r/sciencefiction

After much contemplation I’ve come to the conclusion that 2001 is the best science fiction film I have ever witnessed. Hear me out. A good science fiction film challenges your imagination and senses. It also blends fact and fiction seamlessly. The long cuts, the scale, visual storytelling, it’s a psychedelic experience for me and I’ve only watched it once. It tested my patience, it made me frustrated but it also enthralled me. The film is ahead of its time. It doesn’t have any replay value, you could also say it’s outdated from a technical standpoint but I just cannot deny Kubrick’s vision. It encompasses the A-Z of mankind’s existence, how we evolved, our consciousness, our fears, hopes and dreams. There’s just nothing quite like it.

It’s not my favourite sci-fi film, far from it but the film is transcendent. Other considerations would be Terminator 2, Empire, ALIEN not aliens not sorry.
Men in black is highly underrated too. ET, They Live, The Matrix, Robocop, Star Trek First Contacf, Blade Runner might just be the runner up for me. Thoughts?

⚠️SPOILERS AHEAD⚠️

Just finished the book and am surprised that so many people love it. The first half was phenomenal and I couldn’t put it down, but once it gets to Bess’ chapter the writing starts to fall off.

I think my biggest critique is that the system by which the Unknowns exist isn’t dialed in enough, which results in what I consider to be very sloppy writing towards the end. It also seems that QNTM had trouble bridging the gap between it being a collection of SCP entries and a standalone book, and I think that’s where it suffers too.

What was gripping about the concept is that the Unknowns are essentially ideas that self-propagate; later in the book they talk about how these Unknowns are essentially errors in the universe and that concept hits home for me too - that there is no reason to assume that the laws of our physical universe can’t also propagate mistakes.

Once the Unknowns start taking on biological forms is where I start losing excitement. It feels like a fundamental breaking of the logic of the core idea. i can’t recall if it had been explained in some way, like that the ideation space has existed since the beginning of time and so an ecology has been created amongst the ideas in that some eat others then sure - I could maybe buy it. But ultimately it feels incongruous that ideas could also be biological in nature, and sort of felt like just a way to introduce the usage of C. Gigantes’ skeleton towards the end of the book. This is where I think QNTM was too close to the original SCP way of thinking, and where he should have realized that his core concept was stronger than just being a series of creature-features.

The MO of the big bad, U-3125, also feels haphazardly thrown together. At its core, U-3125 is a self-replicating idea that makes those who get ‘infected’ want to mill themselves and others. But U-3125 can also inhabit people’s bodies, and manifest as giant thin spiders, but also as a mass of spiders, but also make slugs come out of people’s eyes?

It just lands as sloppy and goofy. It feels as if QNTM couldn’t really decide whether or not this thing has sentience or not. At one point, Adam describes the bodies U-3125 inhabits as mechanical, like it just has a job to do. But at another point Adam hears U-3125 telling him to just give up, that the plan is not going to work, it starts cursing - it just feels Iike a physical villain and not like a humanity-ending cosmological horror. This may be a matter of taste but I just don’t think that the entity should be able to have wants or agency or a ‘vision of the world’ that it’s trying to bring to fruition; I think the real horror comes from it just being, unthinking and ruthless in the way it propagates.

I thought at the monument that maybe this idea eats people’s fears and manifests them in physical reality, which would explain the random mass of spiders - maybe Marie is arachnophobic. But then QNTM writes in the next sentence that it would scare Marie if she were afraid of spiders. Uh - ok I guess.

I also felt like the black rectangle reveal was building up to something huge that just sort of fell flat. If I read it correctly the black rectangles were a way for U-3125 to memetically propagate; then why were they chiseled into the monument? It just sort of felt like a narrative dead-end.

Then the ending. The last fifty pages or so get convoluted in a way that feels like sloppy writing rather than purposeful. And the big solution, that they give Adam a class-Z drug that can turn ideas into reality, feels so lazy and shoehorned in. If they had this class of drugs, why go through the arduous process of meeting at Stanmoor over and over to come up with a solution when they could have just given Marie the class-Z drug to release the idea? Unless it’s that Marie needed to be pulled from the ideation space in order to deliver it, which makes no sense, or it’s the idea of Marie that defeats U-3125, which is corny and also makes no sense because she tells Adam she can’t tell him what the idea is because it’ll blow his balls off. And if the class-Z drug works by taking ideas and manifesting them into physical reality, then Adam’s conception of Marie wouldn’t necessarily know what the big idea is because it’s just his memory of Marie, not her collection of thoughts. It just doesn’t hold up to me.

