r/scifi

So I watched this movie last night and I loved it. Is it the best movie I’ve ever seen? No. Is the dialogue sometimes cheesy? Most definitely. However, I loved the story because it’s a bit rare nowadays. You don’t see many movies explicitly about class war anymore. Something else that seems increasingly rare these days is having a protagonist who’s just ‘some guy’, not a cia agent, not an fbi guy, not a merc, just an average man or woman struggling in a hostile world. And honestly I miss that. I miss the days of Bruce Willis playing the every-man action hero. And I miss Sci-Fi that makes a statement beyond spectacle and forgettable storylines.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/john-scalzi-collection-old-mans-war-more-tor-books-books

$18 (or more) will get you all this:

• Old Man's War books 1-6 + After the Coup, a novella set in the universe.
• The Interdependency, all three books
• Agent to the Stars
• The Android's Dream
• Fuzzy Nation
• The Kaiju Preservation Society
• Lock In; Head On; Unlocked
• The President's Brain is Missing
• Redshirts
• The Shadow War of the Night Dragons, Book One: The Dead City: Prologue
• Starter Villain
• Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded

Make sure you Adjust Donation to your liking.

You play as a customs officer stationed on a remote asteroid outpost, inspecting alien travelers arriving from every corner of the galaxy. Your job is to compare documents, faces, ships, license plates, and cargo to catch smugglers, terrorists, and impostors before they reach your home planet.

As your shift goes on, the inspections become increasingly complex... and reality itself starts to feel a little less reliable. By the end of the day, it's hard to tell whether you're hunting a criminal or just encountering yet another bizarre alien species.

And if you're really not sure, your employer has kindly issued you a shotgun.

It's basically our attempt to combine Papers, Please, spot-the-difference gameplay, and a dark sci-fi comedy about the worst border patrol job in the galaxy.

Something unusual is happening in sci-fi right now. Three of the genre’s biggest franchises — Star Trek, Doctor Who and Stargate — all find themselves in limbo at the same time.

Star Trek has slowed after years of rapid expansion across Paramount+. Doctor Who is being reassessed following its recent Disney+ era. And Stargate, after finally appearing poised for a comeback, has once again been put on hold. Different studios and circumstances, but the same strange reality.

Of course, this isn’t new territory for these franchises. Star Trek fans once waited 10 years to see Kirk and the Enterprise return after the original series ended in 1969, with that drought ending in 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture; Doctor Who endured its “Wilderness Years” between 1989 and 2005 and Stargate has now been off the air for 15 years. So what’s going on?

Suggests Doctor Who historian Richard D. Carrier, “Things are more expensive now anyway and the standard of television that people demand since the streaming era has come in… that’s the expectation, especially for a science fantasy show.”

But bigger budgets don’t necessarily mean better storytelling. “Some of the best Doctor Who stories, even in the modern era, have been the cheapest ones,” Carrier notes. “Sometimes the necessity to do something under certain constraints actually forces you to be creative.”

That feels especially relevant to Star Trek. The original series became iconic despite limited budgets and often primitive effects. What mattered was the writing, the characters and the ideas, and the same may apply now across legacy franchises.

Darren Sumner of GateWorld believes studios may be drawing the wrong conclusions about what audiences want. “You look at what’s been happening with major franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars and Doctor Who,” he says. “The newer shows and films certainly have their audience. They’ve found viewers, but apparently it’s not enough for whatever studio is producing those projects.

“It feels like they’re deciding that the problem is the audience,” he adds, “when, in fact, my opinion is that the problem is, by and large, with the content.”

Carrier sees a similar issue with Doctor Who. “They relied a bit too much on that fan-service kind of approach,” he says. “It starts to eat its own tail a little bit when you get too self-referential. But in a way, I think the pause is probably a good thing.”

And he points to Star Trek as proof. “Star Trek had to go away and come back again and be successful.”

