labingi: (Default)
A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) by David Lindsay is the best book I have read in a long time (sci fi or otherwise). It’s an odd duck: never a huge success but never out of print, influential for many, apparently including C. S. Lewis in his Space Trilogy, but often absent from the Great Works of Science Fiction lists. Until I happened on a YouTube video about it, I had never heard of it or Lindsay.

Perhaps all this isn’t surprising because the book really is odd; it may be a quintessential example a very well-written “niche” work, destined to be admired by a few and passed by by most.

Like The Space Trilogy, A Voyage to Arcturus uses a science fiction setting to stage a philosophical exploration of the meaning of life, morality, and so on. This staging is so similar, in fact, that I initially expected the book to be an allegory or thought experiment on Christian cosmology. It is not. In fact, while it echoes themes from real-world religions and philosophies, the cosmology it seems to settle on is not quite like anything else I’ve encountered. (I won’t say more here due to spoilers.)

I find this book hard to understand. I could not predict where it was going, even up to the last page. And while I found the ending a bit anti-climactic (maybe I just didn’t get it), I like all that. I like being surprised; I like being perplexed. I would take that a hundred times over being bored by sameness. I am also in awe of Lindsay’s worldbuilding. Overall this book is immensely ahead of its time. It was published in 1920, but I would have readily believed it came from the 1950s, or even a less gender-progressive corner of the ‘60’s or ‘70s. It’s that far-thinking. Spoilers below the cutExpandRead more... )
labingi: (Default)
A question for you physicsy folks out there ([personal profile] astrogirl?). I'm writing a story that hinges on time dilation in space travel, and to get the sort of time dilation I need for the story to work, I need to reach speeds around 0.9c or higher.

My question is what kind of drive could I posit these people are using? This story is not set in the super distant future: a few to several hundred years. And I can trade on the idea that a lot can happen in 100 years of unexpected innovation (as we've seen in the past), but they're not gods or anything.

These ships are not multi-generational. They are designed to get people from point A to point B in not more than a few years, ship time. (In terms of living space, they are closer to Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary than KS Robinson's Aurora. I'm thinking they rely on acceleration for simulated gravity, not rotation.

This society does have access to lots of raw materials, ranging from bodies to mine to stars, nebulae, etc., and they have big, fast 3D printers.

I want to reasonably appease an audience that is not picky about very hard SF but would like some semblance of scientific plausibility.

Thanks!
labingi: (Default)
I came across this neat animated sci-fi short (7:33 minutes), "Scavengers" by Charles Huettner. It has a very creative take on an alien biosphere and its ecological interactions. I haven't quite seen anything like it.

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