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Your favorite science fiction/speculative fiction concepts?

M

More_Badass

Member
Seeing the new details on the next sci-fi CRPG from the developers of Age of Decadence got me thinking about how fascinating the concept of generation ships are. There aren't many in films - Snowpiercer is an earth-based version, and Pandorum tackles the "evolved to suit the environment" idea - but the general idea is just so cool and ripe for different angles. Just thinking about the logistics of such a ship, the kind of culture and society that might emerge after several generations who only know life on the ship. Look at the common post apocalypse trope where people born after the end are amazed by everyday stuff, like Ellie being incredulous about ice cream trucks in The Last of Us; life of a generation ship would be that taken to a whole new level

Altered Carbon's "sleeves" are really cool too. It's a concept done often in other works, but exploring the darker, seedier ways such a technology could be used for, rather than a more optimistic view, made for some compelling world-building.
 
E

EdibleKnife

Member
I really like the idea of generation/colony ships too. Entire city or even state sized populations of people having to cope in a tight supportive community as they drift through the expanse looking for a new home. Living, loving, and dying on such a journey always struck me as equal parts romantic and tragic.
 
T

Tuorom

Neo Member
I really enjoyed the time relativity in the book The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. The guy goes on military tours to distant planets using light speed travel (I think), and every time he comes back from a tour Earth has changed by like centuries.

Also liked it in Interstellar when they go to the water planet and come back, and the dudes like it has been 23 years. Pretty crazy concept to imagine, and that's why I like it.
 
KonradLaw

KonradLaw

Member
I like ancient alien things, like Monolith from 2001. Ie..things that are so old and alien they're impossible for humanity to ever truly comprehend and should be aproeached with pure terror.

Also love hell dimensions. Like the one Event Horizon went into or Thirdspace from Babylon5
 
S

sarcastor

Member
Holodeck - Just imagine the possibilities. Societies would crumble cause everyone will be addicted to having sex with celebrities.

Replicator - no more need for money. Or farming. Or working, I guess
 
old

old

Member
I love the ones dealing with human-like androids who can pass for real humans almost and whether they should be treated as humans. Blade Runner for example.
 
D

DirtyCase

Member
I was just checking out that thread, looks awesome. I really do like the idea of an Age of Decadence type game set in space on a generational ship.

I also really loved the idea of "sleeves" in Altered Carbon, just that book in general was amazing. I really need to read the 2nd and 3rd books.

My first thought on interesting science fiction/speculative fiction concepts besides what you mentioned are FOQNEs (Franchise-Owned Quasi-National Entities) from Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

Ground Control said:
Consists physically of franchise locations of parent corporate entities; the land within each franchise is considered to be part of the same (quasi)nation, even though they are non-contiguous.
Click to expand...

So like thousands or even hundreds of thousands of mini countries throughout the world, most a part of a larger corporation. Thought this concept was a very interesting idea, and in the book was a result of the more or less failing of the traditional nation state, especially so for the US. The ideas of a FOQNE doesn't seem so far fetched with globalisation on top of the continued consolidation and increased power of corporations.

This idea is explored further and with a slightly different take on it in Neal Stephenson's more recent book, The Diamond Age. The book features "Phyles" or "tribes" that are usually organised around commonalities such as religion, culture, ethnicity, and values. These Phyles are the successor to nation-states, with major cities divided into sovereign enclaves representing the different Phyles. All the different Phyles follow the Common Economic Protocol which is a set of agreed upon laws, rules, and regulations.

Damn I really love those books.
 
S

SkyOdin

Member
I'm a big fan of orbital space colonies and orbital elevators. They make for awesome backdrops and locations, and they are far, far more realistic than FTL.
 
H

HStallion

Now what's the next step in your master plan?
For sure its gotta be unbelievable hot and shapely alien space ladies. Nothing says you're a tiny insignificant speck in a vast inconceivable and uncaring universe than a species of busty alien vixens tailor made to be fit the male human gaze ready to sex you up.
/s
 
Z

Zenner

Member
Isaac Asimov's concept of Psychohistory, the underlying mechanic in his Foundation series.

