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?

  • Murse@slrpnk.net
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    il y a 16 jours

    Wormholes always kinda rubbed me wrong in sci-fi. They’re always depicted in a way that screams fantasy, not science, with only one exception that comes to mind, which was Interstellar’s depiction of a wormhole as a sphere, even taking the time to explain why it looks that way.

    The only got it half right though, since as soon as they enter the sphere it’s straight back to the fantasy BS with the blue tunnel. That scene could have been a really cool transition of entering the one ‘side’ of the sphere while exiting the other simultaneously. Cut from the crew’s perspective seeing lens-like distortion of the stars, to an external view of the ship moving into the sphere.

    I kinda feel like that’s how they intended to do that scene, with the whole buildup about the sphere, but decided to throw a nod to oldschool science fantasy for some reason.

    Oh well. They got it half right, and that half was pretty fucking sick - it was the first presentation of a wormhole that didn’t instantly yoink me out of suspension of disbelief. Until the blue tunnel ofc, at which point, yoink.

    To answer OP’s question, I guess for me it’s less a specific concept as it is presenting something possible only in theory in a believable way. The whole lens-distortion style transition would have been way less flashy, but less can be more.

    • pugnaciousfarter@literature.cafe
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      il y a 16 jours

      I’ve always thought of scifi being very adjacent to fantasy.

      Dune, star wars are basically fantasy stories packaged with scifi elements.

      I’ve always wondered what makes a SciFi story SciFi and I’ve come to the conclusion that for it to be SciFi it must be an exploration of how technology effects the human condition.

      What do you think?

      • Murse@slrpnk.net
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        il y a 15 jours

        Definitely adjacent. The distinction as I understand it basically boils down whether or not there’s magic.

        Like Star Wars has a lot of sci fi elements, but then space wizards who use ‘the force’ which is just space magic. Fantasy.

        Dune I’m less familiar with - never read the books. Saw the first movie but was kinda distracted and never have it my full attention. Main character definitely showed some magic super power stuff, but idr much outside of that.

        Most of them kinda toggle back and forth, like Interstellar is mostly sci-fi with a sprinkling of fantasy up until the black hole scene, then it’s mostly fantasy with a sprinkling of science.

        Or there’s Star Trek, which of mostly grounded in actual science and theory, but it’s got a sprinkle of space magic here and there too.

        Not many purebreds.

    • elephantium@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      il y a 16 jours

      Now this has me thinking about the wormholes in Stargate. I never quite understood why the wormhole had a shakey “going down a waterslide at a theme park, but in space” vibe.