All the stories on the FP are about labor relations and corporate shenanigans. So anyway, do you like Star Trek or Star Wars better? Anybody still ike to read old school sci fi, for example I really love Poul Anderson’s Polesotechnic League stories - the swashbuckling adventures of intersteller trador Nicholas van Rijn and his Solar Spice and Liquors company, David Falkayne, et al. Good old basic space opera.
Everything I needed to learn about SciFi I learned from watching Prisoners Of Gravity on TVO. The host Rick Green was always interesting to listen to. I learned there was far more scifi than just TrekWars
I feel like in a post-global pandemic world, where we have AIs that can pass the Turing test, VR world’s where we can do global virtual raves, and if one cobbles enough cutting edge tech together one can say “earl Grey, hot” and a 3d printer can print up a model of a tea cup… I think scifi writers have to come up with what is NEXT.
No more “Oh this logical robot which can either be a metaphor for autism or enslaved people want to be free and human”. Give us projections on our current technology and social evolution. Shows set in the year 2200 shouldn’t just be dealing with the emergence of AI and still have only straight nuclear families.
True, most sci fi about the future just overlays fancy gadgets on top of present-day culture, and every robot is Pinocchio and wants to be a real boy. But if an author tried hard to speculate about future life it would probably be too unfamiliar and unrelatable to sell a lot of books - and I don’t really blame them for not wanting to put readers in a too-unfamiliar world, they’re trying to entertain not write white papers. Also consider the reaction to a writer who made it okay for an robot to get fulfillment out of just functioning perfectly. OMG no, we can’t give that toxic idea any breathing space. Every entity must long for Freedom like an angst-ridden teenager or the writer will be accused of shilling for the system.
I am firmly Star Wars, my wife is Star Trek. It’s a mixed marriage. We both love Firefly and Doctor Who.
I have not yet shown her Battlestar Galactica.
Whoa!
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold it right there.
What about Babylon 5?!?
I love Babylon 5 and she loves what she has seen of Londo and G’Kar, but she hasn’t seen a lot of it.
She says: “Oh? You mean DS9?”
Love TNG and DS9, currently reading the Ringworld series
New age sci-fi, but you have GOT to read the Murder Bot books. They are absolutely incredible. They’ve also won Nebula and Hugo awards.
Martha Wells… cool, thanks!
Also: children of time series, as well as the bobiverse series
I haven’t read Children of Ruin yet, but Children of Time was awesome.
Ruin is awesome. The story is like going on an adventure.
People are split on Memory, but I like it. It’s just written differently
I love both Star Trek and Star Wars, but Star Wars has a lot of really toxic fans. These days I tend to be a quiet Star Wars fan.
Back in the days of Star trek the next generation, Voyager and Deep Space 9, I Would say Star Wars is not really Science Fiction but Science Fantasy.
But unfortunately that’s become true for Star Trek too.As Science Fiction I clearly prefer old school Star Trek, but as Science Fantasy Star Wars does it way better IMO.
I hadn’t heard about Poul Anderson’s Polesotechnic League stories before, they look very interesting, I’ll bookmark that for when I feel like some old school SciFi. 👍 😀
To be fair, Star Trek always had its fantasy element as well. They dressed it up with Treknobabble a lot, but many of the episodes had fundamentally fantasy elements as well. Like, remember the time Kirk gets beamed down to a planet where the inhabitants use literal, actual magic and it turns out the Salem witches were actual witches?
You are absolutely correct, I’d also argue Q is more fantasy than SciFi, it’s probably more correct to say Star Trek was MOSTLY SciFi, while Star Wars had more fantasy elements as a fundamental part of the Universe that are the basis for the stories.
Personally I consider time travel as absolutely a fantasy element, I see no reason to believe the past and future exist at the same “time” as the present. Which makes time travel basically nonsense.
All time travel speculation quickly ends out in either infinities or paradoxes. Only a very careful author, who set up strict limitations prevent that.
To be honest I’m extremely tired of all the time travel babble Star Trek has turned into, where time travel is a key element of the stories.
‘War Of The Wing-Men’ is a good one to start with.
Thanks. I just found the entire series, 😋 but with some odd numbering?:
Anderson, Poul - Polesotechnic League - 01 - The Trouble Twisters
Anderson, Poul - Polesotechnic League - 02 - War Of The Wing-Men
Anderson, Poul - Polesotechnic League - 03 - Trader To The Stars
Anderson, Poul - Polesotechnic League - 04 - Satan’s World
Anderson, Poul - Polesotechnic League - 05 - Mirkheim
Anderson, Poul - Polesotechnic League - 06 - The Earth Book Of Stormgate
Anderson, Poul - Polesotechnic League - People in the WindCompletely different numbering than for instance the recommended here?
https://www.bookseriesinorder.com/polesotechnic-league/
Which would you recommend?
