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Where did all the starships go?

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Re: Where did all the starships go?

#301

Post by Joeri »

colinb wrote: post #56
chmod775 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For literature: House of Suns* if you feel like strapping in for a wild ride with nevertheless believable physics. Leviathan Wakes/The Expanse if you're looking for a more "down to Earth" setting. Children of Time if you want an alien experience. Avoid reading summaries of any of these books beforehand. They're best enjoyed going in blind. I've heard "The Expanse" and "For All Mankind" are supposed to be good TV show…

Alas I think I've read/watched everything on your list. I'll try a useful echo response. I read the two big Arkady Martine books, and much of Ann Leckie's work. I thought they were all pretty good. Martine because the Aztec's in space genre is new to me, and she writes so well about people, Leckie because her galaxy spanning empire of genetically cloned god-kings and spaceships with transferrable personalities is cle…

Other book recommendations:

- valuable humans in transit by qntm

- the old axolotl by Jacek Dukaj (skip the tv show, it is very different from the book)

- the Agent Cormac series by Neal Asher

- the night’s dawn trilogy by peter f hamilton (his books are borderline fantasy, but he writes such deliciously monstrous villains)

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#302

Post by rudolftheone »

I say this as someone who loves SF and deeply mourns its decline: I think the genre painted itself into a corner by focusing too much on "Hard SF." In my view, an obsession with technology has often been a crutch for weaker storytelling. The genre works best when it serves as a pretext to examine the human condition—like Vonnegut or P.K. Dick did.

By betraying the ideals of humanist writing in favor of technical accuracy, SF has been cannibalized by genres that actually focus on the inner lives of individuals, such as the booming "romantasy" sector.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#303

Post by zozbot234 »

rudolftheone wrote: post #302

I say this as someone who loves SF and deeply mourns its decline: I think the genre painted itself into a corner by focusing too much on "Hard SF." In my view, an obsession with technology has often been a crutch for weaker storytelling. The genre works best when it serves as a pretext to examine the human condition—like Vonnegut or P.K. Dick did. By betraying the ideals of humanist writing in favor of technical accu…

"Hard SF" is the defining characteristic of the genre, though. Soft SF is just another name for fantasy/magical thinking. Which is fine on its own but not really what sci-fi is about.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#304

Post by NuclearPM »

delichon wrote: post #7

The starships left with the optimism. In the 50s there was a greater demand for stories with an unconstrained vision of the future where growth and expansion amount to flourishing. Later generations that lived in the excesses of growth saw it as the source of an intensifying dystopia. They stood athwart history and demanded decelleration. Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer. Escaping sidewa…

Athwart? These posts really bring out the try-hards.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#305

Post by adrian_b »

chasil wrote: post #247
int_19h wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Three Body Problem is not even close to hard science fiction.

Three Body Problem in the book set the alien world in Alpha Centari, which is not a three body system. Even a cursory analysis at the time of writing would have ruled out Alpha Centari. It was shockingly bad research.

Alpha Centauri is a triple star, even if it is not the kind of three body system depicted in that story (mainly because one of the 3 stars is much smaller than the other 2, so it orbits stably around them like a very big and distant planet).

While the triple star Alpha Centauri does not have mass ratios between its stars that are compatible with the story plot, I think that ignoring this technical detail is a much less serious plot hole than those of the majority of the non-fantastic Hollywood movies, which are supposed to happen in the real world, but they still contain a lot of impossible actions.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#306

Post by jacquesm »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #283
jacquesm wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hence eco-systems, yes. But that's probably a harder problem than radiation shielding + hibernation. You'd still need the radiation shielding but it would be far, far more of it (because non-local). These are interesting problems to think about, right now they are solidly SF but dragons are and always will be fantasy because physics says they can't exist in the way they are described. But you can't 100% rule out that…

> physics says they can't exist in the way they are described If we assume advanced genetic as well as bio engineering that admits the possibility of self reproducing cybernetic organisms that closely match many or all of the key characteristics. I'm not sure it's actually a cyborg if the lineage is fully independent without involving any technology external to the species but I use the term there because that's the…

