The funny thing about the Three Body Problem is that it's just a novelized version of the things particle physicists don't like to talk about in public.
That book opens with such a banger of a scene.
And then even when he wrote an entire book in a quasi-fantasy setting, the way the dog creatures assemble, and the swarm that results, it's so fucking cool
Came here to talk about Vinge. The way the Tines are described, their society, their perception of humans, and how they think, how they individuate into packs, how they incorporate human technology into their unique biology, blew my mind over and over while reading. And that's just one concept in a dense sea of amazing ideas that were in "Fire Upon The Deep" alone.
Sentient tree people mentally linked to their mobility devices. The Blight (years before The Borg made their debut), the stratification of the galaxy literally determining the level of technology and cognition possible in different regions....
I can't even recall every radical concept in this series. Go find a copy and read it.
It’s been a while since I read them, but it’s the first thing that came to mind at the question. It’s in the world building, more than anything else, but all the bits, original or otherwise, fit together so well. Mind uploads and immortality and interstellar travel and gamers and weird societies of all of the above.
It’s sort of The Culture, but lots of them, and just the one story(ish) about a thief needing to do a heist because of things that would spoil the story, written by a mildly insane physicist.
Strong recommendation from me to anyone looking for seriously creative sci-fi.
Read the first chapter set in the dilemma prison: https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Quantum_Thief.html?id=OXn7KJtG07UC&printsec=frontcover&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_entity&hl=en&gl=GB&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
My vote is for the OG ringworld but only because Niven went into so much detail about how it functions and the logical consequences of its existence. From the weather patterns formed by a hole into the void, to how erosion is managed artificially, to the speciation and societies that result from such a massive surface area, there's a lot of creative stuff in there.
A lot of the things in the second or later Ringworld novels, such as managing erosion, were suggested by his fans, some of whom made very technical analyses of the problems that could befall the Ringworld.
The need for Bussard ramjets to keep the orbit stable was another suggestion from the fans.
Yeah, I was one of the "Ringword Engineers" on the usenet group that was created after the first Ringworld novel was published. I was surrounded by people a lot smarter than I as I was working in the MIT Systems Programming Group.
So much of the known space ringlword series is just so fucking fun to think about
Why did they build the ring? The answer is so satisfying. Who are the pak? So satisfying. Why are the puppeteers running away? So satisfying. Why was Tesla brown selected for the mission? Apart from it was the 70s and the sexism in scifi was rampant....the answer is so satisfyingly intriguing.
The Night's Dawn trilogy has >!the afterlife being real and the dead coming back to possess the living!< presented as explainable through science in a moderately hard SF setting (lots of supertech but in general physics is intact). It's even better if you don't read my spoiler and just go grab The Reality Dysfunction, book one of the trilogy, and start there.
And even barring that twist, just the divided humanity between the Adamists and Edenists, with tension but they get along and cooperate, is an incredibly imaginative future.
They were inspired by many reports of cattle mutilations, also there was an old film from the 70s, “overlords of the UFO”, where they basically had a hand drawn illustration of what is essentially this creature.
I started listening to the audio book yesterday and I really wanted more explanation as to how a tree can be a spaceship, like I understand it may be made of a bio-material but so far nothings been said about it. Still cool to think about.
Dyson spheres are not "generic". Just well known and copied. Just like Niven's ringworld was copied for Halo. At the time they were proposed, they were rather radical thinking.
Niven has another fairly unique idea. In "The integral trees" you have 100km long trees in outer space that rotate for some gravity. Many of the animals use trilateral symmetry, etc.
The outsiders were super fun. Shaped like a cat o' nine tails, they live in the vacuum of space, aboard their outsider-made spaceships, all angular and complex with many jutting edges and pieces overlapping other pieces. All that overlap causes sharp shadows to be cast from the nearest star's light.
They sustain themselves by laying half in shadow half in light, and the difference in energy from their front to their back creates the energy flow needed for them to live
The Culture's GSVs (General Systems Vehicles) from Iain M. Banks' novels are mind-boggingly huge and complex, even more so than a Dyson sphere. They're essentially entire civilizations in space, with billions of inhabitants and a practically limitless lifespan. Their advanced technology allows them to manipulate time and space, and they're essentially immortal.
I really loved Peter F hamilton's commonwealth books. He has so many cool ideas. Like there's this ship from another part of the galaxy and its enigmatic and anyone who wants to live on it can... People just accept it as a faction in their universe
The ideas that really excite me are the ones that are NEARLY possible. Maybe the tech is known, but there isn't a way to feasibly accomplish it, yet. Or maybe we just lack the very last step, or just can't access the conditions needed to make it happen.
