Favorite scifi concept?
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?
131 replies
I started reading a new series called The Captives War, same author as The Expanse. The book starts on a non-earth planet where humans have a seemingly similar level of science and tech as today. They discuss knowing that this planet is not their home world because they live along side another evolutionary tree but they do not know how they got there.
Its not really the main focus of the story so it hasn't really been explained yet, I only read the first book so far and the third of the trilogy is not yet released. Some fan theories think its a connection to the end of The Expanse book series, where spoiler spoiler the network of portals connecting 1000s of world's is destroyed stranding millions of people on 100s of worlds across the universe.
I just really like the concept of humans industrializing on an alien world and how they got there was simply lost to time. The fan theory is also partially why I like it but I'm sure it will have a different explanation.
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
I'm boring and I really like rotating megastructures. I think what I find fascinating is they're feasible for us to make IRL if we somehow figure out refining on the moon and mass drivers (ignoring the economics too lol) since they use conventional materials even for relatively large ones.
Everyone is always focused on terraforming or colonizing distant planets. A rotating habitat is engineered to be exactly what we need better than any planet we can colonize.
Life on Mars would be demonstrably worse. You need to bury your habs under meters of regolith to not kill your colonists from radiation. Going outside is a space walk with a laundry list of items you need to attend to with little to no time to enjoy being outdoors (you're in a suit regardless which means it sucks to some extent no matter what)
A rotating Hab means you can live much closer to how you live on Earth
Just give me neon lights in the rain and I'm already happy.
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:
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.
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.
N.K. Jemisin (mentioning her again here) did it really well in Fifth Season. Implied-to-be-future-Earth that is tectonically unstable, and constantly suffering from eruptions, earthquakes, and acid rain.
This reminded me of the Pern books from Anne McCaffrey. For the most part they seem to be in a medieval setting but the planet they are on was originally colonized before they lost their modern technology due to a natural disaster. One book was written about this colonization period. Most of the books are set centuries later. At some point they rediscover old ruins from the colonization and manage to reactivate an AI system.
A couple from from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series have always stood out to me:
The Infinite Improbability Drive is used to propel a spaceship by means of increasing improbability to infinity. It ramps up improbability at your departure point until you are literally everywhere at once since everything is possible, then ramps it back down leaving you at your destination. The offshoot being a whole lot of highly improbable other things happen in the vicinity.
The Total Perspective Vortex is a machine that upon entering gives one a perfect sense of perspective of the entirety of existence (which it derives from a piece of cake.) No one emerges sane. It was invented by a guy to get his wife to stop nagging him.
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
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
highly recommending this series as well. the ships soldiers are pretty interesting as well
The evolved species in Adrian Tchaikovsky's "children of time" series. So much thought and detail went into them and he's a fantastically descriptive storyteller. His command of language is superb.
I don't want to spoiler too much beyond that but it's easily my favourite series.
"We're going on an adventure"
Yes, especially the first book, thought that was excellent. Less so for me the third one, and I haven't read the fourth one yet.
Second book was the one for me but the first two were incredible. Third one definitely wasn't as good but I still take enjoyed it. The fourth is out and I have it but haven't started yet.
The Uplift Series is a gem. Copied directly from Wiki because it's succinct yet thorough:
sounds interesting !
that's the fictional part right there I guess :)
Besides the whole uplift concept, I've also liked the concept that the galactic civilization is really old - like hundreds of millions if not billions of years old. Some of the ships flying around are tens of millions of years old.
I have to say the second and third books, Startide Rising and The Uplift War, are some of my favorite sci-fi novels of all time. The first book is David Brin's first novel and it kind of shows. It's not a bad book, but it's a bit weak. The last three books are a trilogy and they start getting pretty weird and I didn't care for it as much. The second and third books are standalone so you can read them without the first book very easily. I actually had read the second and third books a few times before looking into it a bit more and realizing there was a first book.
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.
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.
ill take a look, thanks!
By way of warning, the generation ship isn't a major setting of the story, but it does come up.
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.
I think because once you break the seal on generation ships, that becomes the story. There’s so much required for humans to actually commit to that plan. It would shape everything, and you’d need to explain how they overcome certain problems.
