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 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
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.
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
Just give me neon lights in the rain and I’m already happy.
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.
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:
The Five Galaxies are filled with alien races, all of whom were “uplifted” into sentience by another race through the use of directed breeding. As “payment” for being made sentient, the uplifted races are subservient to their uplifters for a period of time. All existing races have reached sentience through this process, and follow a common evolution in which the races become free of their uplifters, enter a period of independent power, and then fade and eventually disappear.
The arrival of a human ship at a populated star upsets the established races as humanity reached sentience on their own. This had been believed to be impossible, nothing of the sort is known in the eons-old galactic library. This leads to great arguments among the alien powers. Humanity begins to uplift other species on Earth, including chimpanzees and dolphins, but does not demand subservience.
sounds interesting !
but does not demand subserviencethat’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 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:
- 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.”
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.
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:
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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.
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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.
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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
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Good to know I’ll have to check the series out, thanks
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).
