Science Fiction

I mean, we could speculate and explore the strange future and stuff. Just without that tired trope of "well, science and technology progressed a bunch and then we got this really great machine".

I mean there's gotta be another way. Examples?

I really enjoyed reading it a couple years ago. Takes place mostly in about 2023, trying to accurately predict what life would be like 30 years after it was written.

So there's a question I've been having for a while now: Why is Ubki, from Philip K Dick so popular ? I've read it, and was pretty disappointed. The scenario starts pretty well, but becomes very obvious amongst the rest of the book, there's little no to connection between the scenes, everything seems to have no relation, the final characters (Ella and Joe) are barely introduced, the resolution (Ubki's provenance) is barely explained, ...

Overall, I feel like I've read a really good scenario idea from a great author, but it feels like a missed opportunity; I’m left feeling unsatisfied.

I just finished this incredibly interesting book and will leave the description from my book service below.

"Worst Case Scenario" by T J Newman

"#1 internationally bestselling author T.J. Newman is back with Worst Case Scenario. When a pilot suffers a heart attack at 35,000 feet, a commercial airliner filled with passengers crashes into a nuclear power plant in the small town of Waketa, Minnesota, which becomes ground zero for a catastrophic national crisis with global implications. The International Nuclear Event Scale tracks nuclear disasters. It has seven levels. Level 7 is a Major Accident, with only two on record: Fukushima and Chernobyl. There has never been a Level 8. Until now. In this heart-stopping thriller, ordinary people--power plant employees, firefighters, teachers, families, neighbors, and friends-- are thrust into an extraordinary situation as they face the ultimate test of their lives. It will take the combined courage, ingenuity, and determination of a brave few to save not only their community and loved ones, but the fate of humanity at large."

She's the namesake of the Del Rey Books publishing imprint.

The article links to a PBS documentary, Judy-Lynn Del Rey: Galaxy Gal from a series "Renegades" which "highlights little-known historical figures with disabilities"

So I found this one season (26 episode) extremely campy sci fi TV show -- a low budget 2007 Canadian production -- called Grand Star. Watched a few episodes last night. OMG it's so terrible it is awesome.

It's like a B-grade GameCube era JRPG got crossed with Snowpiercer. I can't stop watching it somehow.

Anyone else seen this amazing piece of ... something? ;)

First a definition for this question, because there are many kinds of sci-fi out there and they sometimes liberally use cool sounding words without explaining them:

A disruptor is a kind of weapon that weakens, or "disrupts", either material bonds (breaking a material into molecules), molecular bonds (breaking a molecule into atoms), or atomic bonds (breaking an atomic nucleus into protons, netrons, and free electrons. Almost like instantly turning into plasma).

Temperature can do these things, but the idea behind a disruptor, specifically, is that it happens through some kind of catalyst, rather than brute-forcing with insane amounts of heat.

Would such a weapon physically be possible (even if we don't know how to make them just yet)?

How would a target realistically behave when hit by a disruptor?

Using a vinyl cutter and mini-sand blaster I made some alternate universe corporate schwag! I like the idea that someone might have swiped these during an interview before both companies had their 'accidents.'

I just finished part 1 and, well, I'm kinda disappointed. It's not bad, I think it's actually pretty solid, but compared to the book it's much worse in terms of story progression and characters. Some parts felt really rushed. I didn't expect it to be better than the book, but I still expected better adaptation considering that (at least as far as I know) it was well received and I knew that it didn't adapt whole book so I expected it to don't skip too much. Is part 2 any better?

I'm sure many of you know this one, but some of you may not, and the rest could always hear it again. Story itself is by Terry Bisson.

Apologies for the slightly off-topic post...

It's not looking good, folks...

George R R Martin confirms he hasn't written anything for the 2 remaining A Song Of Ice And Fire books since 2022.

He wishes that they were finished.

The last published book in the series, A Dance With Dragons, was published in July 2011, now 13 years ago.

Obligatory song that's now 12 years old... https://youtu.be/j7lp3RhzfgI

Finished reading the Remembrance of Earth's Past series (i.e. The Three-Body Problem and the other books) and have opinions. WARNING: SPOILERS

Overall I liked it a lot. I felt like the books could've been a lot tighter though, and Liu Cixin really needed an editor. Lots of cool ideas, but I did not care about the 3 old guys arguing with each other in the first part of the second book. It gave some background info, but that could've been collapsed into a few paragraphs. I also didn't need the whole backstory of some some ship's cook whose plot relevance was about 10 seconds long.

I didn't have my mind blown by the ideas in it. Not that I begrudge people that do, I'm just not lying awake worrying about the dark forest hypothesis. Maybe it's because there's not much we can do about it anyways 🤷. I did really like the recasting of string theory's 11 dimensions as not some beautiful reality of the universe, but as the result of brutal galactic warfare.

I thought the FTL communication was kind of weird for a series that mostly tried to stick to (or at least give lip service to) hard sci-fi. If you haven't seen it before, this is a good explainer of the problems with FTL communication: https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fasterlight.php. In the end, I think it more wants to be cosmic horror than hard sci-fi, which is fine.

One minor nit I have is that at the very end they talk a big deal about making messages last for billions of years, and they arrive at carving messages into stone. Good idea, but even then the message got partially lost. Why not add redundancy and carve it multiple times? I also kind of expecting something "clever", like writing the message into the genes of the mobile trees or something.