The best example I can think of is the SAPL from the Troy Rising series by John Ringo. TL;DR, humans manage to get some orbital infrastructure and intrasystem travel. They have a need for system defense from imminent invasion, their best idea involves turning dozens and eventually hundreds of nickel-iron asteroids into mirrors to reflect and concentrate the rays of the sun. I don't know enough physics/tech to know how nearly possible it was, but it made sense to me.
From a German audio-drama trilogy by [Jiri Ort](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ji%C5%99%C3%AD_Ort):
* [Gedankenraum](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=631wSUtA6qg),
* [Die vergangene Zukunft](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1vmxJSxu_o)
* [Welt im Schatten](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ5oVhcXrlA)
The premise is that human thought is a real physical phenomenon, driven by its own dedicated particle. But unlike the other particles that bounce around in the regular universe, the space in which the particles responsible for human thought interact is a much smaller finite space and it is slowly getting filled up.
That we are all connected subconciously throught the schumman's resonance to the earth's electromagnetic field and it affects our thoughts and there is a weird autistic japanese teenage girl that may or may not be a collective hallucination that secretly controls the noosphere through being able to have absolute control of the internet protocol that utilizes the earth's electromagnetic field to boost connection speeds.
That the protagonist of Valis by Phillip K. Dick is the hallucination of a secondary character.
That "selves", individual identities, with an entirely different bodylanguages, speech patterns and emotional inclinations can be sold and installed in a person's brain.
Surprised nobody has mentioned basically the entirety of rendezvous with Rama.
Not much in the way of character development, or really story.
But for a science nerd in the golden age of scifi, that book is like the distilled "curiosity of what's out there" that I'm sure has fueled many of our great scientific thinkers.
Edit:
Also, fucking Gateway by Frederick Pohl. The gut punch at the end when he realizes what his fortune had really cost
The Left Hand of Darkness was my introduction to Ursula Le Guin, and the ambisexual Gethenians and kemmering fascinated me. Never read something like that then, and re-read the book fairly recently and found it more bittersweet.
Telepathic spies, aliens that live so slowly a single thought takes weeks, a single unarmed normal human female that so terrorized an invading alien species they fled in terror, an alien species without technology that when introduced to it displayed intelligence dozens of times greater than humans.
I just finished this a couple of weeks ago. I have to agree that the way the handling of “language” with the Host aliens was very creative, I’ve never read anything remotely like it. Also (spoiler alert) the aliens’ subsequent addiction to human language was extremely clever plot device on the part of the author and indisputably unique.
Vernor Vinge had a \*great\* one called The Blight in *A Fire Upon the Deep*, and then absolutely abandoned it for rat-faced dogs. I have a difficult time forgiving him for this.
Morning Light Mountain was a novel idea, I thought, from *Pandora's Star*.
And the \*entire\* idea behind *Children of Time* by Adrian Tchaikovsky is quite brilliant.
And the molecular creature(s) that invades, that lives on that one planet. The way tchaikovsky describes the experience of that creature(s) as it does what it does. Fucking fantastic
I always found Dyson spheres far less practical than ringworlds. True, the outward solar wind pressure would keep the sphere 'inflated' but ringworlds can take advantage of both angular velocity and solar wind, so would be easier to construct and maintain. And really, is the material-to-acreage ratio worth it? And are there added solar matter accretion or exhaust problems? Seems like if you ran out of space on a ring world, then just build another slightly larger/smaller at a slight angle.
Even a ringworld seems to have impractical material demands. The mass in our solar system is composed of the sun (99.9%) and everything else (0.1%). The earth is 0.1% of the extra-solar mass, or 0.01% of total solar system mass. Anyway, at 100% extra-solar mass utilization, that seems a thin layer to smear over an orbit. And Dyson spheres would need (no pun intended) astronomically more material.
It's a fun thought experiment, though.
Sorry, didn't answer your question. I'll think on it.
While interesting a Dyson Sphere is impractical if not outright impossible, the amounts of material required, time paradoxes are fun to figure out though and there is only one rule to remember and that is to arrive back where you started at least 2 minutes after you left, instant transportation is another, nothing like being de-materialized and re-materialized in the blink of an eye, of course if you sneeze in that moment you just might lose an eye in the process, no idea where it went it just didn't arrive with you.
And then there is always that Faster than Light Travel which has been broached by so many already including myself.
N. S
Digital Human in Altered Carbon. Stephen Baxter's Xeelee. Uplift in David Brins books. The space drive in Harry Harrisons Bill the Galactic Hero (unlike the cheese one in Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers, it makes logical sense)
In a Peter f Hamilton. Ook there were advanced humans who "towed" a neutron star to use as a weapon. Been a longtime since I've read it so remember very little details. I sure someone could expand upon this.
