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Has modern Science Fiction lost its way?
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Which is literally what 'arcane' means. You're right though. It does have mystical connotations. I apologize. I used arcane because I like that word.
To Flarna's response, I also agree with everything your saying as reasonable. We won't really know how similar or different aliens of any form or origin are to us beyond assumptions until we actually meet some. And even that is another assumption; the assumption that the universe is too big not to have other life, intelligent or otherwise, in it.
Maybe science fiction, hard and soft alike, need to start looking at these kinds of themes more to find new ground to tread, rather then revisiting the infinite multitude of good and bad futures that await humanity.
This occurred to me as well. Also, ask yourself this: if some sort of sentience could exist that we could neither observe acting sentient nor communicate with, is there any difference between it and a non-sentience?
1) Eating: A large number of Terran organisms don't eat--there's no reason to suspect that life on another world, even intelligent life, would necessarily be heterotrophic. Chemosynthetic or photosynthetic life forms are possible, and there may be even stranger power sources. All that is required is a source of energy.
2) Sleep: We don't even know the purpose of sleep in Terran animals--we have absolutely no reason to suspect that it's common in other forms of life elsewhere in the universe.
3) Mating: Again, it's not at all clear whether sex is something that could be expected to evolve consistently on different worlds, even with similar overall planetary conditions. There are plenty of asexual organisms on Earth, and it's entirely possible that they could have become dominant given small differences in our planet's history.
4) Find Shelter: This one's obviously wrong--plenty of animals on Earth don't bother with this, and plenty do. You can't generalize to unknown and arbitrary environments from our tiny sample. There's no reason another planet should necessarily have changing seasons or weather at all--there may be quite literally nothing to seek shelter from.
5) Survive: This is a tautology given the way evolution operates. No points for pointing this out.
6) Find answers for their existence: This is mere supposition. Curiosity is an adaptation in humans and other organisms where it appears--it may or may not arise in other intelligent life. I'm ignoring the more "spiritual" connotations of this sentence because we obviously have no good reason to think other species would feel the same way.
I hope you realize that you're just making things up at this point. We are currently working with a sample size of exactly one out of trillions of worlds--and we know for a fact that ours is not even typical (because our star, Sol, is not typical--it is unusually bright; most stars are what we'd call red dwarfs). All life on the Earth has both evolved to thrive in certain shared environmental conditions and is descended from a common ancestor. Just how "different" alien life would be is a complete unknown.
StarCraft II User Name: DeadMenRise
Look at the other benefits as well: with so many stars and planets, sans the biotics and mind control there's probably a race like the Asari out there.
TOS and DS9 were actually about how humans could overcome poverty, disease, and war to build a better future, whereas in the other shows, humans simply are able to do it because they just magically become better in the future and people today aren't able to achieve that because we're a bunch of dumb unevolved monkeys.
More importantly, if you have magic, you probably wouldn't get a renaissance. In LotR, by the time humans start sciencing up the place, all the elves will be gone and the Ents will probably be dead so there won't be much magic left to science at.
But if you have a Wizard, why would you need science?
If you have a wizard, you technically don't need technology ethier, but people put those two together all the time.
I mean, I get why, and it can make for some interesting stories, but after a certain point logically speaking a world with high technology and magic doesn't really make sense unless the magic is kept secret or only able to work or certain people.
It's why Harry Potter being stuck with quills doesn't bother me in the slightest.
It's like that deleted scene from LotR where the Witch King's sword bursts into flame and Gandalf's staff explodes. Why? You could describe a system where the force of the Witch King's magic exceeded the normal force of Gandalf's staff or how about it's fucking magic man. Its properties are different from moment to moment.
That's what Tolkien envisioned when he made Middle earth. It was our Earth before mankind finally took over the planet.
In that case science is replaced by magic. With enough magic wielders they're enough to transform society into being far more powerful, depending on what magic system they have access to. Harry Potter's wizarding world is a good example with this.
Exactly. I feel like it'd be more of a distraction of we got Middle Earth: The Renaissance Years though.
The different types of magic are different tropes, and if the writer has all these tropes over here that are about how the universe is unknowable or how everything has a cost or how God Is Great, and then over here they have a neoplatonist or rules-based magic system, the tropes are going to clash, and not in a good way.
