No, seriously, we always joke about how our sci-fi TV is just humans in rubber masks, and by extension how real aliens would find it quaint and ridiculous, but who says they wouldn’t get it? The Zurgleplexians get to Earth and watch Star Trek and go, oh, yes! What an excellent use of limited resources to create serialized fiction. Oh, this one over here is both creative and hearts-wrenching! Glorbin, come watch this one!
Of course Zurgleplex had some kind of Star Trek equivalent. Storytelling always pushes the limits of what a society can understand or accomplish at any point in time. It wasn’t until the mid-80s that we got what we’d recognize as CGI these days, but starships and space battles and weird aliens were being depicted all the same, with whatever resources their creators could manage. Give me aliens who love Star Trek.
on the topic of humans being the intergalactic “hold my beer” species: imagine an alien stepping onto a human starship and seeing a space roomba™ with a knife duct taped onto it, just wandering around the ship
it doesn’t have any special intelligence. it’s just a normal space roomba. there are other space roombas on the ship and they don’t have knives. it’s just this one. knife space roomba has full clearance to every room in the ship. occasionally crew members will be talking and then suddenly swear and clutch their ankle. knife space roomba putters off, leaving them to their mild stab wounds.
“what is the point?” asks the alien as another crew member casually steps over the knife-wielding robot. “is it to test your speed and agility?”
“no it doesn’t really go that fast,” replies the captain.
“does it teach you to stay ever-vigilant?”
“I mean I guess so but that’s more of a side effect.”
“does it weed out the weak? does it protect you from invaders? do repeated stabbings let your species heal more quickly in the future?”
“it doesn’t stab very hard, it gets us more than it gets our enemies, and no, but that sounds cool — someone write that down.”
“but then what is its purpose?”
“I don’t know,” the captain says, leaning down to give the space roomba an affectionate pat. “it just seemed cool”
this is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard but I thought about it for five seconds and realized that if I were, say, a random communications officer onboard this ship and someone taped a knife to a roomba it would take maybe three weeks before even I was inordinately fond of Stabby. I would be proud of Stabby when I met up with my other spacefleet friends for space coffee, I would tell them about the time Stabby got the second mate in the ankle five seconds before the fleet admiral beamed on board and she swore in seven different languages in front of high command.
also by the fourth day Stabby would be in the ship’s log, he’d have little painted-on insignia, people would salute him as he went by, and someone would hook up a twitter account to tweet maniacal laughter and/or a truly terrible knock-knock joke every time he managed to nick someone.
Omg so the ting I typed up might actually happen this is gold
I am suddenly astonished that Stabby isn’t Farscape canon. 1812 was weird enough.
Stabby’s little charging dock would start accruing cuddly toys and commemorative holo-vids of Stabby’s greatest stabs. Its insignia would start off at a fairly low rank, but soon, without anyone every discussing it, everyone would know that Stabby got to take the rank of the highest ranking crew member it stabbed. The ceremony for Flag Admiral Stabby was beautiful. The captain gave a speech.
Details: Six (6) members of a Mercenary/Pirate crew of little renown attempted to infiltrate ship in order to steal equipment and/or personnel.
Prior to being detained they had remained undetected for eight (8) hours and accumulated several high value materials (see attached log), and incapacitated and restrained several crewmen (see attached log) in dock #3, with the intention of using a life boat to exfiltrate.
Just prior to their would-be escape, the boarding party encountered the ship’s mascot. A cleaning unit which had been modified by crew members to mount a traditional Terran melee weapon, as well as an officer’s insignia (having been jokingly given a commission by the Captain the night before). Curious, one picked it up, before realising the mounted weapon had a nickel finish (highly toxic to their species) on the handle, and dropped it in a panic.
As the unit’s anti-impact sensors had been disabled, it immediately tried to right itself on landing. This caused it to flip over and slash the third knee of the boarder who dropped it, prompting the rest of the boarders to flee. In doing so, they tripped over a waste container, causing the unit to “chase” them, as it collected the trail of dust they left.
The security crew were alerted to the boarding party’s presence by an entry on “Sargent Stabby’s Hit List” – an account on an intership microblogging site which automatically logs any injuries caused by the cleaning unit in question – and quickly intercepted them.
Casualties: Four (4) crewmen treated for minor lacerations sustained after detaining boarding party, one (1) captured crewman treated for negative reaction to sedatives used by captors.
Belligerent status: Two (2) members of the enemy boarding party remain in stable condition in sickbay. Three (3) remaining surrendered peacefully and remain in the brig. One (1) refuses to leave the safety of a storage cupboard he went to ground in.
Recommendations/Actions:
All captured guards to undergo debriefing and possible disciplinary action for breaches of security protocol.
Remind all crew members to report missing colleagues immediately.
Retain a guard outside cleaning storage room 87 until the final boarder can be coaxed out and properly detained.