By publication date or chronological story line?I always try to go by publication.
Someone put it this way [they were talking specifically about the Conan stories]. If you meet someone and get to chatting you don’t tell your story in chronological order. Maybe the first story you tell is about what happened at work, or your most recent vacation. After you’ve known them a while you talk about grade school.
That’s my opinion.
Thanks. 😀
I mean, it’s all news concerning technology, or tech companies. Did you expect there to just be constant posts about new tech or improvements to existing tech? Because that shit doesn’t happen every day.
Do we need a new post everyday?
seveneves was a banger, if you haven’t read it just go in hot.
I have a soft spot for star wars but only the first 3, probably because I was young and it was so breathtaking.
So now I roll with star trek, especially the older ones.
But back on track, Where are the robots? The DIY? The fun stuff. Where are posts about a new ESP32? Some portable 3D printer (probably garbage, lets have a flame war!), how to use phone chargers to get 20 vilts to your led strip, funky homelab setups and deals, better network stuff, even retro computing I’d say.
Yeah, block all the boardroom chatter and bring back real tech!
+1 for an actual tech focused community. I think it has to be focused on software or hardware as a rule. News about stocks, CEOs, rebranding etc should not be allowed. Maybe put them in tech_news or something.
I want to read about what new feature the openbsd folks are working on or innovations by the quebes os team or a new RISC based laptop or the raspberry pi 420 that can play half life 3.
“Business” also exists. If it’s news about the business, not the technology, it should go to Business.
It might be too technical for some, but Linux Weekly News (lwn.net) has been a long-running source of articles dating back to the 1990s, if memory serves aright, that’s kind of in that ballpark.
EDIT: Hmm. It looks like at some point, some of their articles went subscriber-only, though.
I think it has to be focused on software or hardware as a rule.
I don’t. Those fields are but small slivers in the realm of technology, and they’re not even particularly novel any more. A community dedicated to one or both of them might make sense, but there’s no reason to let them dominate the technology community.
News about stocks, CEOs, rebranding etc should not be allowed.
I agree with you there.
Fair enough, I would have thought most things would be related to either hardware or software but I could be overlooking something. I was just trying to propose a sensible approach that could be a starting point.
Seriously, the mods need to step. This is a technology community, not a business community.
I like turtles
TMNT never made enough sense to me.
Better?
Y’know, I was just browsing earlier and thinking that there wasn’t even any technology stuff in my feed anymore, it’d all been subsumed by the political churn…
Anyhow, to answer properly: I like Star Wars’ aesthetic better, but Star Trek also had some incredible stuff. I’ve also been increasingly burned out on Star Wars since the Disney takeover, to the point I barely follow it anymore. Back in the day I was neck-deep in the community of nerds who loved analyzing how the technology in the setting worked!
But the real love of my science-fiction life is Babylon 5. Something about how they planned the show’s myth arc out over multiple seasons leading to huge payoffs for both characters and the overall story.
Disney is really milking it, but I loved Andor.
I only watched a few episodes of Babylon 5 when it was new, but recently started at the beginning and I think it’s a great show now.
IMHO, this community should be about technology. Novel inventions. Interesting or creative applications. Discoveries. Dangers, advances, impacts, experiments, tutorials, etc.
Instead, it’s overrun with stock market and business news having no more to do with technology than CEOs of wood pulp factories have to do with literature.
I wish Rule 2 was phrased in a way that clearly excludes the latter, and enforced.
Yeah I prefer a post about coffee_drudge version 0.12 being released than what we have now.
Technology cannot be disentangled from society and the economics that create and develop it. Technology is social process, it is not a technical matter.
The idea that technology is a thing on its own, maybe even with its own agency, is an ideological stance pushed first and foremost by the people you don’t want to hear about exactly for the purpose of obscuring their role in the whole deal.
no more to do with technology than CEOs of wood pulp factories have to do with literature.
This has me envisioning a literature community filled with stories like “Random House and Penguin merging” (I know, old news), “Layoffs at PRH”, etc.
Poul Anderson mentioned 🗣️ 🗣️🗣️
He and H.Beam Piper are my favorite SF writers, be sure to check Three Hearts and Three Lions, the book where the hero solves fantasy problems with Science™.
In my late 20s at a sci fi con, a friend came up and said, “Here’s someone I’d like you to meet,” and suddenly I was face to face with Poul Anderson. He was one of my idols - I had read the crap out of his work for years and years. I was so gobsmacked all that came out of my mouth was, “How do you say your first name?” Worst fail of my life.
I’ve never heard of HBP, will take a look.
He’s fun reading, though being a woman I also find his stuff kinda sexist. It’s basically cowboys in space.
I mostly read sci-fi from the late Golden Age and the New Wave, so I have a lot of practice in glossing over questionable bits!
Cowboys in space sounds fun.
The Little Fuzzy books are some of my favorites.
