12-16-2014, 07:06 AM
Does this project still have people working on it? I sure hope so.
Hi. I'm Bear. I'm called "Bear" face-to-face as well as online, so it's always the first thing I try when I'm asked to provide a username - though it's rarely available. I found you guys when, in another forum, I was complaining that science fiction no longer even pretends to respect physical laws and has become just a setting or style for what are effectively fantasy novels. I mean, these guys aren't even trying any more, and have forgotten that anyone in the audience values any kind of physics or realism that might actually make writers need to learn or think. Someone pointed me at OA for a counterexample, so I came to check it out.
I've been reading the Encyclopaedia Galactica entries for a few weeks, and while some of them are a bit silly, they are at least somewhat possible and, well, a lot of history is a bit silly. Also post-scarcity would allow people to indulge a few fairly silly whims if they want to, and the silly things would in fact be remarkable enough to include in an encyclopedia, so that's okay. I particularly like how EG documents that many aspects of things are still controversial, mysterious, or unknown to most of civilization. That is entirely consistent with living in a galaxy controlled by beings so advanced you don't understand them.
OA describes a future I find at least mildly plausible (though bits of the tech such as stable exotic matter and stable, transportable, traversable wormholes are highly unlikely IMO) and that puts it about six cuts above everything I'm seeing in bookstores these days. I'm totally onboard with the future being full of Posthumans, Tweaks, Vecs, AIs, Rianths, Provolves, and Xenosophonts utterly UN-like humans wearing rubber suits.
I already have a couple of ideas fairly well developed and consistent with the setting; One clade of extreme tweaks descended from a Backyarder group that wanted to be sure no one could ever take their nanofacs away, and one megastructure ISO far from any star, possibly aligned with Deeper Covenant, possibly in recent contact with Drifters or Hiders who will have fled the instant they understood that it is effectively the equivalent of an archailect.
The tweaks are fairly open and knowable, though they may have gone through a long period of separation before being recontacted. The megastructure ISO is full of mysteries, moreso for being a "Slow God," relatively immobile, using an unfamiliar ontology, being of uncertain origin, and located very far from any form of realtime contact due to lightspeed delays. E may (or may not) have important insight regarding the Great Filter and The Chaos. But nobody will be paying much attention to em for the next few thousand years, for much the same reasons people paid no attention for decades to humans who believed in silly things like global warming and a climate crisis. The thing you need to stop doing, if e is right, is the same thing that keeps civilization working.
Hi. I'm Bear. I'm called "Bear" face-to-face as well as online, so it's always the first thing I try when I'm asked to provide a username - though it's rarely available. I found you guys when, in another forum, I was complaining that science fiction no longer even pretends to respect physical laws and has become just a setting or style for what are effectively fantasy novels. I mean, these guys aren't even trying any more, and have forgotten that anyone in the audience values any kind of physics or realism that might actually make writers need to learn or think. Someone pointed me at OA for a counterexample, so I came to check it out.
I've been reading the Encyclopaedia Galactica entries for a few weeks, and while some of them are a bit silly, they are at least somewhat possible and, well, a lot of history is a bit silly. Also post-scarcity would allow people to indulge a few fairly silly whims if they want to, and the silly things would in fact be remarkable enough to include in an encyclopedia, so that's okay. I particularly like how EG documents that many aspects of things are still controversial, mysterious, or unknown to most of civilization. That is entirely consistent with living in a galaxy controlled by beings so advanced you don't understand them.
OA describes a future I find at least mildly plausible (though bits of the tech such as stable exotic matter and stable, transportable, traversable wormholes are highly unlikely IMO) and that puts it about six cuts above everything I'm seeing in bookstores these days. I'm totally onboard with the future being full of Posthumans, Tweaks, Vecs, AIs, Rianths, Provolves, and Xenosophonts utterly UN-like humans wearing rubber suits.
I already have a couple of ideas fairly well developed and consistent with the setting; One clade of extreme tweaks descended from a Backyarder group that wanted to be sure no one could ever take their nanofacs away, and one megastructure ISO far from any star, possibly aligned with Deeper Covenant, possibly in recent contact with Drifters or Hiders who will have fled the instant they understood that it is effectively the equivalent of an archailect.
The tweaks are fairly open and knowable, though they may have gone through a long period of separation before being recontacted. The megastructure ISO is full of mysteries, moreso for being a "Slow God," relatively immobile, using an unfamiliar ontology, being of uncertain origin, and located very far from any form of realtime contact due to lightspeed delays. E may (or may not) have important insight regarding the Great Filter and The Chaos. But nobody will be paying much attention to em for the next few thousand years, for much the same reasons people paid no attention for decades to humans who believed in silly things like global warming and a climate crisis. The thing you need to stop doing, if e is right, is the same thing that keeps civilization working.
