In the forward-looking spirit of the New Year, it might be fun to get readers’ opinions of their favorite science fiction inventions. I wrote about favorite sci-fi materials back in 2015, but let’s broaden the field. Personally, I’m a fan of the farcaster (spoiler warning!) from the Hyperion Cantos of Dan Simmons. I also have a long-time affection for Larry Niven’s Known Space universe, especially the General Products Hull (a single molecule transparent to the visible, but opaque at all other wavelengths, and with binding somehow strengthened by an external fusion power source) and the Slaver Disintegrator, which somehow turns off the negative charge of the electron, and thus makes matter tear itself apart from the unscreened Coulomb repulsion of the protons in atomic nuclei. Please comment below with your favorites.
On another new year’s note, someone needs to do a detailed study of the solubility limit of crème de cassis in champagne. Too high a cassis to champagne ratio in your kir royals, and you end up with extra cassis stratified at the bottom of your flute, as shown here.
Happy new year to all, and best wishes for a great 2023.
No love for the stasis box in Known Space? I think that would be amazing ... no food spoilage, for example. Cook a meal, pop it in the stasis box, eat it hot and fresh whenever. Imagine what pizza delivery could do!
ReplyDeleteI keep waiting for the active-sensor "tires" from Snow Crash, where the computer telescopes spokes in or out to meet the road so that the ride is amazingly smooth. I'd also like the specs from Snow Crash, giving you the metaverse by painting lasers on your retinas.
The stasis box is a great one. I like how it has to be perfectly reflective from the outside. I’d forgotten about the Snowcrash tires. How about the transfer booth or stepping disks?
ReplyDeleteAll Purpose Spray from Futurama!
ReplyDeleteInfinite improbability drive.
ReplyDeleteI’m coming in way, way late on this, but mine has to be the notion of newmatter in Neal Stephenson’s brilliant novel Anathem. For those who haven’t read the book, newmatter is matter which obeys physical laws slightly different than those in our cosmos, and by virtue of that, has useful properties not achievable with “ordinary” matter. The idea is that if you have a powerful enough particle accelerator, you can create collisions energetic enough to get to a state “close enough to the Big Bang” where the basic constants of Nature - speed of light, charge on the electron, the fine structure constant, etc. - are malleable, and so you can create new and more useful kinds of matter, apparently in ton-lots.
ReplyDeleteThe energy source for this is never explained, for obvious reasons, and the existence of newmatter is a convenient mcguffin for some parts of the plot, but it could have been removed from the book without major issues. I suspect Stephenson just liked the idea too much to do away with it, despite the very obvious energy issue.
Niven’s stasis field, which not only has perfect reflectivity but infinite rigidity, is a good one too. Many years ago, my then-girlfriend and I were getting drunk with Niven in his hotel room, and in between his attempts to steal my girlfriend, we discussed some difficulties with the stasis field. One good one was this: make a variable-sword that’s really long, hundreds of AU; then wave it. Remember, it’s perfectly rigid. What happens? Can the tip go faster than light?
Asimov’s idea of the Temporal Field, providing a way to “stand outside” of the flow of time, was the most original time-travel I ran across back in my SF days. And it was the basis for what I (and quite a few others) consider to be far and away his best novel, The End of Eternity. If you’ve never read it, you should; really good book.