not even works on the harder end of the Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness are immune to this sort of problem. One of my favorite books is Dune (duh!), and although it's overall in the soft sci-fi category bordering on actual fantasy, there are times where Frank Herbert clearly wasn't thinking his world building through in the most basic of mathematical ways. (This is not to say that Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson were better, just the opposite.)

Paul Atreides said (in "Dune Messiah"): Statistics: at a conservative estimate, I've killed sixty-one billion, sterlized ninety planets, completely demoralized five hundred others.

61 / 90 = ~0.678

61 / 590 = ~0.103

Population of Earth in billions in 1969 (date of publication of "Dune Messiah"):

3.6

So the average inhabited planet in the Duniverse has somewhere between 678 million (if all the stiffs lived on the "sterilized" planets) and a bit more than 200 million inhabitants (casualties distributed about evenly on average among all the planets attacked, assuming at least half the population survived on most planets), a tiny fraction of the population of Modern Earth, and less than its population in the Medieval eras.

This despite the fact that wasteland Arrakis has tens of millions of Fremen living on it in "Dune".