12-10-2017, 01:32 PM
(12-09-2017, 08:55 AM)Rynn Wrote:(12-04-2017, 05:57 AM)Cray Wrote: If you're looking for examples, MANY "space opera" settings written prior to the 1990s rarely addressed large area computer networks. From Foster's Humanx setting to Asimov's Foundation to Pournelle's Codominium and Niven's Known Worlds, information technology often had mighty computers and AIs but scant vision of anything like the Internet.
Sorry to pull the thread back to this but I’ve spent the last several hours on a train and re-read the first foundation book in that time. When I was a teen and read it I found the primitiveness of the setting quaint: citizens of the ten millennia old galactic empire (supposedly founded 40,000 years after the development of atomic power) still read physical news papers and transfer data on microfiche. But it dawned on me that given the entire premise is the galaxy is stagnating and regressing perhaps the dawn of the empire did have technologies beyond our wildest dreams (like a hyper-mega-super-internet) but they’ve lost it.
Silly thought but one that put a very different spin on the anachronisms.
An even more extreme version of tech that's incredibly advanced in one direction but pathetic in the other might be the Lensverse. They do have computers, but there are humans (admittedly not many) who can do better than them at calculating. OTOH, they have access to staggering amounts of raw power. Tactical FTL, in both movement and weapons fire. Weaponised stars, and ships that can generate a significant fraction of stellar power output - by total conversion. Planetary masses of antimatter used as weapons. Almost casually moving planets. And generating wormholes (or something very much like them) with reasonably small amounts of equipment. Between universes, even.