Imagine how shit LOTR would be if Gandalf was 30th level. And imagine how weird the Dresden Files would be if Harry's magic came from a deep existential exploration of the state of his soul.
The powerful will eventually possess the production capacity to sustain their lifestyles without our continued existence being necessary.
What do you think will happen to us?
Trend toward dystopia:Explained
Hmm, can you reccommend anything?
this is basically the premise of star trek, and it went the entirely opposite direction
my unofficial autobio will be accompanied with tips on how to smile
cause I've found that when they don't see you frown, they never know that you're a threat
and they don't sweat you when you came around
Analog signal processing is truly some crazy awesome as hell black magic.
Well, there might be the mind control. But it would probably be achieved via a symbiotic fungus which would take control of your brain, affect your behaviour and force you to not be hostile to them. And then likely kill you. Fungus can do crazy stuff to insects, humans are just lucky we are too slow to be of much interest to plants and insects or we'd be up against some crazy stuff. Did you know there is a wasp which uses a retrovirus to change the DNA of trees at the point where it lays eggs to make them produce sap for its larvae?
Star Trek said that advances in technology and information distribution effectively destroyed the concept of 'powerful'. There was only very limited leverage which could be brought to bear by even the most powerful when food, fuel, shelter and medical care became effectively free.
In a dystopia super technologies exist, and may be self repairing (requiring no further support) but they are initially hugely expensive. Thus, only the super rich can get them and eventually declare themselves to be effectively god. It's the difference between what would happen to our society if we discoverd that say, using a 50 carat diamond we could give you immortality and eternal youth, or if we discovered that fusion was possible. One is a utopian technology (fusion) and another is dystopian.
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Well its more we have a closed circulatory system as opposed to an arthropod's open hemocoel or the vascular system of a plant, fungal invaders aren't going to be able to spread themselves very well, or get in anywhere, and in addition to that the blood brain barrier is mighty fortress. Plus the mammalian immune system is the death star to the invertebrate ISS (a hugely expensive engine of destruction that's a wasteful extravagance for most phyla).
If mind control fungus was doable for Vertebrates, we'd probably see it around - those fungal buggers get in everything else after all!
EDIT: I hate to go so off-topic, but check that shiz out:
After a second holocaust, WW3, and numerous other horrors, yeah.
the number of books being published every year is at a record high. higher than it's ever been, despite the contraction of the industry as a whole. which means they're putting out more books, not fewer. yes a good many of them are celebrity books but even these are becoming lost in clamor unless it's a 'big' one like the steve jobs bio. they do take risks, actually. most books don't do well at all, and yet publishers still put out thousands of books every year, many of them debut fiction writers.
I wonder if there's anyway to measure the inequality of the book publishing market? My suspicion is that more and more sales are going to just a few mega-bestsellers, while most books published these days hardly get read at all.
yes this is the case. the majority of books sell very poorly, but still involve a considerable amount of time and effort on the part of an author, agent, and publisher, even if the publisher doesn't put its publicity dollars behind the book. There's an enormous amount of good fiction being put out right now, but because there's so many books it's very tough to get one to stand out. most publishers are bankrolled by the success of books like the hunger games, since a huge seller like that can keep a publisher in the black for quite a while.
distram is right that there's a scramble to find 'safe books' but he's vastly oversimplifying the situation.
How is that not the future?
The future is a robot street sweeper dropping a few coins in your coffee cup.
Well as Iain M. Banks envisages it, the future is the super-intelligent AIs basically keeping people as pets for pretty much the same reasons we keep cats.
I thought I made this pretty clear but I guess I still have to spell it out. Sci-fi novels are just fine, they've always been pushing boundaries and continue to do so.
Sci-fi in popular film and television however has not. It's actually taken a nosedive with a few exceptions and decided to play it safe by recycling action genres in a "futuristic" setting. The Battlestar Galactica re-imagining for example, good as it was, was a space opera that didn't really delve too deeply into themes of artificial intelligence, self-awareness, etc. and instead opted for religious symbolism.
Which is fine, since that's what it set out to do.
My point is that it's one of the more recent examples of a GOOD sci-fi series that nevertheless was almost completely devoid of a genuine sense of wonder, discovery or new ideas.
It was drama, story arcs and action done well but that was about it.
The last good sci-fi show on tv is Dr Who. And I'm waiting for the inevitable American remake to destroy that.
He lives on as cheezburger grease in our hearts.