No, then it still wouldn't work. Not until you use that other thing to get you to a planet where gravity is low enough that a dragon would be able to take off. The whole power-to-weight and wing-surface-area-to-weight ratio simply does not work. It (barely) works for bats though some of them can be of impressive size. The idea that something the size of a dragon can fly with that size wings on Terra is something that I do not believe is supported (hah!) by physics.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#307

Post by zozbot234 »

chasil wrote: post #15
delichon wrote: post #7

The starships left with the optimism. In the 50s there was a greater demand for stories with an unconstrained vision of the future where growth and expansion amount to flourishing. Later generations that lived in the excesses of growth saw it as the source of an intensifying dystopia. They stood athwart history and demanded decelleration. Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer. Escaping sidewa…

Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible, and the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology. Interstellar space is also hostile to life, and any life present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works that way). We also do…

The weird thing about this is that interstellar space ought to actually be very hospitable to cold, highly efficient computational substrates. (This is for standard thermodynamic reasons: reliable computation must be free of noise, and low-temperature means low noise.) So there might be 'life' of a sort in interstellar space that's extremely smart and naturally long-lived compared to humans or even ordinary room-temperature AIs, but just can't do all that much in the outside world (i.e. has very low agency), except very slowly and with exceptional effort.

(Of course, these same constraints apply in a relative sense to the outer regions of planetary systems.)

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#308

Post by hdgvhicv »

direwolf20 wrote: post #202
wolvoleo wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True but at that point objects travelling faster than sound had been demonstrated. It was just hard to engineer a manned plane that could do it. For example during WWII the V2 rockets travelled much faster than sound. They were just unmanned. Or more simple, bullets were supersonic for longer too. What I mean is, nobody thought the sound barrier was a hard limit we could never break.

Just specify an Alcubierre drive. Job done.

Massive implications from that

A magic unobtainium drive which works in a consistent way is fine, just call it “hyperspace” or whatever

There’s a difference between hard sci-fi and soft sci-fi, but they are both still sci-fi, you can tell optimistic stories of the future with a “battle drive”, as long as you keep it consistent. If the drive cancels relativity effects and allows travel at 5000c that’s fine. Just ensure you travel at 5000c, no hoping across the galaxy in a few days, but travelling to another star in a few days or even hours is fine.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#309

Post by hdgvhicv »

Frotag wrote: post #197
Dylan16807 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But if your setting or plot relies on something we know to be scientifically untrue, and you don't put some effort into explaining why it somehow works in your setting, it's fantasy and not speculative. Agreed but only because "some effort" could be as little as a single paragraph. > But detective stories don't work if your world isn't grounded in something real. Otherwise the reader can't reasonably build their ow…

> No need for "serious justification" unless you're trying to pull it out of nowhere halfway through the plot. If it's there from the start, there's no problem. Yeah I think most readers care more about consistency than realism. Being completely realistic makes consistency easy but a harder sell in terms of entertainment. Maybe one way to view consistency is modelling the story world as a network of criss-crossing ch…

Start trek transporters work because of a Heisenberg compensator. Great, no idea how it could possible work but it’s enough to know it does.

The typical poorly received uses aren’t when the cre beams down from orbit, or even when they can’t beam down, it’s when they de age people and retrieve their pattern from the buffer to cure an illness, and never do it again, or when they beam light years away for a throw away story element.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#310

Post by hdgvhicv »

bluescrn wrote: post #286
satvikpendem wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Visiting remote planets is as unlikely as riding a dragon No, because one is theoretically impossible while the other is theoretically possible.

Creating some sort of genetically-engineered dinosaur-derived ‘dragon’ may be more plausible than actually reaching another star system. It’s not going to breathe fire though.

Stomach full of natural gas or oil of some sort. Surely nature has examples of creatures that can produce a spark?
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