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?

  • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
    0·
    15 days ago

    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.

    • ashenone@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      15 days ago

      Fully agree, give me non-ftl space is really really fucking big scifi and I’m a happy camper

      • Ixoid@aussie.zoneEnglish
        0·
        14 days ago

        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 magic technology 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.

    • Caveman@lemmy.world
      0·
      14 days ago

      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.