You’d need to show what was worth the commitment to begin with - what’s the goal / where are they going and why? And you’d need to show how they selected crew for their fertility and genetic composition overall, probably not with a 1:1 female:male ratio. And you’d need to explain how they got people to commit to their children dying in space. And, once that generation was raised, how they kept it from revolting and turning the ship around to Earth so they could see the sky before they die. Would they raise them on lies? And how many generations of humans do they need to go through to reach the destination? How are they going to solve all the gravity, radiation, and thermodynamics problems? Whats going to fuel a ship for hundreds of years? And of course your book starts to have the Foundation problem of having multiple whole sets of characters in one book. I think that’s just challenging for any story, or at least you can see why I say it takes over and shapes the entire story.
There’s just so much to it that it takes over the narrative. So in your comment where you say you’d like to see more of it… do you mean more stories about this? Or you just sort of expect it to be in the background of more stories?
I guess it was kind of in the background for The Expanse, with the Navoo Mormon generational ship. Which in one fell religious stroke answers many of the questions in a believable way, including the male/female ratio and how anyone would be crazy enough to do it.
This is a bit of a general one, but I have a fondness for very large space structures. A number of my favorite scifi stories take the premise of "exploring a (usually abandoned or tech-regressed) alien megastructure".
Dyson spheres and ringworlds and stellar engines and the like are the obvious candidates, but honestly I like smaller (but still huge) ideas like oneill cylinder colonies just as much, because what I like in them is a function of both size and how close to understood physics they follow, and the latter tend to be easier to make plausible.
There's a certain sense of inspiration that comes of someone describing something almost incomprehensibly huge, explaining that it is designed by intelligent entities, and then justifying it with enough real science as to convince you that something at least somewhat like it really could exist, someday, or maybe already does somewhere out in the vastness of the universe.
I think my favorite megastructure is the shell world.
The idea is that you take a geologically "dead" world (no mantle movement / tectonic drift like earth) and start excavating a big underground space, with the aim of adding another 'level' to the world below the surface level (with periodic pillars to hold up the ceiling). The rock from that excavation could then be transported up to the surface to form another level above that (using nanotech assemblers or what have you). Rinse and repeat until you have a bunch of nested shells.
Each 'ceiling' could be covered in a light field that replicates the sky, including sunlight. The spaces would be large enough to have their own weather, so that wouldn't need to be faked. The levels would need to be actively cooled though. So the support pillars would need to have coolant tubes in them and the actual surface would need to be covered in radiators.
Now, imagine a structure like that which has broken down and fallen into disrepair. Some or all of those levels could be dark. A dead ecosystem and ruins of a civilization entombed in an artificial underworld. Or maybe the displays still work in a few places. A few isolated pools of light supporting the last plant life, which herds grazing animals have to migrate between periodically to avoid exhausting their food supply. And ambush predators evolved to wait in the dark until something gets close.
Im with you i love a good megastructure. I know the bobiverse books are a bit cheesy but I really enjoyed the oneill cylinder world that was the main focus of book 4 I think it was. Pushing Ice, Ringworld, and Rendezvous with Rama were all good as well. Got any other good superstructure stories I could get into?
You named virtually all of the ones I'd mention first lol. I guess I'd probably add "bowl of heaven" to that, I'm not sure it's design is the most plausible form for the concept really but it features a stellar engine (specifically, one using the star as a sort of rocket thruster, to move something like a ringworld around).
Megastructure Enioyer spotted.
Seeing the Beyond Coast space colony in Policenauts use the o'neill cylinder for its design was pretty cool. I think its the only time I have seen one in a video game, and pretty neat considering its age.
I really like sci fi settings where there is one major leap of physics that has ramifications across the rest of the setting.
Mass Effect is my prime example with the discovery of mass effect fields that allow the manipulation of how much mass things have. This is the basis for local interstellar travel after using a mass relay, as the mass of the ship is reduced for acceleration greater than the speed of light. Artificial gravity is created by increasing the mass of the floor. Guns work by electromagnetically accelerating bullets through a reduced mass field for greater acceleration, while shields work by emitting repulsive mass effect fields.