Know enough about ourselves, through history, to accurately mathematically predict the future for generations to come.

I always found that to be a more grounded concept than Dune's similar, but far more mystical, prescience foretellings.
 
B

Bronx-Man

Banned
Just exploring the cosmos itself, like it's the ultimate wild west. As I get older though, I kinda cringe at how a lot of those stories kinda present imperialism as this awesome thing that needs to be done for space civilizations.One reason why I was really excited for No Man's Sky because it seemed like it was avoiding that direction.
 
S

SillyEskimo

Member
I find the concept of generationsl ships enthralling. Planning, selection, arrival, and all the problems that can occur before, during, and after keep the wheels turning in my head for days.

Edit: Also anything from Warhammer 40k. The entire scope of 40k is staggering and yet it somehow maintains its unique feel. I can never get enough.
 
kaiju

kaiju

Member
Badass weapon tech

g0awsj0c21razrlwi7an.gif
 
T

TheXbox

Member
Book of the New Sun/Dying Earth/Destiny/Horizon (to a lesser extent). An Earth so remote and so transformed we hardly recognize it, where fantasy and reality are indistinguishable.

Gene Wolfe did it best. The human race has been around for so long that it measures its history not in years, but in multi-millennial cycles of civilization - rise, fall, and rebirth - of which there have been thousands. Mind boggling shit.
 
P

pa22word

Member
Bronx-Man said:
Just exploring the cosmos itself, like it's the ultimate wild west. As I get older though, I kinda cringe at how a lot of those stories kinda present imperialism as this awesome thing that needs to be done for space civilizations.One reason why I was really excited for No Man's Sky because it seemed like it was avoiding that direction.
Click to expand...
Check out anything by Stanislaw Lem
 
L

Laiza

Member
One thing I find is not explored nearly enough is the idea of "morphological freedom", i.e. what happens to humanity once we've mastered biology and biotechnology to the point where we can inhabit shells in whatever shape and form we desire.

It's weird that vanity is one of the foremost vices in the public realm in this modern era, yet hardly anyone bothers exploring the logical conclusion of that track. I don't even mean necessarily just looking "young and perfect", I mean going off the beaten path to crazy body shapes that deviate wildly from human norms, to the point where it's heavily arguable that the people undergoing such modifications are even human anymore.

It's one of my biggest disappointments with the Star Trek franchise - the idea that they would outlaw all such modifications makes the world lean quite dystopian in my view, to say nothing of the fact that they could (and really, should) have solved the puzzle of aging long ago. All that post-scarcity technology and then they hold the human form so sacrosanct that they criminalize the application of full morphological freedom enabled by such technology?

I guess this is just not something a lot of folks think about. It's easy to assume that humanity will just continue on its current path and just get a bit prettier, a bit younger-looking, a bit more perfect over time. But there's always that underbelly of humanity that wants to explore extreme concepts and go beyond the limitations of the human form, and it really bothers me that we just ignore that facet entirely in so much sci-fi.

Oddly enough, Warframe is the closest thing I can think of to something that actually tries to explore this in some fashion. "Dream - not of what you are, but what you want to be." The Warframes themselves explore body plans that, while still married to the traditional humanoid biped design, still deviate wildly in many ways from standard human shapes, and it's quite fascinating what they can come up with when they are no longer tethered to the base design. I really, really want to see more exploration of stuff like this.
 
E

eizarus

Banned
I fucking love colonial space stations. They're so awesome.

The Gundam series has some of the best, like this O'Niell Island 3 Cylinder colony model:
latest


This crazy shit from SEED:
latest
 
V

Vulcano's assistant

Banned
A lot of these are in the "space magic" end of the spectrum.

-) The 'sickness' that Rachel has in Hyperion in which she wakes ups every morning as the self of the day before, her body and mind going back in time until she ceases to exist.