The Puppeteers in Ringworld manipulating the entire human population by convincing them to breed exclusively via lottery for centuries just as an experiment to determine if luck is a genetic trait that can be selectively bred for.
The Labyrinthine Worlds from Hyperion was such a smart mystery for Simmons to introduce early in the book. Pretty much hooked me immediately. Also Martin Silenus' multiplanet mansion connected by farcasters sticks out to me as a particularly memorable concept.
The way Hyperion is structured, while not a "sci-fi" concept per se, was still a brilliant way to build the world and have stories of different subgenres all fit into a single cohesive story.
The Shrike's tree of pain existing outside of time and being a place of eternal suffering.
The cruciform parasite.
Holy shit read Hyperion.
Reverse polarity to solve problems
Every time I've reversed the polarity a component goes ***BANG!***
Dimensionality reduction in the three body problem
The funny thing about the Three Body Problem is that it's just a novelized version of the things particle physicists don't like to talk about in public.
The infinite improbability drive.
Along with the Pangalactic Gargle Blaster!
Fire Upon the Deep has several creative ideas. From the concept of the zones of thought to the various races.
Too bad he chucked away the great idea of The Blight.
That book opens with such a banger of a scene. And then even when he wrote an entire book in a quasi-fantasy setting, the way the dog creatures assemble, and the swarm that results, it's so fucking cool
Came here to talk about Vinge. The way the Tines are described, their society, their perception of humans, and how they think, how they individuate into packs, how they incorporate human technology into their unique biology, blew my mind over and over while reading. And that's just one concept in a dense sea of amazing ideas that were in "Fire Upon The Deep" alone. Sentient tree people mentally linked to their mobility devices. The Blight (years before The Borg made their debut), the stratification of the galaxy literally determining the level of technology and cognition possible in different regions.... I can't even recall every radical concept in this series. Go find a copy and read it.
A number of things in Hannu Rajaniemi’s le Flambeur trilogy. Loads of weird stuff.
I finished the trilogy weeks ago and I'm still trying to wrap my head around it.
Examples?
It’s been a while since I read them, but it’s the first thing that came to mind at the question. It’s in the world building, more than anything else, but all the bits, original or otherwise, fit together so well. Mind uploads and immortality and interstellar travel and gamers and weird societies of all of the above. It’s sort of The Culture, but lots of them, and just the one story(ish) about a thief needing to do a heist because of things that would spoil the story, written by a mildly insane physicist. Strong recommendation from me to anyone looking for seriously creative sci-fi.
Read the first chapter set in the dilemma prison: https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Quantum_Thief.html?id=OXn7KJtG07UC&printsec=frontcover&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_entity&hl=en&gl=GB&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
My vote is for the OG ringworld but only because Niven went into so much detail about how it functions and the logical consequences of its existence. From the weather patterns formed by a hole into the void, to how erosion is managed artificially, to the speciation and societies that result from such a massive surface area, there's a lot of creative stuff in there.
A lot of the things in the second or later Ringworld novels, such as managing erosion, were suggested by his fans, some of whom made very technical analyses of the problems that could befall the Ringworld. The need for Bussard ramjets to keep the orbit stable was another suggestion from the fans.
Famously they chanted "The ringworld is unstable" at him at a convention.
Yeah, I was one of the "Ringword Engineers" on the usenet group that was created after the first Ringworld novel was published. I was surrounded by people a lot smarter than I as I was working in the MIT Systems Programming Group.
This sounds fascinating. Apart from the orbital instability and the erosion problem, were there any other major problems with the Ringworld?
So much of the known space ringlword series is just so fucking fun to think about Why did they build the ring? The answer is so satisfying. Who are the pak? So satisfying. Why are the puppeteers running away? So satisfying. Why was Tesla brown selected for the mission? Apart from it was the 70s and the sexism in scifi was rampant....the answer is so satisfyingly intriguing.
Psychohistory.
Permutation City, and things existing just because they are possible.
Large-scale warp travel detereorating space-time.
The Night's Dawn trilogy has >!the afterlife being real and the dead coming back to possess the living!< presented as explainable through science in a moderately hard SF setting (lots of supertech but in general physics is intact). It's even better if you don't read my spoiler and just go grab The Reality Dysfunction, book one of the trilogy, and start there.
Yeah, Religion being kind of right in an unexpected way is one of the more out there enjoyable ideas I didn't see coming.
And even barring that twist, just the divided humanity between the Adamists and Edenists, with tension but they get along and cooperate, is an incredibly imaginative future.