In The Expanse, the only technological breakthrough that doesn’t feel like a natural extension of modern technology is the Epstein Drive. The only thing it does is make propulsion engines fuel efficient enough that they can burn nonstop between destinations, which allows a ship to constantly accelerate to its destination instead of reaching a maximum velocity then floating the rest of the way there. It cuts down travel times between planets from months/years to weeks, and allows the society presented to exist.
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.
This is indeed Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Hamilton had really cool use of portals in the Salvation series, though. Among other things, they could:
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."
Hyperion, probably.
Martin Silenus's house in Hyperion
You are thinking of Pandora's Star
There are private wormholes in the Commonwealth Saga, but not individual rooms linked seamlessly by wormholes.
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.
Oh, I'm probably thinking of Hyperion! It's been a while since I read that.
Speaking of Alastair Reynolds, concept of Pattern Jugglers - benign algae-like pools that oscillate in strange image-like patterns and can physically connect, read, and modify human brains. A person entering the Pattern Juggler could experience someone else's life, temporarily gain skills or knowledge, or... die.
In Ursula LeGuin's Left Hand Of Darkness, I love the idea of society without war. There is still violence and murder, but fighting on someone else's behalf must be viewed as incredibly absurd and unacceptable.
Department Of Truth comics are based around the idea "what if what we believe becomes true?". So cryptids, UFOs, and conspiracies exist because enough people believe in them.
The depth and mechanics of Orogenes in N.K. Jemisin's Fifth Season / Broken Earth. It's not just "I cast frost", it's heat and energy manipulation, with sense, direction, and geometry.
To Be Hero X (2025) is an anime with a similar concept to department of truth and was done really well. Peoples Trust (and fear) in someone can grant people powers according to their followers faith/desires.
Big ups for Jemisen. Read the trilogy in 2023 and again in 2025 and I don't think I've met its match since (and not for lack of trying either).
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.
Riven is great, probably my favorite in the series. You should definitely play it as soon as you get the chance.
But I think you're a bit off the mark with descriptive books. It's not VR, it's a teleporter. When you write an Age in a book, you're not creating it, you're describing it. When the book is detailed enough, it opens a portal to an existing world that matches your description.
It's pretty explicitly based on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, with infinite worlds lying on The Great Tree of Possibilities.
This is reinforced by a few details:
You can't write contradictions into an Age. The book will try to link to a world that matches your description, but that world is going to be extremely unstable if it works at all.
Altering a descriptive book is very risky. You can write changes after you've been to an Age assuming you've never observed anything that would contradict the change(the idea being that the waveform of possibility is still a bit in flux concerning details not previously mentioned), but it's very difficult to pull off and you need to be really really good at writing books to not break something.
It's generally a bad idea to try to write technology into an Age. Yeah infinite worlds, but artificial features are so specific you have difficulty finding a good match
Good to know I'll have to check the series out, thanks
My current favorite topic is the idea of a world ark, a self-contained world adrift in space containing the remnants of life from a doomed world, and the inhabitants aren't aware of it. Intetestingly it has been featured in two different games: SOMA and Genshin Impact. I'm currently working on a TTRPG campaign within such a world.
I've been thinking of an idea like this for a while. A bubble of stars and planets preserved from a dying universe, either doomed to drift the void for eternity or perhaps lucky enough to stumble into a new existence. Either way, I imagine people on worlds with a countable number of stars in the sky. Think of it as almost the same as a world arc, but on a local cluster scale instead of planetary.
I don’t know if this is the same or at least similar, but I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of a generation starship that is moving toward the universe either toward another planet, in search of another planet, or simply as an indefinitely mobile home. It’s wild to imagine generations being born and living on the starship without having any real understanding of the place that humans came from. Stories of Earth would start to seem like wild folklore and mythology rather than actual human history.
Eventually, some generations may become angry that the decision to live on this starship was made by other people many generations before them, and now everyone on the starship is cursed to live under that decision. Was the starship navigation designed so that people may one day change the course? Or perhaps enormous safeguards were put into place to ensure that the ship kept going toward the initial objective because all other options were decidedly much much worse for everyone.