-) When FTL is 4th dimensional space skipping rather than accelerating beyond c. This is why the spice is needed to space travel in Dune, and why the Minds in the Culture exist in 4th dimensions. Also why Anea from Endymion has the visions someone high on Spice would have.

-) Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought. The speed of light is greater the father away you get from the center of the galaxy, so the closer you are to the rim the smarter your civilization and your computers are and the faster your ships can be.

-) also Vernor Vinge's dog-like aliens The Tines. A race of wolves that share their minds through sound in groups of up to 8 parts to become an individual. Then you drop them on a feudalistic civilization where queens and kings have been extending their rule for centuries and inbreeding between the members of their own pack to maintain their minds as close as possible to that of the original group.

-) Treating digitized individuals as not even copies, but as simulations, like in Revelation Space.

-) That space battles will be fully automated instead of using slow-thinking, squishy bags of meat to do the fighting. Any space fight where humans are piloting the ships is inherently slow.

-) How humans in the culture can take any shape. Like that dude that was for all intents and purposes a bush. Makes you think that the Culture in any orbital looks like you stepped in Saga (the comic) and all those races of human looking aliens with horns, wings, and animal ears are simply a few shades of the looks humans take.
 
V

Vyrance

Member
Children of Time is a great book that deals with a generation ship over a couple thousand years as half of its story. Really good stuff.
 
M

Morat

Banned
Tau Zero by Paul Anderson. Concept is a interstallar ship based on the bussard ramjet principle expects to take a colonising voyage that will either end in the crew founding anew planet, or a worst returning to earth within a few centuries, or for them a few relativistic decades. Don't want to spoil the novel completely but it has one of the best treatments of relativism I've come across. Read it.
 
S

SwiftDeath

Member
I like things that seem just out of reach even if in reality they may be la ong way off assuming they are even possible

Things like:

  • Mass Accelerators for FTL Travel
  • Spaceships self-sufficient enough to last for decades traveling in space
  • Using artificial magnetic fields on spaceships to protect against solar radiation
  • Controlling/using wormholes for any valid purpose
 
S

Servbot24

Banned
All things deep space / inter-dimensional / black hole exploration really gets me going

And not nerd shit like Star Trek btw
 
Airola

Airola

Member
First I tell what I don't like.

The most boring way to do sci-fi is the basic spaceships here spaceships there thing. My interest gets lower as soon as you bring other space civilizations in it. I got my share of it in the original Star Wars trilogy and that was enough for me.

It bores me how many times these other alien species seem to be somehow based on how life has formed in Earth. They are often just creatures with different random things mutated together. Someone might have a rat face and some might have an elephat trunk or some have googly eyes or whatever "deformations" they might come up with.

Space guns? Bleh. Not interested.

No, give me some metaphysical shit and I'm game. Hell dimensions are great. The Doctor Who episode where the Doctor finds Satan in space was fantastic. Not really "hell dimension" thing but still!



Now, along with the hell dimension metaphysical stuff I always love these concepts, no matter what:

-Time travel. Now, personally I don't believe that time travel is even theoretically possible but I love the idea and stuff like that always entertains me (except The Time Traveller AKA. The Next One from 1984 that really bored the hell out of me. The Finnish VHS release has a cool cover but sadly the movie was everything but that.)

-Having to live the same day over and over again. I love that stuff. I love Groundhog Day. I love Edge of Tomorrow. I liked Repeaters quite a bit. I have this one horror film on DVD where a woman has to live the day she gets murdered over and over again but I haven't watched it yet.

-Entering into another dimension is cool too. Add dreams being the other dimension to that and oh boy, I will enjoy watching that shit.
(I recall The Outer Limits had this one episode where someone went between two realities and she/he always thought the other dimension she/he was previously in was just a dream and the one she/he is right now is the real one - or something like that)

-People living in between life and death. I even loved this z grade Joe Estevez movie called Soultaker from 1990. It's one of my childhood favorites.