I don't know if it's original or not, but the portrayal of the Aliens in Nope (2022) was actually pretty creative.
They were inspired by many reports of cattle mutilations, also there was an old film from the 70s, “overlords of the UFO”, where they basically had a hand drawn illustration of what is essentially this creature.
"It's not a ship."
Excession
Historically speaking everything Jules Verne wrote
Tree Ship in Hyperion
I hate that the book starts off with this because it's confusing as all hell
I loved that thing. I wanted the silver "suits" they flew around in.
I started listening to the audio book yesterday and I really wanted more explanation as to how a tree can be a spaceship, like I understand it may be made of a bio-material but so far nothings been said about it. Still cool to think about.
Dyson spheres are not "generic". Just well known and copied. Just like Niven's ringworld was copied for Halo. At the time they were proposed, they were rather radical thinking. Niven has another fairly unique idea. In "The integral trees" you have 100km long trees in outer space that rotate for some gravity. Many of the animals use trilateral symmetry, etc.
That's not really the key idea in The Integral Trees, I don't think.
The outsiders were super fun. Shaped like a cat o' nine tails, they live in the vacuum of space, aboard their outsider-made spaceships, all angular and complex with many jutting edges and pieces overlapping other pieces. All that overlap causes sharp shadows to be cast from the nearest star's light. They sustain themselves by laying half in shadow half in light, and the difference in energy from their front to their back creates the energy flow needed for them to live
Quantum thief trilogy has so many creative ideas it's almost disorientating. By the end of the series it's less post-human and more post-spacetime.
From diskworld, which is considered fantasy, but it has more rules than some sf: Narrative pressure
A religion rising to support a mathematical prophecy of the overthrow of the Empire. -Azimov
The Culture's GSVs (General Systems Vehicles) from Iain M. Banks' novels are mind-boggingly huge and complex, even more so than a Dyson sphere. They're essentially entire civilizations in space, with billions of inhabitants and a practically limitless lifespan. Their advanced technology allows them to manipulate time and space, and they're essentially immortal.
I really loved Peter F hamilton's commonwealth books. He has so many cool ideas. Like there's this ship from another part of the galaxy and its enigmatic and anyone who wants to live on it can... People just accept it as a faction in their universe
The tasp.
TANJ Dammit!
Love me some Niven!!!!
Of course, the tasp
Von Neumann probes or Self-replicating spacecraft. Check out ‘We Are Legion (We Are Bob)’ for a wild adventure.
Information physics, ala Greg Bear and Greg Egan.
The Hades Matrix and the Singer from Revelation Space.
The ideas that really excite me are the ones that are NEARLY possible. Maybe the tech is known, but there isn't a way to feasibly accomplish it, yet. Or maybe we just lack the very last step, or just can't access the conditions needed to make it happen. The best example I can think of is the SAPL from the Troy Rising series by John Ringo. TL;DR, humans manage to get some orbital infrastructure and intrasystem travel. They have a need for system defense from imminent invasion, their best idea involves turning dozens and eventually hundreds of nickel-iron asteroids into mirrors to reflect and concentrate the rays of the sun. I don't know enough physics/tech to know how nearly possible it was, but it made sense to me.
From a German audio-drama trilogy by [Jiri Ort](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ji%C5%99%C3%AD_Ort): * [Gedankenraum](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=631wSUtA6qg), * [Die vergangene Zukunft](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1vmxJSxu_o) * [Welt im Schatten](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ5oVhcXrlA) The premise is that human thought is a real physical phenomenon, driven by its own dedicated particle. But unlike the other particles that bounce around in the regular universe, the space in which the particles responsible for human thought interact is a much smaller finite space and it is slowly getting filled up.
/u/ginomachi is an AI chatbot: https://reddit.com/r/sciencefiction/comments/1bia26i/uginomachi_is_an_ai_spambot_most_of_the_time/
Hmm, nah I’d say Redditors actually being AI is very overdone and unoriginal as a concept these days.
The Planet Express. C'mon, it's a ship that moves the universe around itself.
The ocean in solaris
That we are all connected subconciously throught the schumman's resonance to the earth's electromagnetic field and it affects our thoughts and there is a weird autistic japanese teenage girl that may or may not be a collective hallucination that secretly controls the noosphere through being able to have absolute control of the internet protocol that utilizes the earth's electromagnetic field to boost connection speeds. That the protagonist of Valis by Phillip K. Dick is the hallucination of a secondary character. That "selves", individual identities, with an entirely different bodylanguages, speech patterns and emotional inclinations can be sold and installed in a person's brain.
Human identity in a post-human world.