If you haven't read his books, Stephen Baxter has at least a couple of good explorations of long journey ships.
In Genshin Impact, it's not known by the vast population that the planet they're on isn't a normal world. But it's expansive enough that I think most people wouldn't have much opinion either way. It would be like telling you that you're trapped on a chunk of rock suspended in space. Well, yeah and?
You might be interested in browsing through this site:
https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/
It talks about a lot of sci fi tropes from a hard science perspective, and goes over FTL specifically:
https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fasterlight.php
It's kind of a downer site in some respects because it does a lot of "here's why your favorite sci fi series is unrealistic", but in that discussion there's a lot of looking at interesting tropes and concepts. There's also a good explainer for FTL specifically here:
https://www.physicsmatt.com/blog/2016/8/25/why-ftl-implies-time-travel
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 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. :::
A tardis from Dr who. It's a living spaceship + time machine.
It also has some insane features like:
It's bigger on the inside. In fact it has infinite rooms and storage.
It also has access to all knowledge across time.
It can instantly translate all languages telepathically. So everything you hear and see will automagically be in your language.
It can take any form physically. On both the inside and outside. It has a chameleon circuit which makes it blend perfectly into the surroundings.
It's said that it's destiny to be chosen by a tardis. It reads your thoughts and takes you where you want to go or where you are needed.
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
I love the idea of the Niling d-sinks. With enough time, an individual can amass a nuclear bomb's worth of energy off of a simple low power source like a geothermal generator or solar array.
So many original ideas in Hamilton's work, I too liked Niling D-sinks.
Since I read Stranger in a Strange Land long ago. I keep coming back to the idea of an indoor lawn.
It's an idea that seems fairly complicated when you get into the details, but also there's no real reason it can't be done.
I was a building engineer for years and this sounds like an absolute nightmare, but it would definitely be super cool.
I love that, of all the out-there ideas in Stranger in a Strange Land, that's the one that sticks with you. Honestly, I think you're right to favor it! 😄
I like the idea of Fair Witnesses: people who were trained to impartially observe in order to give reliable testimony.
It's so hard to choose just one. Relevan to OP's post is a part of Revelation Space where someone is pushed into a long elevatr shaft on a lighthugger, and she uses the Conjoiner engines to stop her fall relative to the ship, and ends up beating her assailant to death with the floor and ceiling as she adjusted the ship speed back and forth at 10g.
In Adrian Taichovsky's "Alien Clay", there is a planet inhabited by symbionts. Everything is symbiotic with everything else. You'll have a creature, but it's made up of a critter that can digest food, a critter that can see, a critter that can move, a critter that can defend itself, etc.
Neal Asher's "Polity" books depict a future where AI has taken over, and it's a good thing, because humans are such murderous evil dipshits.
"A World Out Of Time" had a guy who was frozen, woke up in the future, was forced into becoming a bussard ramjet pilot, and his attempt to get away from this situation landed him in another, weirder situation. There was a weapon mentioned in this book that would make you wish for death. "If you lie to me, you will take your own life. When I let you."
The Well World, divided up into hexagons, each hex having an entirely different climate, ecology, and technological rules.
"A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge had a space faring civilization that didnt use hours, minutes, years, etc. Everything was seconds. Centiseconds, kiloseconds, megaseconds. It made sense for these people who were always in space, always on ships.
Another thing I like is all the various propulsion methods that different authors come up with. Conjoiner engines, is just one example. Niven wrote about a type of hyperspace that moves at exactly one speed, (Or another, faster speed) and looking outside the ship will drive you mad. Alderson drives work instantly, but you have to be in exactly the right spot for it to work. The rest of the time you're stuck with fusion rockets accelerating as fast as the humans on board can stand.
Effing Neal Asher. The Polity books are just "The Culture is too woke, so I made the libertarian version and my bad guys are cardboard cutouts of conservative stereotypes of liberals and anarchists lol."
I fuckin' can't stand that guy.
I noticed that sort of thing appearing in his later novels.
