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Favorite scifi concept? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/sciencefiction@lemmy.world
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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?

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[–] 4 points 3 months ago* (2 children)

The details of how the books work mostly comes from the book series, specifically The Book of Ti'Ana, which IIRC is the second book in a trilogy. I haven't played more than the first one and a little bit of 3 tho. Always wanted to play Riven after reading the books, since they all take place right before the events of that game. But the book series and the games were written by the same people, so it's all the same lore.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    Riven is great, probably my favorite in the series. You should definitely play it as soon as you get the chance.

    But I think you're a bit off the mark with descriptive books. It's not VR, it's a teleporter. When you write an Age in a book, you're not creating it, you're describing it. When the book is detailed enough, it opens a portal to an existing world that matches your description.

    It's pretty explicitly based on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, with infinite worlds lying on The Great Tree of Possibilities.

    This is reinforced by a few details:

    • You can't write contradictions into an Age. The book will try to link to a world that matches your description, but that world is going to be extremely unstable if it works at all.

    • Altering a descriptive book is very risky. You can write changes after you've been to an Age assuming you've never observed anything that would contradict the change(the idea being that the waveform of possibility is still a bit in flux concerning details not previously mentioned), but it's very difficult to pull off and you need to be really really good at writing books to not break something.

    • It's generally a bad idea to try to write technology into an Age. Yeah infinite worlds, but artificial features are so specific you have difficulty finding a good match

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