this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2026
90 points (96.9% liked)

Science Fiction

19088 readers
11 users here now

Welcome to /c/ScienceFiction

December book club canceled. Short stories instead!

We are a community for discussing all things Science Fiction. We want this to be a place for members to discuss and share everything they love about Science Fiction, whether that be books, movies, TV shows and more. Please feel free to take part and help our community grow.

  1. Be civil: disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally insult others.
  2. Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, or advocating violence will be removed.
  3. Spam, self promotion, trolling, and bots are not allowed
  4. Put (Spoilers) in the title of your post if you anticipate spoilers.
  5. Please use spoiler tags whenever commenting a spoiler in a non-spoiler thread.

Lemmy World Rules

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Tenthrow@lemmy.world
90
Favorite scifi concept? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 4 days ago by ashenone@lemmy.ml to c/sciencefiction@lemmy.world
129 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I'd love to hear about your favorite concept or idea you've read about or seen in scifi media.

My personal favorite is the Conjoiner Drive out of the Revelation Space series. These ship drives are dual drives on either side of a lighthugger and have a living being inside the drives to act as a supercomputer, which holds a wormhole open inside the drives. The wormhole links far in the past to the big-bang and uses the energy from the big-bang for propulsion.

In most scifi I've come across wormholes are used for FTL travel, and I thought this was such a unique and creative use of a wormhole it has stuck with me for years after reading about it.

So what are your favorite devices or ideas that have come out of scifi media?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Riven is great, probably my favorite in the series. You should definitely play it as soon as you get the chance.

But I think you're a bit off the mark with descriptive books. It's not VR, it's a teleporter. When you write an Age in a book, you're not creating it, you're describing it. When the book is detailed enough, it opens a portal to an existing world that matches your description.

It's pretty explicitly based on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, with infinite worlds lying on The Great Tree of Possibilities.

This is reinforced by a few details:

  • You can't write contradictions into an Age. The book will try to link to a world that matches your description, but that world is going to be extremely unstable if it works at all.

  • Altering a descriptive book is very risky. You can write changes after you've been to an Age assuming you've never observed anything that would contradict the change(the idea being that the waveform of possibility is still a bit in flux concerning details not previously mentioned), but it's very difficult to pull off and you need to be really really good at writing books to not break something.

  • It's generally a bad idea to try to write technology into an Age. Yeah infinite worlds, but artificial features are so specific you have difficulty finding a good match