I’d love to hear about your favorite concept or idea you’ve read about or seen in scifi media.
My personal favorite is the Conjoiner Drive out of the Revelation Space series. These ship drives are dual drives on either side of a lighthugger and have a living being inside the drives to act as a supercomputer, which holds a wormhole open inside the drives. The wormhole links far in the past to the big-bang and uses the energy from the big-bang for propulsion.
In most scifi I’ve come across wormholes are used for FTL travel, and I thought this was such a unique and creative use of a wormhole it has stuck with me for years after reading about it.
So what are your favorite devices or ideas that have come out of scifi media?
I can’t remember what book it came from, maybe one of Peter F. Hamiltons, but portals was a thing. So naturally the superrich had houses where rooms were not on the same planet. The doors between the rooms looked normal, but was portals to the next room somewhere else.
Especially the toilet tickled me. That was situated on an open raft on a deserted ocean covered planet.
Martin Silenus’s house in Hyperion
You are thinking of Pandora’s Star
Hyperion, probably.
This is indeed Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Hamilton had really cool use of portals in the Salvation series, though. Among other things, they could:
- Make people travel (and indeed have distributed houses as well),
- Source of free energy by placing one end of the portal close to the sun,
- Solution for garbage by placing one end of the portal into outer space,
- Geoengineering, for example, by placing one end of the portal above the Australian desert, and feeding it icebergs from the other end.
My favourite use was a protagonist placing one end of a portal on Earth, and smuggling the other onto a penal colony to rescue a prisoner.
For me the wildest aspect of the Hyperion portals was that there was essentially only one portal. Hyperdimensional godlike artificial super-intelligences swept the portal across each doorway like some sort of cosmic lighthouse, mimicking the theory that there only exists a single electron in the universe that travels backwards and forwards in time to be every electron for everything everywhere all and once. Also, those articlfical intelligences shared their environs with other older beings referred to as “Lions and tigers and bears.”
I’m sure I’ve read this book, but I have no clue about the title, the author, or anything else in the plot :(
Great North Road, Peter F Hamilton I think. Also Hyperion by Dan Simmons.
I love the dying earth trope. Its earth, but millions if not billions of years after present day. I love thinking about what the humanity of today might leave to be discovered by whatever comes next. I think the first real exposure I had to it in media was that Artificial Intelligence movie from 2001. Its been around in fiction a lot longer, but that was the first time I really “got” it. Its so neat to me to think about how an alien (or a distantly removed human) might interpret the present day.
I love science and technology vs. the supernatural. I think it started with Ghostbusters when I was a kid.
Any time any movie or TV show attempts to battle the supernatural with technology I am glued to the screen. Anything from movies like Oculus where you try to confront an ancient evil with real-life modern tech to inverse movies like Event Horizon where oops…my future tech unleashed evil.
One thing that absolutely stuck with me as an idea was the plot premise of the short story The Road Not Taken by Harry Turtledove. In this story not only is FTL travel by gravity manipulation possible, but also very very easy to discover. It’s so easy that many aliens discovered it early on and then their progress on technology is basically halted. So humankind is a very advanced civilization because we never discovered FTL travel which led to our advanced technology. Then one day one of the “prehistoric” alien races try to conquer the earth and can’t grasp what they’re up against.
Spoilers ahoy! (yes, old series. Still.)
spoiler
This sounds like the opposite side of the coin explored in the Worldwar series, where the aliens have sublight drives and very ergonomic military equipment – but at a level where Earth WW2 kit is close enough to be dangerous.
There are several scenes where the aliens are crowing about how they’re going to give medieval knights a whuppin’, based on probe data they’d seen from like 1200 AD or so.
Then in a later book, humanity discovers FTL and shows up at the alien home planet with an embassy. The implication was that the alien empire wasn’t going to be quite so supreme after that…heh.
Anne Leckie’s Translators. Aliens so alien that the only way we can have any shred of common ground is by them taking a few humans and rebuilding them specifically to be their ambassadors, with interesting results.
Is this from Translation State? That’s what came up when I searched Anne leckie translators, but sounds like something I’d enjoy.
Have you read Embassytown? It has some funky linguistics going on that sounds like it might be up your alley
Translation State is a standalone book in her Imperial Radch universe, which includes the Ancillary Justice trilogy, which is a great series. I highly recommend it.
A Translator appears in Ancillary Sword, and it’s pretty much “try to simulate a human” silly stuff for comic relief.
It’s a theme that runs through the Ancillary series, and is further expounded on in Translation State. I like the latter, but the way she writes them in the series is something else, it’s an incredibly imaginative and funny piece of writing. I love those three books, I think they’re amongst the best sci-fi ever committed to paper.
I haven’t read it, but I will now I reckon, thanks for the recommendation
highly recommending this series as well. the ships soldiers are pretty interesting as well
Okay, but that human translator thing sounds like something similar to what we see in a single episode of Sliders when we are introduced to the Kromagg. Except the one human translator you see is still seen as an inferior being.
Would have been a cool plot point had they not completely dropped it in season 4.