-People being somewhere and suddenly see copies of themselves going around. I absolutely loved Coherence. Triangle was great too. I'm currently waiting for a movie called +1 (AKA. Party Invaders) to arrive on mail. I think it's supposed to have something like that but I've tried to avoid getting any more information about it before I've watched it.

-Some weird shit happening in one room. I love the one room movies so much. Especially if there is some sort of weird scifi thing going on. For example Circle was very entertaining for me. I count Cube as a "one room movie" too.

If you can put the "I woke up and didn't know where I was and how I got there, and I have completely lost my memory" trope in any of these, it's the perfect thing for me right there.
 
P

pa22word

Member
Tuorom said:
I really enjoyed the time relativity in the book The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. The guy goes on military tours to distant planets using light speed travel (I think), and every time he comes back from a tour Earth has changed by like centuries.

Also liked it in Interstellar when they go to the water planet and come back, and the dudes like it has been 23 years. Pretty crazy concept to imagine, and that's why I like it.
Click to expand...

Of all of the various scifi that I've read this was probably the coolest. The book lost me when about halfway through when it wandered into another Malthusian dystopia #4510 and I've never finished it. Need to get back to it honestly.

Laiza said:
One thing I find is not explored nearly enough is the idea of "morphological freedom", i.e. what happens to humanity once we've mastered biology and biotechnology to the point where we can inhabit shells in whatever shape and form we desire.

It's weird that vanity is one of the foremost vices in the public realm in this modern era, yet hardly anyone bothers exploring the logical conclusion of that track. I don't even mean necessarily just looking "young and perfect", I mean going off the beaten path to crazy body shapes that deviate wildly from human norms, to the point where it's heavily arguable that the people undergoing such modifications are even human anymore.

It's one of my biggest disappointments with the Star Trek franchise - the idea that they would outlaw all such modifications makes the world lean quite dystopian in my view, to say nothing of the fact that they could (and really, should) have solved the puzzle of aging long ago. All that post-scarcity technology and then they hold the human form so sacrosanct that they criminalize the application of full morphological freedom enabled by such technology?

I guess this is just not something a lot of folks think about. It's easy to assume that humanity will just continue on its current path and just get a bit prettier, a bit younger-looking, a bit more perfect over time. But there's always that underbelly of humanity that wants to explore extreme concepts and go beyond the limitations of the human form, and it really bothers me that we just ignore that facet entirely in so much sci-fi.
Click to expand...

Honestly I think the whole star trek thing kind of comes apart ideologically when start to break down the idea of post scarcity and the mostly utopian foolishness that it is. I mean maybe I'm incorrect, but I just don't see a future in which entropy continues to rule the laws of the universe
that we can ever solve the perpetual search for resources in universe in which we are constantly expanding and creating more areas for human development in areas more and more costly the further we go out, not to mention the insane costs of building societies from zero, or retrofitting or even terraforming existing planets, satelites, or even asteroids. Thus I foresee the search for resources will fuel exploration in and of itself, and that will create endless feedback loops in which we continually exploit further in scale with how far we reach as a civilization. As someone else mentioned above, it's the same imperialism trap every empire since the dawn of time has faced and I don't know how cybercommunism solves that. That's also why I thought Foundation's setting was so unique in that it noticed this inevitable trend of perpetual empire and forced the same rules that human empire on terra itself had to deal with. That being control inevitably starts to crumble the further you go due to inevitable cultural varience leading to instability through sectarianism, and once you hit maximum capacity for further spread the basis for which you set your empire starts to crumble in on itself. In the end this creates a massive house of cards and all it takes is a single event to bring the whole thing down on itself.
 