I love Neal Ashers space operas and almost never see anyone else mention them! So nice to see this!
Wormholes always kinda rubbed me wrong in sci-fi. They're always depicted in a way that screams fantasy, not science, with only one exception that comes to mind, which was Interstellar's depiction of a wormhole as a sphere, even taking the time to explain why it looks that way.
The only got it half right though, since as soon as they enter the sphere it's straight back to the fantasy BS with the blue tunnel. That scene could have been a really cool transition of entering the one 'side' of the sphere while exiting the other simultaneously. Cut from the crew's perspective seeing lens-like distortion of the stars, to an external view of the ship moving into the sphere.
I kinda feel like that's how they intended to do that scene, with the whole buildup about the sphere, but decided to throw a nod to oldschool science fantasy for some reason.
Oh well. They got it half right, and that half was pretty fucking sick - it was the first presentation of a wormhole that didn't instantly yoink me out of suspension of disbelief. Until the blue tunnel ofc, at which point, yoink.
To answer OP's question, I guess for me it's less a specific concept as it is presenting something possible only in theory in a believable way. The whole lens-distortion style transition would have been way less flashy, but less can be more.
I've always thought of scifi being very adjacent to fantasy.
Dune, star wars are basically fantasy stories packaged with scifi elements.
I've always wondered what makes a SciFi story SciFi and I've come to the conclusion that for it to be SciFi it must be an exploration of how technology effects the human condition.
What do you think?
Definitely adjacent. The distinction as I understand it basically boils down whether or not there's magic.
Like Star Wars has a lot of sci fi elements, but then space wizards who use 'the force' which is just space magic. Fantasy.
Dune I'm less familiar with - never read the books. Saw the first movie but was kinda distracted and never have it my full attention. Main character definitely showed some magic super power stuff, but idr much outside of that.
Most of them kinda toggle back and forth, like Interstellar is mostly sci-fi with a sprinkling of fantasy up until the black hole scene, then it's mostly fantasy with a sprinkling of science.
Or there's Star Trek, which of mostly grounded in actual science and theory, but it's got a sprinkle of space magic here and there too.
Not many purebreds.
Yeah, there's certainly a degree to how SciFi something is.
But you could remove their scifi elements and tell star wars and Dune as fantasy stories and you wouldn't loose too much substance. I'd call them science fantasy at best.
But star trek, though it has magic, relies heavily on the SciFi concepts to tell a story. I'd consider it SciFi through and through.
Now this has me thinking about the wormholes in Stargate. I never quite understood why the wormhole had a shakey "going down a waterslide at a theme park, but in space" vibe.
Because it looks cool
It's round. It has to spin!
The General says it has to spin!
People permanently grafted into ships is pretty cool. That does come up a lot, doesn't 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Titan
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
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.
I don’t recall which book. But there was one with truth in advertising laws. I feel like it was Larry Niven. Anyway, the laws were the result of improved sucsess rates for organ transplants. It's really only a side point, but I loved how they were connected.
Okay, absolutely not realistic, but one of my favorites is XANA and Lyoko from Code Lyoko. XANA an AI contained in a nuclear powered supercomputer and is evil. Lyoko is a virtual world within the computer and the only way to stop it. Basically, a group of students at a nearby school have to head over to an abandoned factory where the supercomputer is located and go virtualize themselves into the digital world in order to guide someone who can stop XANA attacks.
XANA is a pretty unrealistic AI villain since it can take control of non-electronic things, control gasses, and even control living creatures. It's a deadly menace that in one episode turned lamp posts into antigravity devices. That kind of unrealistic, yet terrifying AI villain because of just how dangerous it is.
Always fun to come up with horrifying ways that XANA could destroy the world if the main characters ever failed. Or if it was real.
Peak French anime.
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
One more warning, he's a chauvinist pedophile
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.
I cant pick just one but since you mentioned Conjoiner drives (rev space is my all time favorite series) I would say that the cryoarithmetic engine is super crazy. They popped up in Star Sector as well, I'm guessing as one of the many SF references in that game. If you like good SF games that have a ton of depth, check Star Sector out. You can purchase it from the website directly, it doesnt mess around with third party bs or drm software or anything.
