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Favorite scifi concept? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 day ago by ashenone@lemmy.ml 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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[-] ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 18 points 1 day ago

The Uplift Series is a gem. Copied directly from Wiki because it's succinct yet thorough:

The Five Galaxies are filled with alien races, all of whom were "uplifted" into sentience by another race through the use of directed breeding. As "payment" for being made sentient, the uplifted races are subservient to their uplifters for a period of time. All existing races have reached sentience through this process, and follow a common evolution in which the races become free of their uplifters, enter a period of independent power, and then fade and eventually disappear.

The arrival of a human ship at a populated star upsets the established races as humanity reached sentience on their own. This had been believed to be impossible, nothing of the sort is known in the eons-old galactic library. This leads to great arguments among the alien powers. Humanity begins to uplift other species on Earth, including chimpanzees and dolphins, but does not demand subservience.

[-] edralzar@feddit.fr 12 points 1 day ago

sounds interesting !

but does not demand subservience

that's the fictional part right there I guess :)

[-] toddestan@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Besides the whole uplift concept, I've also liked the concept that the galactic civilization is really old - like hundreds of millions if not billions of years old. Some of the ships flying around are tens of millions of years old.

I have to say the second and third books, Startide Rising and The Uplift War, are some of my favorite sci-fi novels of all time. The first book is David Brin's first novel and it kind of shows. It's not a bad book, but it's a bit weak. The last three books are a trilogy and they start getting pretty weird and I didn't care for it as much. The second and third books are standalone so you can read them without the first book very easily. I actually had read the second and third books a few times before looking into it a bit more and realizing there was a first book.

this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2026
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