M

Morat

Banned
Also, as a concept in of itself Culture Minds are hard to beat. I'm paraphrasing, but there's a line in one of the novels that says something like "we are like god's, but on the far side"

Edit

Also by the same author, the Lazy Guns, which transcend all laws of physics, but have a sense of humour
 
P

pa22word

Member
More_Badass said:
This is why I love science fiction threads on GAF. Never heard of Lem and all of his works sound fascinating
Click to expand...
Lem is awesome and severely underrated. Personally he's my favorite scifi author. Defo check out The Invincible (big rep to the other guy wanting scifi on imperialism), Solaris of course, Return from the Stars, The Futurlogical Congress, and The Cyberiad.
Edit: ha, seems we're talking over ourselves now. Never read the other two, but Eden is a great read.
 
V

Vulcano's assistant

Banned
Examples of people with complete morphological freedom I have found in:

- The Ousters from the Hyperion Cantos
- The Ultras from Alastair Reynolds novels (Other humans do it to a lesser degree, or like the Conjoiners that are more machine than person, so it is not done biologically)
- Citizens of the Culture (like everything else, taken to the extreme by at least some people just because they can)
- They can't choose what they get, but the Inhumans from Marvel comics.
 
T

The Kree

Banned
I'm drawn to anything that deals with alternate universes where the rules that govern reality are different. The Matrix, Alice in Wonderland, stuff like that.
 
V

Vulcano's assistant

Banned
this is for fantasy, but I really like how someone in the Discworld decided at some point to change the rules of how magic works so now it should take the same effort to do something with a spell that it would take to do it normally.
 
S

Stinkles

Clothed, sober, cooperative
Abandoned, extinct and subliminated civilizations. Especially ones that left all their shit behind.
 
J

Jack Scofield

Member
TheXbox said:
Book of the New Sun/Dying Earth/Destiny/Horizon (to a lesser extent). An Earth so remote and so transformed we hardly recognize it, where fantasy and reality are indistinguishable.

Gene Wolfe did it best. The human race has been around for so long that it measures its history not in years, but in multi-millennial cycles of civilization - rise, fall, and rebirth - of which there have been thousands. Mind boggling shit.
Click to expand...

I'm not familiar with these specific examples, but I agree on the themes. I've always been fascinated by sci-fi stories that take place in the far, far future. Where humans are scattered through the cosmos and no one even knows about Earth amymore.

Dune is similar to this.
 
P

pa22word

Member
While we're here, has anyone ever read end of universe fiction they can share? I've always found the fact and inevitability of entropic heat death profoundly facinating, yet I've never really read anything that really gets into it. The closest I can even think of that dealt with something like it was probably the original Dark Souls game.
 
P

Platy

Member
I know this will sound kinda generic after all those posts but i love REALLY alien aliens.

From "they are made of meat" level of being made of other materials and ideas to 4 sex societies based on weird monetary ideas.

Like societies and biologies that are completely unheard.
 
H

HotHamBoy

Member
Platy said:
I know this will sound kinda generic after all those posts but i love REALLY alien aliens.

From "they are made of meat" level of being made of other materials and ideas to 4 sex societies based on weird monetary ideas.

Like societies and biologies that are completely unheard.
Click to expand...

Vernor Vinge came up with several fascinating concepts for evolved intelligence in A Fire Upon The Deep.

The Tines are a race of dog-like creatures that, individually, aren't much smarter than one of our own dogs. But when they form packs the pack itself becomes a new, highly-intelligent individual and the composition of that pack shapes its personality and memories. The creatures communicate semi-telepathically as one mind and must avoid getting too close to other packs to prevent mind interference. The pack operates with cooridination as if each member is a limb. There is an upper and lower limit to the pack size for intelligent, coherent thought. If a member dies it effects the pack in a devestating way but replacements and mergers are possible, extending the spiritual life of the pack organism potentially indefinitely, barring "total death" i.e. the whole pack dies at once.

The Skrodes are a race of sentient plant creatures that rely on computerized carts to get around, speak verbally and store memories as they lack any form of naturual short-term memory themselves.

He also describes how each race as its own particular form of body language and expression that is pretty interesting, too.
 
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