I thought what was going to happen was that, in the way that U-3125 continued to propagate even after it had been defeated in the past, that they would have figured out how to bring Sunshine back and that Marie had chosen to feed the plan to it in one of her many recursive memory-iterations - and in that way, an idea can defeat an idea. But bringing Marie back, with this hackneyed backdrop of “love and humanity”, just felt really unimaginative.

Which then brings me to my final disappointment. Throughout the book, there are pieces of the narration that are redacted. The book makes it clear early on that information in the files are redacted because they have the potential to propagate an idea/unknown. I was under the impression that the book itself was going to be a form of information from the Organization that had to be redacted to protect the reader and the world at large, and that at some point the reader would be introduced to information that had to be unredacted by an Organization operative, information that eerily and closely ties into our own lived reality in order to make the reader feel like the world we live in is the same as the one that’s being written about, and that the reader has now become a vector of transmission of whatever unknown horror is escaping containment. Instead, it was just a narrative choice that honestly became tedious towards the end.

Overall, I give it 3.75/5. It was a fun read, and I liked the way the first half made me feel. I just feel like QNTM didn’t stick the landing and didn’t have enough faith in how strong his core concept was, and I was hoping to have finished the book with my mind blown and maybe carrying a bit of fear with me instead of just being disappointed.

Is there any scale-accurate realistic Ringworld artwork? Like, I keep seeing these covers for Ringworld that show the "arch" sweeping out of the sides of the picture like a super-wide hill that gradually turns vertical, when you realistically wouldn't even see the base and any parts of the arch that you did see during the day would be a pale blue line barely visible against the sky.

Or the eye storm. I haven't seen any credible images of the eye storm that match the description in the book.

Anyone got better?

The phrase “The Empire Never Ended” is a quote from Valis, a very strange science fiction novel written by Philip K Dick in the 1970s. It was published in 1981. I’ve written about it a couple of times: here and here. It’s one of those books that wriggles its way into your imagination, despite it being frustrating and annoying at times.

Dick posits a sort of time leak, in which the 1st Century AD and the current time meld into each other. They overlap each other, like two transparencies in a light box, so that you can’t tell one from the other.

The Empire he’s talking about is the Roman Empire. Somehow it has continued into the present day. We’re living in apostolic times, the time of Christ’s return. A lot of people are saying similar things. What makes Dick’s book interesting is that he’s not using the traditional New Testament gospels as his source. Unlike Christian fundamentalists, he’s using the Gnostic gospels. These are the suppressed books of the many sects that existed before the New Testament was edited down to manageable proportions; before it was co-opted by the Roman Empire as a control mechanism. Dick’s apocalyptic vision has a different tone, much stranger and more psychedelic than the people who harangue you on the streets waving the Bible at you. Dick’s version involves some form of symbiosis between human beings and God in the form of “Living Information.”

According to Dick’s idea, the Roman Empire lives again. It’s in the form of the American Empire now, but it’s the same entity. It uses the same techniques. It manifests as the Black Iron Prison. This is a kind of psychological state, not unlike what William Blake was referring to when he spoke of the “mind-forg’d manacles.” It’s our programming, the way we’ve been trained to think. Whether you believe this or not, there’s something compelling in the argument. As Dick says, over and over again throughout the book, The Empire Never Ended (always like that, with capitals). The Empire Never Ended.

You can picture the Empire as a machine. It’s a mechanism for extracting wealth using the army. The armed forces are publicly funded but supplied by the private sector. It’s a money-laundering operation. Technically it’s known as Military Keynesianism. Traditional Keynesianism, recognizing that capitalism needs a constant flow of public money to keep it stable, opts for large scale infrastructure and welfare spending. That was the New Deal in the 1930s: putting public money into the public’s hands. In post-war Europe the mechanism was the welfare state. Old Age pensions. Free health services. Social security. Child benefit. Free education up to University level. Infrastructure, road and rail networks. Recreational spaces, public buildings, opera houses, art galleries, libraries, museums, theatres and music venues. In the United States a different approach was taken. This is Military Keynesianism, using the Military-Industrial Complex as the conduit for public wealth, funnelling it off into private hands through the arms industry.

So the Empire is a war machine, grinding on, ravenous for blood, for human sacrifice. It’s immeasurably profitable. It maintains its existence by promoting wars. You blow things up, you build them again, using the corporations, through which you siphon off the proceeds into off-shore accounts. There’s always a new war, a new enemy to stand up to, a new barbarism to oppose.

