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’May you live in interesting times’ is the worst thing one can wish on a citizen of Discworld, especially on the distinctly unmagical Rincewind, who has had far too much perilous excitement in his life and can’t even spell wizard.
Adrian Tchaikovsky wrote Children of Time, one of my favorite sci-fi novels. Most sci-fi is based on futuristic physics and technology; Children of Time is based on futuristic evolutionary biology. And it’s every bit as cool as it sounds.
That’s probably not what he’s talking about here but hey, free book recommendation
Ian M. Banks would probably love to live in The Culture
I would too
Yeah for real, same. No downsides
The setup to children of time doesn’t make sense, and I don’t even mean the spiders
I thought it was fine enough for scifi. What was the issue?
What didn’t make sense? Magic potion makes evolution fast.
Designed for monkeys, but monkeys didn’t make it to the planet
Thr death wave virus that crippled mankind requires a tech hegemony beyond belief.
Like 90% of today’s technology runs on Windows, Mac or Android. 3 viruses would wipe us out today
It was a radio signal that killed all systems in the solar system. So… no firewalls? Air gapped life support and critical systems? Sanitized inputs?
The guy that blew up the initial terraforming mission was the lowly tech on that ship meant for the observer coffin… how did he have the elevated privileges to do any of what he did?
Why was the initial planet meant for this stupid science experiment instead of as a colony?
If they could build an ark ship, I have trouble believing they actually had to abandon earth. They could have continued living there with vastly higher access to resources
Also, I think at some point they brought up military personnel that were kept asleep because once you take that cat out of the bag it won’t go back in. Yet later when they had two existential crises, those soldiers weren’t woken up?
Edit: I also found it galling when Kern mused about how maybe things would have gone differently had people been more empathetic, towards the end. Like, lady, you were a dick almost the entire time
The signal doesn’t have to take down everything. Just a critical mass to take the world down. For example, if it couldn’t get the hospital, it could get the power companies nearby. Or take down the next town over and overrun the functional town.
I’m pretty sure his elevated privilege was the gun (or bomb or whatever, it’s been a minute since I read it).
The funder probably got to chose where the money went. And Kern wanted a monkey planet. I think the goal was to establish communication with them.
I think they found people were living there, and IIRC, that’s how the book ends, with them headed back to earth.
I can’t speak for the military thing. I don’t remember it well enough.
I wish Gene had lived to see the Star Trek universe
In a way, he did. Star Trek helped to break the racial barriers of 1960’s America, and inspired a generation of scientists and engineers to invent things that we use commonly today.
There was an entire generation of people who saw what Star Trek brought to the TV screen, and wanted to bring it into reality. Gene saw thousands of fans were inspired to become a better person because of an idea he had one day.
People saw an interracial kiss on screen for the first time. Some were outraged, most didn’t see a problem. Some saw a Japanese person working equally with white crewmen while Japanese-Americans still were treated like garbage and had their possessions still stripped from them.
Roddenberry intended the show to have a progressive political agenda reflective of the emerging counter-culture of the youth movement, though he was not fully forthcoming to the networks about this. He wanted Star Trek to show what humanity might develop into, if it would learn from the lessons of the past, most specifically by ending violence. An extreme example is the alien species known as the Vulcans, who had a violent past but learned to control their emotions. Roddenberry also gave Star Trek an anti-war message and depicted the United Federation of Planets as an ideal, optimistic version of the United Nations.[15] His efforts were opposed by the network because of concerns over marketability, e.g., they opposed Roddenberry’s insistence that Enterprise have a racially diverse crew.[16]
Gene didn’t live to see a post-scarcity, no violence, bigotry free society, but he inspired people to achieve it. Gene died happy with knowing he sparked an entire idea into action, some day in the future.
I wish any of us could live to see the Star Trek universe. I doubt a child born today will live to see it. It remains to be seen if we can ever stop backstabbing people in service of a false hierarchy.
In the canon of Star Trek, humanity had a series of eugenics wars, wars for resources, and then capped it off with a World War 3 where the Geneva conventions were scrapped with nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons used by every world power.
The mess was still being cleaned up and the effects of hundreds of millions dead is when people went “Why did we ever hate each other? What did some dude in the African Union do to piss off some dude in the European Alliance, that pissed off some dude in China?”
And then when Zefram Cochrane used the Phoenix to test warp flight, everyone truly went “…Holy shit, we’re not alone. We can fix this for everyone.”
Took me way too long to realize we weren’t talking about SanFran or Salesforce.
I thought Sci-Fi would be the preferred short form of Science Fiction, to be honest.
Nonono that has literally 3 times the number of characters as “SF” and on Mastodon there’s a strict character limit so they just had to shorten it so they could communicate all the information in the clearest possible way within those limitations.