It’s hard to describe if you haven’t read it without just spoiling the books, it’s a fantastic bit of writing, and very integral to the story
Just give me neon lights in the rain and I’m already happy.
piers anthony has a series called I think kirilian quest. There is no ftl and the law of physics as we know them can’t be circumvented (I think its been awhile but maybe its real difficult and rarely used). Anyway all civilizations eventually realize astral projection is possible and time and space make no difference. Thing is it takes two types of people to work. People with strong auras can project and people with weak auras can be possesed. Its not a requirement but more it will work better and last longer. Anyway people with the strongest auras get jobs traveling and people with the lowest get jobs as vessels. This is how communication between societies in an intergalactic culture communicate and interact.
Yea thats pretty cool definitely gonna check this out
just one word of warning he is more of a fantasy writer so the alien species are a bit fantastic. On the other hand they are not all humanoid. In fact quite the opposite. So sci fantasy but definately different.
One more warning, he’s a chauvinist pedophile
A universe/dimension where everything takes place inside a giant creature can be pretty fun one. The bloom in torment: tides of numenera is the example I recall but I’m sure there’s more.
my favorite trope that i dont see enough of in movies is realistic galactic travel and all the tech that would require… travel to another star system… usually multi-generational attempts. feels like there is a lot of this in books.
you often see a brief glimpse, or some hand waiving with hibernation techniques. not much feels real.
Chasm City has a pretty realistic take on generation ships.
ill take a look, thanks!
Oh yes, and the deep dark fear of people on the first ever flotilla that someone back home will build a second FTL capable one that would OVERPASS them before their destination and they would arrive to an already colonised world.
Fully agree, give me non-ftl space is really really fucking big scifi and I’m a happy camper
I have just finished Peter F. Hamilton’s latest excellent duology The Archimedes Engine and The Helium Sea and slower than light interstellar travel, and the time dilation that ensues, is a constant theme. There is some hand-wavy
magictechnology for speeding ships up to 99% of lightspeed (and slowing them down again) using massive gates, which means the main parts of the story are told over decades.
The issue with multigenerational stuff in movies is that you would need a new cast for each generation. Foundation series is for example very hard to adapt and they diverged from the books to make things more convenient by having the emperor clone himself and cryosleep. I think currently it’s very hard to get a series through that requires people to pay attention when they’re literally on their phones while watching.
Elite Dangerous’s Frame Shift Drive having both modes of operation with the standard Alcubierre drive which allows you to do FTL by contracting spacetime around your ship (hence frame shift) or near instant system travel by creating a wormhole to travel through.
The catch is that while supercruise has been around for a long time and works just as you expect, the wormhole hyperjump is new reverse engineered tech by captured Thargoid technology.
The drive uses mass to guide the ship to the destination, meaning it can only work by locking onto primary stars of a system. You can only make wormhole jumps between systems but must use supercruise to get to where you actually need within the system.
Also that mass affects its operation:
Being close to any mass will affect the FSD charge time. While being next to a heavier ship will merely make it charge slower, the FSD will get mass-locked should the ship be next to something extremely massive (station, asteroid field, etc.) and will be unable to charge at all.
I don’t play Elite anymore, but I’ve always really appreciated how elegant the FSD is and wanted more games to copy it. The physics of it just feels sensible. It explains away the lack of FTL ramming while simultaneously being a safety mechanic for the player. Looking at it as a pure game mechanic, it self-balances travel times so that distances many orders of magnitude apart are compressed together into a much more practical range.
My friend always complained that that jumping between systems is unnecessary. That you should just be able to to fire up your FSD and go between systems that way. I don’t know if this would be better, I think we all understand that the wormhole is just a loading screen that makes you wait longer than loading the actual system. I don’t play Elite anymore either, I did all 5 of the activities it offers lol.
I just did the math, and using the FSD presented in-game to travel from Sol to Alpha Centauri would take 20 real life hours, so I think it’s fine to say that, yes, FSD can technically be used for interstellar travel in lore, but it’s so impractical versus jumping that it might as well not exist.
Also, yeah, the game doesn’t offer a lot of variety. I only still want to pop in occasionally, because the immersiveness in VR is something special. It makes combat really fun and space trucking really cozy. Unfortunately, there’s not much else going for it. I just don’t get how all the faction war stuff is supposed to be appealing.
Well I think he meant that the ship should speed up a lot when you get clear of the system so it’s a lot quicker ;)
And yeah man same, the VR experience is incredible. The VR, the sound design, planets, docking, all so great. But almost everything else is just so garbage it’s embarrassing. I just wish they’d open up the game to modders to create some actual fun gameplay.
The thing is, I’d at least want the mathematical rule governing speed versus mass proximity to stay internally consistent, so bringing up the interstellar speed massively would mean bringing up the interplanetary speed massively too, and right now, I think the latter is already tuned pretty well.
Did you play with a HOTAS? I lined mine up to match the virtual positions, so the feeling of presence was insanely good. This is making me want to set that up again, which I should probably do anyway for an Index/Frame comparison.
And yeah, the lack of mod support is a shame.