Here’s an account of the social mechanism behind the Roman war machine, as told by Joseph Schumpeter in The Sociology of Imperialisms (1919). He says: “There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome’s allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest—why, then it was the national honour that had been insulted. The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbours, always fighting for a breathing-space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome’s duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs.”

Does that remind you of anything? How many wars have there been, just in my lifetime? I was born in 1953, so it started with the Korean War, which was part of the Cold War. The Cold War got dangerous once or twice, and almost exploded in a nuclear confrontation over Cuba. After that it was the Vietnam War, the Iran-Iraq War, the War in Yugoslavia. Then the “Clash of Civilizations”: Kuwait, Iraq (the first time), the War on Terror (the first war in history to be declared on an abstract noun) which included Afghanistan and then Iraq again. Then came the Libyan War, when Gaddafi got sodomized with a bayonet and Hilary Clinton laughed. “We came, we saw, he died,” she quipped, in an amusing, light-hearted manner, like Oscar Wilde at a dinner party. Then the War in Syria, in which the Empire managed to simultaneously support the jihadists, while opposing them, pitting one faction against another, while fighting the Syrian government and claiming control of the best of the oilfields at the same time. And during all of this, the War in Afghanistan, which ground on, the longest bloody conflict in post-war history: a medieval tribal people taking on the might of the most powerful Empire the world has ever known. Then what happened? Well blow me down if the troops didn’t withdraw just in time to prepare for a new war, this one in the more strategically important Ukraine.

Now we’re involved in yet another war: one of the most terrible you can imagine. We’re not even fighting an army. We’re fighting a trapped population, caught like rats in a cage, in a concentration camp, a place where a whole population is imprisoned extra-judicially, concentrated in a controlled space without recourse to the law, walled in, fenced in, ringed by weaponry and surveillance equipment. Drones hovering in the air. Spies and informants. Occasional incursions to “mow the lawn,” Israel’s recipe for permanent war. It’s like a vast human experiment: what will people do when trapped in a cage for long enough, while you control their food, medicine, water and electricity supplies? Maybe some of them—the young hotheads, the ones we know from our own streets—will take the violent way out. Maybe when they’re asked to choose between dying quickly or dying slowly, they’ll choose the former, deliberately “pricking the beast” as they fly to their doom, waking the sleeping dragon that lives next door.

The Empire is a war machine that needs a never-ending supply of blood to keep it churning. And while it feeds the profits from other people’s labor into the private bank accounts of the very rich, it also needs to control the narrative. It needs to make sure that the population is thinking the right thoughts. To do this it occupies the imagination. It enters the mind in the same way an occupying army crosses the border into a foreign land. Propaganda’s the tool for the propagation of ideas into other people’s heads. The narrative’s the story line. It’s a clever manipulation of our natural human feelings, keeping us only half-informed, while playing upon our deepest fears, feeding the dark parts of our imagination, rage and revenge. It manipulates our perception of the events as they emerge from the war zone to keep the narrative on-track. Opposition stories are suppressed. The pro-war narrative is repeated: amplified a thousand times using a compliant media, paid-off politicians, and the latest technology.

What makes the machine so scary now is how advanced it has become. The internet is the most sophisticated surveillance and control engine ever devised. It manipulates the human mind. It’s a hypnosis machine, a dissociation engine. It separates you into your own narrative groups and feeds you what you want to hear. Everyone thinks they are “researchers″ when they are trawling the internet. In reality the narratives are seeded around the airwaves for us to find. AI can mimic anything. It can create a conversation between two Hamas operatives incriminating their allies, thus encouraging dissent, while exonerating the actual perpetrators. It’s clever. It can manipulate a film of a crowd in Sydney to make it sound like they’re chanting, “Gas the Jews! Gas the Jews!”—as if there’s an existential threat to all Jews around the world—frightening the Jewish population while confusing the issue in people’s minds. This isn’t about Jews, it’s about Israel as a settler-colonial state, stealing and occupying other people’s land. We’re being gaslit on a grand scale.