Cleaning unit D4.87 AKA
“Sargent Stabby” has been promoted to Quartermaster, and is now considered the superior officer of all autonomous drones on the ship. All Class #1 drones have been programmed to salute their superior with their effector, should it enter the room while they’re active.
Ok but what about that final bit – all the other space roombas respectfully standing to the side and saluting when Quatermaster Stabby comes past?
So lately it occurred to me that it seems like you could split people’s ideas about Solarpunk into two categories: “City” Solarpunk and “Country” Solarpunk.
“City” Solarpunk:
Tends to focus more on the idea of cities as humanity’s future, and how to improve them to that end. Better urban design/planning, apartment living, walkability, better streets, better communities, etc. Want to make cities “greener” in both tech and look.
“Country” Solarpunk:
More of a focus on the idea of Earthships and the Homestead, as well as a preference for smaller communities closer to nature. Preference for self-sufficiency for the household and the community.
Both of these outlooks are perfectly valid! (Though I’m partial to City Solarpunk myself) In my opinion, any realistic future is going to include a little of both. This is also very much based on my own observations and ideas, so take this with a grain of salt. I just find the differences in what people think about when they think of Solarpunk very interesting.
New trend or trope I would KILL to see in sci-fi novels:
Rich industrialists fund space travel and gain the means to leave the planet and colonize Mars to leave a ‘dying/depleted’ Earth behind. Only the 1% have the means to afford a ticket on board the ships and ‘start fresh’ on the red planet in domed cities or whatever.
And then with the people most responsible for destroying the planet and depleting its resources gone, the remaining 99% of people ‘left behind’ on Earth construct new socialist societies, implement clean energy and redistribute the existing resources while of restoring the planet’s renewable resources and healing the damage done by pollution and irresponsible waste management.
Cut to a few hundred years later where Earth has a thriving population on a thriving planet that is not at all the doomed and dying and ‘used up’ place the Mars colonists thought it was when they left for the planet they’re still attempting to terraform so they can step out of their scattered little bubble cities that don’t allow for any real growth, innovation or exploration.
Earthborn character to a Martian: “Guess the grass isn’t always greener on the other side, huh? Oh wait, you guys still don’t have grass over there yet, do you? Whoops, my bad.”
assuming Mars society hasn’t collapsed in on itself when a bunch of billionaire entrepreneurs discover they don’t have the skills to plump a toilet
Petition to sit down all the people who make coma theories about Adventure Time and tell them “listen, this fucking show is about the last human living in a post-apocalyptic world where deadly magic has been reawakened following a global thermonuclear war that wiped out the rest of the human species, how much fucking darker do you want it to be”
Even though I thought my first Creative Writing professor was kind of a douche, he made a good point about this. One of our first assignments was to write in this eerie, otherworldly style (we were mimicking a specific author whose name escapes me), so we had to write about eerie otherworldly things happening. It’s no exaggeration to say that more than half the class had a “big reveal” where we find out that the story’s strange events and themes are all in the mind of some person in an insane asylum, or someone having a drug trip.
My professor said something like, “you just successfully wrote a world that feels separate from our own, but got frightened last minute and shoe-horned in normalcy. You showed that you were afraid to commit to something different and interesting.” Though I’m typically a contrarian and a piece of garbage, I am inclined to agree with my professor. I feel like people who write coma theories and the like are afraid to accept that the world of the story is separate from our own. They like everything wrapped up in this crazy little realism box where nothing out of the ordinary happens in fiction.
you win the Best Addition to a Post prize
Thank you 🙂
This pretty well hits the nail on the head as to why I generally hate coma/dream theories and people who think they’re so fucking deep for coming up with it. In my book it’s LAZY, plain and simple.
I think the only times I can think of where “It was all a dream” really works are in pieces like Over the Garden Wall, Ink, Coraline, and Mirrormask. In all of those, the characters ‘wake up’ again in their ‘normal’ world, but there’s a very strong implication that the dream world is as real, if not more so, than the ‘real’ world, and the things they did in the dream world had a very direct impact on the waking world– not in an “I’m gonna be a better person” sense, but literally who lives and who dies at the end of the story.
Notably, in most of those, it’s stated flat-out within the first couple of minutes that the character in question is dreaming. It’s not a big reveal, it’s a fundamental detail of the setting.
If you’re gonna do a dreamworld, actually commit to doing a dreamworld.
Whatever it is you do, ACTUALLY COMMIT TO IT.
Another problem with coma theories in stories that aren’t specifically about a dreamworld is that it completely nullifies any character growth or change or hardship. None of it matters anymore, which is a betrayal of the audience’s investment in the world and characters. That’s why it feels lazy and unsatisfying- it makes all other plot threads and elements unnecessary.
@ubercream was it Ray Bradbury? Because that sounds like Ray Bradbury.
DarkestElemental616 