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’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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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”
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
If you haven’t read his books, Stephen Baxter has at least a couple of good explorations of long journey ships.
A tardis from Dr who. It’s a living spaceship + time machine.
It also has some insane features like:
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It’s bigger on the inside. In fact it has infinite rooms and storage.
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It also has access to all knowledge across time.
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It can instantly translate all languages telepathically. So everything you hear and see will automagically be in your language.
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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.
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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.
highly recommending this series as well. the ships soldiers are pretty interesting as well
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
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
A Translator appears in Ancillary Sword, and it’s pretty much “try to simulate a human” silly stuff for comic relief.
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.
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
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.
It’s so hard to choose just one. Relevan to OP’s post <spoiler>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.</spoiler>
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.
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.
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!
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.