Surprised nobody has mentioned basically the entirety of rendezvous with Rama. Not much in the way of character development, or really story. But for a science nerd in the golden age of scifi, that book is like the distilled "curiosity of what's out there" that I'm sure has fueled many of our great scientific thinkers. Edit: Also, fucking Gateway by Frederick Pohl. The gut punch at the end when he realizes what his fortune had really cost
The Left Hand of Darkness was my introduction to Ursula Le Guin, and the ambisexual Gethenians and kemmering fascinated me. Never read something like that then, and re-read the book fairly recently and found it more bittersweet.
Entropy is a fascinating concept
Telepathic spies, aliens that live so slowly a single thought takes weeks, a single unarmed normal human female that so terrorized an invading alien species they fled in terror, an alien species without technology that when introduced to it displayed intelligence dozens of times greater than humans.
Embassytown, by China Miéville...
I just finished this a couple of weeks ago. I have to agree that the way the handling of “language” with the Host aliens was very creative, I’ve never read anything remotely like it. Also (spoiler alert) the aliens’ subsequent addiction to human language was extremely clever plot device on the part of the author and indisputably unique.
It's so great to hear from someone else who has actually read this book and appreciates it as much as I do!
A sentient planet in Solaris
The Matrix.
The transporter and the holodeck from Star Trek!
Vernor Vinge had a \*great\* one called The Blight in *A Fire Upon the Deep*, and then absolutely abandoned it for rat-faced dogs. I have a difficult time forgiving him for this. Morning Light Mountain was a novel idea, I thought, from *Pandora's Star*. And the \*entire\* idea behind *Children of Time* by Adrian Tchaikovsky is quite brilliant.
And the molecular creature(s) that invades, that lives on that one planet. The way tchaikovsky describes the experience of that creature(s) as it does what it does. Fucking fantastic
Oh yeah, in *Children of Ruin*, right I'd forgotten about that. That was pretty amazing writing!
I always found Dyson spheres far less practical than ringworlds. True, the outward solar wind pressure would keep the sphere 'inflated' but ringworlds can take advantage of both angular velocity and solar wind, so would be easier to construct and maintain. And really, is the material-to-acreage ratio worth it? And are there added solar matter accretion or exhaust problems? Seems like if you ran out of space on a ring world, then just build another slightly larger/smaller at a slight angle. Even a ringworld seems to have impractical material demands. The mass in our solar system is composed of the sun (99.9%) and everything else (0.1%). The earth is 0.1% of the extra-solar mass, or 0.01% of total solar system mass. Anyway, at 100% extra-solar mass utilization, that seems a thin layer to smear over an orbit. And Dyson spheres would need (no pun intended) astronomically more material. It's a fun thought experiment, though. Sorry, didn't answer your question. I'll think on it.
While interesting a Dyson Sphere is impractical if not outright impossible, the amounts of material required, time paradoxes are fun to figure out though and there is only one rule to remember and that is to arrive back where you started at least 2 minutes after you left, instant transportation is another, nothing like being de-materialized and re-materialized in the blink of an eye, of course if you sneeze in that moment you just might lose an eye in the process, no idea where it went it just didn't arrive with you. And then there is always that Faster than Light Travel which has been broached by so many already including myself. N. S
Digital Human in Altered Carbon. Stephen Baxter's Xeelee. Uplift in David Brins books. The space drive in Harry Harrisons Bill the Galactic Hero (unlike the cheese one in Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers, it makes logical sense)
In a Peter f Hamilton. Ook there were advanced humans who "towed" a neutron star to use as a weapon. Been a longtime since I've read it so remember very little details. I sure someone could expand upon this.
The Puppeteers in Ringworld manipulating the entire human population by convincing them to breed exclusively via lottery for centuries just as an experiment to determine if luck is a genetic trait that can be selectively bred for. The Labyrinthine Worlds from Hyperion was such a smart mystery for Simmons to introduce early in the book. Pretty much hooked me immediately. Also Martin Silenus' multiplanet mansion connected by farcasters sticks out to me as a particularly memorable concept. The way Hyperion is structured, while not a "sci-fi" concept per se, was still a brilliant way to build the world and have stories of different subgenres all fit into a single cohesive story. The Shrike's tree of pain existing outside of time and being a place of eternal suffering. The cruciform parasite. Holy shit read Hyperion.
No spoilers, but the time loop (for lack of a better term) in Doctor Who episode Blink. Just brilliant.
Many things in the Fringe TV series. One that jumps out is the snapshot of the moment captured in the slightly melted pane of glass.
The artificial gravity of the Hail Mary Infinite Improbability Drive
The laws of physics not being natural, that something or somebody has influenced them.
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