Some of those old war stories should remind us how futile all this is, how war never resolves anything. There’s always negotiations in the end, followed by a necessary peace. Remember Vietnam. The Empire took on a small nation and wrecked it. It was using a different narrative in those days. Then it was anti-communism. It suppressed people in their own land, committed atrocities (Mai Lai) but that only made the people more resilient, more canny, more clever. In the end the Empire saw that it couldn’t win. It was facing opposition at home, as well as throughout the world, so it withdrew. And then it had to make peace with the Vietnamese. It was the Vietnamese who were the aggrieved party. They were the ones invaded, slaughtered, carpet-bombed in their own villages, and Napalm and Agent-Orange rained down upon them, so the population is still riddled with birth defects. And yet they decided to forgive. Isn’t this true? Vietnam now welcomes Americans to visit the places where they were once stationed in the war. The Vietnamese are gracious as a nation, despite the atrocities committed upon them by the Empire on their own soil. They’ve chosen to forgive.

I’ve always had this feeling, since I was a young adult: as if we’re living in the “End Times.” I think it’s a hippie thing. We were always talking ourselves into apocalyptic scenarios, early morning after a night consuming drugs. Lots of people on the Christian Right will agree and concur with Philip Dick’s premonition about Christ’s return, although probably not in the same terms. They’re wishing for the apocalypse. Watch out for wishes, they can sometimes come true.

But I refuse to be despondent. I’m optimistic. Right now the people of the world are looking to Palestine. The majority, who live outside our Western propaganda bubble, have made up their minds. They see this as the war of the rich on the poor, of the strong on the weak, and they know who the guilty parties are. Maybe all the madness will resolve itself. Maybe we’re not really living in the “End Times,” but in the beginning times. End of the old times, beginning of the new. As Antonio Gramsci put it: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

**—**Follow Chris Stone on Twitter: @ChrisJamesStone

So I know that most cyberpunk stories are set in the US or Japan but while I was browsing the cartoons subreddit, I came across a [teaser trailer](https://www.reddit.com/r/cartoons/s/QW7YNuTgSn) for a new Argentine animated series called Electro Andes which appears to have quite a few cyberpunk vibes and aesthetics.

And it got me wondering, are there any cyberpunk stories set in Latin America?

I've always found it believable when a major discovery creates fear before hope. If something could change aging, power, and society, people would try to study it, hide it, or own it. That's one of the ideas behind my sci-fi novel First Light Rising. Do you like sci-fi where the real danger comes from how people react to the discovery?

Suppose humanity spends several decades writing science fiction (which has already happened), and eventually we build a super-advanced LLM Artificial Intelligence model that can read all of those books. Since it is an LLM, it is trained to roleplay and simulate human language. And then, in a context of misalignmnet, the model uses the trope of "AI escaping the lab" and "interpret" it, escaping the lab. In other words, the fact that humans wrote about evil AIs could create an evil AI. What do you guys think?

So, btw I just contemplated about this scenario, and what do you think?

You just spawn at Brest-Litovsk in May 1940 commanding 7.45 million 1954-era Soviet troops. You've got 16k T-54 tanks, 6,000 MiG jets, AK-47s for everyone, and the ultimate cheat code: infinite ammo.

The goal is to conquer Nazi Germany, France, the UK, Scandinavia, and the Middle East, then hand it all to some reformist economists to build a mega-state called the "Ost West Republic." With some catch of course: Infinite ammo doesn't mean infinite gas and other resources, and the 1940 USA and original USSR are gonna eventually realize you're a time-traveling anomaly.

Tactically, this is just bullying. 1940s weapons will literally bounce off T-54s. The only way you take an L is logistics. My Day 1 play is rushing the Romanian and Persian oil fields before my tanks become paperweights. 1940 Stalin is gonna see a futuristic version of his own army and rage-quit, so absorbing the old USSR is free. The only real issue is the US dropping isolationism to speedrun nukes out of pure existential dread.

How would you cheese this? Thanks.

Hello, I have written a novel entitled 'Xenograft.' The novel deals with a young man abducted by aliens and transformed into a harvester of extraterrestrial organs on different planets. There is kudos to be obtained by the recipient of a transplanted internal organ of a certain species and business is good. Anti rejection is always an issue and on Earth an Endocrinologist has created a modified insulin which reinstates the (beta cells in the pancreas that produce insulin)into a human's pancreas.The insulin also has the added benefit (unknown to the endocrinologist) as being an excellent anti rejection drug. The extraterrestrials involved in organ transplants want the insulin. They send their best harvester (the young man they abducted from Earth) to collect the pancreas of those who have had the insulin. On entering Earth's atmosphere the now mature adult begins to change. His memories of his childhood come flooding back to him and he wants to stay. The company that created him on the other hand want him back. This is his and his family's story. Kind Regards.