I think my favourite is just when they play with the unknowable. Things so different from humans they operate on different principles and see the world differently.
Sure you see this in fantasy and horror a lot with like the house in House of Leaves or Cthulhu but I'm also thinking the TechnoCore and Shrike in Hyperion, maud'dib in Dune, or the black stuff in the Expanse series. I just like alien stuff that's, well, alien
In my own made up worlds I often imagine FTL works by moving between the 2nd and 3rd dimensions. 3D is “flattened” in such a way that point A (where you start) and point B (where you want to be) are at the same point of the now 2D universe. During the transition back to 3D, points A and B go back to their original positions, but you are now at point B.
Mine would be "The RiverWorld" novels by Philip José Farmer...
In Michael Crichton's Timeline, they send people back in time hundreds of years until they push a button to return, except they don't. The time travel has something to do with alternate timelines, so in theory there could be countless versions of them travelling back and forth in alternate universes or alternate realities or however you want to think of it.
The invention of time travel in our universe only got as far as figuring out how to send people back, but they never figured out how to return them to the present. Coincidentally a virtually identical alternate universe figured it out but they get sent to our universe on the way back to the present.
So every time we send someone back, we essentially kill them and in return we receive an alternate version of them that's so close to identical it's virtually the same as the original person. And for every person we get back, another universe loses that person forever. The organisation doing the time travel secretly know this is happening, but it works and it's cheaper then finishing the invention of time travel.
Starship 3000
As I remember it, it was a terribly written book about a colony on the moon with a water ocean, and an asteroid hollowed out to be a seed ship to travel the stars and colonize planets.
The first half of the book was the colony on the moon part, and it went into the physics of an ocean with very low gravity, and how massive the waves get as a result. That part was cool.
And the asteroid seed ship was also very cool, it was described as being an entire ecosystem with hundreds of square miles of earth-like terrain, with small towns sprinkled all over the place.
But the writing was so hard to follow. It was all abstract, pronouns and names were hardly used enough to keep track of what was being talked about. Reviews for the book follow a similar pattern.
I've had a mind to make game about the asteroid seed ship because I feel like the concept hasn't been done justice.
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.
There was that kids movie, recently I don't know if I should spoil it but I liked it.
I'm a big fan of Adrian Tchaikovsky's work, but one concept of his that I am fascinated by comes from his book "Alien Clay":
::: spoiler Spoilers below On the planet the protagonist finds himself on, life has evolved to be fundamentally symbiotic to an absurd degree. Essentially, individual organisms specialize in something... say... jumping. And then they offer their services to whatever macro community comes along. So "creatures" are just communities of individual, highly specialized members who are essentially all free agents. Just wild. :::
Not gonna read the spoiler because I already have it on my list to read, but I really enjoyed the children series. Excited to get to Alien Clay now
I can't believe how prolific that guy is. He puts out like 3 novels per year, and the vast majority of them are absolute bangers. Just finished book 4 in the Children series the other day, and it blew me away.
Nice didn't know a 4th was released
Yup! Just a couple months ago.
Yours sounds somewhat like Foundation series has their intergalactic travel. At least in part.
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.
the various forms of FTL, including dimensional teleportation. hyperspace seems quite common between 3 scifi universes. wormhole drives. the most unique seems to be doctors who tardis which uses a form time travel/ftl. that doesnt violate the C velocity, its a way to explain away/bypass, unlike warp drive.
favorite in trek is the vortex drive(xindi,spherebuilders) is similar to transwarp of voth and borg(voth seems to have a more advanced version than the borg since they can cloak at high warp/transwarp which most species can use both tech at the same time, the borg needs a subspace field for thier transwarp and coils), and slipstream of aucturs species.
other unusual ones is the caretakers intergalatic ftl, which uses thier array to produce a wave of energy that makes them pass through a rift, or subspace so almost instantaneous travel.
asgard seems to have the fastest hyperdrives out there unassisted with zpms(although they use massive generators), not even the deadalus class, or even the zpm powered odessey is that fast.