Yeah they’d have to make up some lore, maybe make it so you have to fly away perpendicular to the other massive bodies in the system, or just plain increase the speed, maybe as it gets faster.
Dude not only did I play with a HOTAS, I bought a HOTAS and drilled it into a dinner tray along with a keyboard, trackball mouse, and USB hub so I could even type blindly. I got very good at flying inebriated :)
Haha, nice. I built a whole mount system too, but eventually got a simpler desk and clamp setup that worked just as well.
In Doctor who spin-off media there exists a voodoo time-travelling cult called faction paradox. They wear bones and skulls. To obtain these they find a species, hunt them, then go back in time and prevent that species from ever having existed in the first place
So they’re wearing the real bones of creatures who never evolved and never existed
That’s pretty cool
Ok that’s cool as shit, bleak as it may be
People permanently grafted into ships is pretty cool. That does come up a lot, doesn’t it?
Something like it comes up somewhere in Scalzi’s Old Mans War series. One of the later books, I think. That’s from aliens giving a human “brain in a jar” treatment, though – not sure if it quite counts as being grafted into the ship.
You know I’d say that’s pretty close. I forgot I should read those, somebody recommended that to me for liking Enders Game
I loved Ender’s Game when I read it as a kid. The followup trilogy was also intriguing, but I kind of lost interest during the 'Shadow series. Maybe around 2002?
Looking again now…wow, the author really expanded the setting! I had no idea he’d added even half this much.
In Christopher Paolini’s book To Sleep in a Sea of Stars there are people whose brains have been removed and installed as ship minds to augment ship functions. There’s some discussion about what it cost and whether it was worth it.
IIRC there was something like that in Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda. The FTL method in that series requires a sentient biological mind to navigate it. In “The Sum of Its Parts,” the crew encounters a race of artificial intelligence that has found a way around this problem…by simply taking the brains from sentient biological beings and basically using them as specialized processors for FTL calculations.
There were definitely a few other instances of that happening on accident but I think the conjoiner drives were the only ones that were on purpose.
Nah, Chronicles of Riddick has ship telepaths who live in pods. Battlestar Galactica has something similar. The video game Homeworld had galactic travel ships that were controlled by a human grafted to the computer, that turned out to he reversible and had lower stakes as time went on. That’s probably the closest thing because the ship controller is responsible for plotting hyperspace jumps by ripping holes in reality.
The navigators in Dune are almost like this but you can carry them offship in a giant fishtank. So not grafted but kind of non-ambulatory outside of spaceflight.
I guess the theme I latch on to here is people who trade their body and autonomy to gain interstellar flight and provide for others. Is it not the same with conjoiner drives?
My bad I thought you were talking about within the Revelation Space universe. Great examples of that trope in different media. Didn’t know that was a trope used in homeworld I didn’t pay much attention to the story when I played it ages ago
Warhammer 40k, more or less with cogitators and servitors - no automation is allowed after an AI uprising tens of thousands of years ago. All processing is done by lobotomized and heavily modified humans. Many of these cybernetics are built into ships.
Ork FTL ships are built around the brain of an ork ‘weirdboy’ or psyker (sometimes).
That’s RIGHT! I knew there would be something 40k related but I completely mind blanked the cogitators. Did the Mechanicus ever put one of those in charge of driving an entire ship?
I’m not too knowledgeable, but there are lots of edge cases. The machine spirits of the largest mechas (Titans) are known to have some autonomy and individual personalities, which is to say, they probably have some illicit AI or a less disabled human consciousness (-es) at their core.
Anne McCaffrey’s The Ship Who Sang has children with severe physical disabilities given new lives, bodies, and possibilities as ‘shell people’ - brains grafted into ships. An amazing new view on what it is to be human.
There’s lots of ship-who-something books written all or in part by Anne McCaffery, they’re all pretty good. I enjoyed City who Fought, also.
The wormhole network of the Nasqueron Dwellers in “The Algebraist.”
Niling d-sinks, from Peter F Hamilton’s Commonwealth novels.
The Planet Express ship from Futurama (it would take too much energy to move the ship at FTL, so it moves the universe instead.)
Planet express ship is cool and all but I think the finglonger takes the cake
The book writing technique of the D’ni from Myst. It was not magic, it was essentially math and virtual reality. It just was in hand written books you could enter by placing your hand on a window instead of walking into a big room like the holodecks of Star Trek.
Sounds interesting. Is this from the game Myst or is there another piece of scifi that goes by the same name?
The details of how the books work mostly comes from the book series, specifically The Book of Ti’Ana, which IIRC is the second book in a trilogy. I haven’t played more than the first one and a little bit of 3 tho. Always wanted to play Riven after reading the books, since they all take place right before the events of that game. But the book series and the games were written by the same people, so it’s all the same lore.
I forget which series it was from, but people could communicate long space diatances by whispering in a semiconscious telepathic beings ear and another being on the other end would speak the words.
Also the explanation of the inertia drive in the BattleField Eath book was interesting. Instead of a propulsion system the engine moved space coordinates of the matter in the engine and the engine/ship had to shunt forward to match the new position.