Concurring with that point is writer and fan Jacqueline Lichtenberg, one of the main players in the letter writing campaign that resulted in the original Star Trek being renewed by NBC for a third season. “The concession from NBC was grudging,” she notes, “and despite Roddenberry’s best efforts, the third season bombed But thanks to that letter-writing campaign, Star Trek went into syndication and then — only then — the audience exploded.”

Which may be the real takeaway. None of these franchises feel finished as they’ve survived long absences before and reinvented themselves. For now, the fans have to wait, but as Carrier jokingly puts it, “People aren’t very patient with these things, are they?”

If you’re interested in an expanded version of this article, just do a search for the headline “Why 3 of the Best Sci-Fi TV Shows Are Suddenly on Hold: ‘Star Trek,’ ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘Stargate’ along with womansworld .com. 

Here is my custom Lego rover build, built for the Beetlezoid Minifigure. Smooth shaping all around with matching trans purple windscreen and beetlezoid head.

If you would like this to become a real Lego set, please vote and share it with the link below:

https://ideas.lego.com/product-ideas/8174b451-0b24-43e2-b68d-d59939c1682f

(you need a Lego Ideas account to vote)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D8V4PCSG

July 5, 2041

When small bits of matter—“seeds” let’s call them—begin falling from the sky like pollen, drifting on the breeze and eventually planting themselves in the soil, it marks the beginning of the end of human supremacy on Earth. As the seeds mutate and grow into something altogether new, financial markets plummet and society itself begins to unravel. What are these objects exactly? Eggs? Beachheads for an alien invasion? Or mere barnacles stuck to the hull of spaceship Earth that will eventually detach and float away on their own? No one knows for certain—but many suspect humanity itself could be under threat of extinction in the coming days. Thus begins the first installment of the Occupy Earth Trilogy.

On the Statistical Improbability of Time Travel

The development of practical time displacement technology in the late twenty-first century was accompanied by an immediate and profound operational limitation. While return to the point of origin, plus a necessary 14.3-millisecond buffer to avoid self-intersection, proved to be reliable, selecting the moment of destination did not.

Early probes could not be directed to any specified temporal coordinates. They arrived, instead, at a random point in the timeline. Or, as it soon became apparent, a random point in the entire future timeline.

Initial test flights, numbering over 300 between 2087 and 2094, yielded a consistent and troubling result. Every single probe returned, or rather, every probe that could return, as 12.4% failed to rematerialize at all, reported a destination environment characterized by complete thermodynamic equilibrium. No stars, planets or particles above the baseline quantum fluctuation threshold were observed. For years research teams debated whether this has indeed been time travel at all, or some play of currently unknown physics. The probes that did return brought back only one meaningful datum: the confirmation that at their destination, nothing remained to be observed.

After extensive debate, the consensus position of the International Temporal Physics Council (ITPC) was formalized in the 2096 Helsinki Memorandum: this outcome was not a malfunction after all, or the result of other unidentified phenomenon, but a close-mathematical certainty that should’ve been expected from the start.

The reasoning, though counterintuitive to lay understanding, can be colloquially explained following a simple thought experiment. Bear in mind that this explanation is highly simplified, as the real physics involved are a complex field of active research.

Consider the set of all natural numbers. Any finite subset, indeed, any finite representation of any subset of these numbers, like let’s say numbers 1 to 1 million, whether written, spoken, or algorithmically generated, constitutes exactly 0% of the total cardinality of the natural numbers. This holds true even for numbers of such magnitude that they cannot be physically represented using all available matter in the observable universe, even when encoded at Planck-scale density. The Graham number, Rayo’s Number or TREE(3), for reference, are vanishingly small relative to the infinite set from which they are drawn.

Temporal analogue is as follows: the interval from the Big Bang to the present day, and indeed to any future epoch within the predicted lifespan of stellar formation, represents a finite interval. The future, however, is, as far as we can extrapolate from experimental data, unbounded. Even in a heat-dead universe, residual particle motion continues. A fact confirmed by the Proxima-7 experiments (2098–2108), in which a time-displaced detector successfully managed to capture a single photon after a decade long experiment. This was indeed the first photon ever detected in a temporal destination whose spectral signature and polarization state were inconsistent with any known artifact of the displacement apparatus. Thus confirming it as indigenous to the target temporal coordinates. Fondly nicknamed “Lucy” by the Proxima’s research team, it proved that change, and therefore time, persists even in deep time.

Taking both the experimental observations and the thought experiment into consideration, it is derived that the probability of any random temporal destination falling within the finite window of "interesting" cosmic history prior to thermodynamic equilibrium, is therefore the ratio of a finite interval to an infinite one. This ratio is, in all practical and mathematical senses, zero. The chance of arriving at any epoch in which stars, planets, or life exist is functionally 0%.

Practical Applications: The Hades Program

The discovery, while devastating to the scientific ambitions of several generations, did not entirely foreclose utilitarian applications. The technology's capacity for two-way temporal displacement, to and from a destination in the heat-dead epoch, found an unexpected niche in the penal system.

By 2100, the global incarcerated population exceeded 107 million. While the UltraMax biorecycling closed-loop prison model, implemented in 2097, had proven capable of sustaining this population indefinitely with a minimal set of initial resources (provided that certain ethical protocols were suspended), the sociopolitical externalities remained intractable. Prison populations continued to function as vectors for ideological dissemination, radicalization, and political organization. And attempts at informational blackout, despite significant investment, had been uniformly unsuccessful.

The temporal displacement array offered an elegant solution: prisoners could serve their subjective sentences at a destination epoch, while the total objective time elapsed on Earth would be measured in microseconds.

Hades 2 : Design Improvements

The new deep-space penitentiary Hades 2, currently undergoing final certification, will launch in Q3 of the coming year on a 25-year loop rotation with a projected population of 16,200 inmates. The improvements to this new iteration, experts argue, would guarantee that a scenario like that of Hades 1 will not be repeated again.

The Hades 1 station, the precursor model, was constructed between 2103 and 2109 at a total cost of 18.7 billion credits. It was designed to accommodate 4,500 inmates in a fully self-sustaining closed ecological system, with backup provisions for subjective sentence durations of up to 400 years.

Launched on 14 March 2110, Hades 1 ceased telemetry transmission at objective 2.4 milliseconds post-transition. The station, by design, lacks any return mechanism, and retrieval can only be initiated by a signal transmitted from the present to the destination epoch.

It was concluded that the station did not arrive at its intended destination, or rather, it arrived at a destination from which no signal could return. Whether this was due to a miscalculation in the temporal coordinates, a structural failure during transit, or an unforeseeable interaction with the destination epoch's physical conditions remains unknown. Recovery attempts, numbering 47 as of the current date, have been unsuccessful.

The MaxFree corporation, which now operates 90% of global correctional facilities and has been contracted for the Hades program since its inception, has assured stakeholders that the Hades 2 station incorporates lessons learned from its predecessor. The new model features redundant temporal retrieval systems, enhanced structural integrity for transit stress, and a significantly hardened communication buffer that should permit telemetry return for up to 7.2 milliseconds post-transition, sufficient to confirm successful arrival.

Critics have noted that the primary lesson of Hades 1: that launching a temporal prison into the heat death of the universe with no return guarantees, is operationally identical, from the perspective of Earth, to simply executing the inmates, has not been addressed by MaxFree representatives.

Indeed, the main argument still used by MaxFree to silence critics is that attempts to locate and recover the original Hades 1 have not been abandoned, although no quantifiable data regarding the extent of these efforts has been released to the public. This, however, marks a significant shift from the original press conference given by the CEO following the original incident, now considered largely lost media. During the conference, the primary argument was that, having considered this possibility from the start, Hades 1 had been launched exclusively with inmates serving life sentences.

Dear community,

I am excited to present my 5th hard science fiction novella.

The US is going to the moon. So is China. How will the dynamics play out ? Find out in COLD TRAP.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H26GXXTN