Armed Polite Society
Main Forums => The Roundtable => Topic started by: AZRedhawk44 on November 29, 2013, 11:20:36 AM
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Can anyone recommend some sci-fi that involves intergalactic travel? Seems just about all of it limits itself to a single galaxy, if it involves travel beyond a single star system.
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Ring, by Stephen Baxter, technically.....
=D
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Any of Devonai's books.
Here: http://www.amazon.com/Reckless-Faith-Trilogy-David-Kantrowitz-ebook/dp/B00G3NV0HK/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1385747099&sr=1-5&keywords=reckless+faithhttp://www.amazon.com/Reckless-Faith-Trilogy-David-Kantrowitz-ebook/dp/B00G3NV0HK/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1385747099&sr=1-5&keywords=reckless+faith
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http://www.amazon.com/The-Genesis-Quest-Donald-Moffitt/dp/1585863475
Humans raised by a benevolent if paternalistic alien species in the Andromeda galaxy. They received the "plans" for humans and a whole bunch of our tech in a Encyclopedia Galactica from a high power SETI/contact broadcast from the Milky Way galaxy, where it's implied humanity has reached a very high level of development.
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Thanks for mentioning my stuff! To be fair, my folks travel between our galaxy and the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is a diffuse sub-galaxy only 167,000 light-years away. Other fully formed galaxies are much further away, and therein lies the problem.
If your ship is fast enough to cross between galaxies in any reasonable time (say, the life expectancy of the original crew), then it is also fast enough to be anywhere in the local galaxy pretty much instantaneously, barring some other limiting factor such as time dilation. From a writing perspective, it is hard to build tension if your characters can travel so fast.
By the way, the Destiny from Stargate Universe travels between galaxies. I enjoyed the show, but it has a drastically different tone than the parent shows.
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By the way, the Destiny from Stargate Universe travels between galaxies. I enjoyed the show, but it has a drastically different tone than the parent shows.
Yup. I really liked the different tone of SGU versus the rest of that franchise.
Been watching various Star Trek series, finally swallowed my bile towards Voyager and watched a couple episodes. Two things interest me in the show:
1. The ginormous distance involved to get the ship back to Federation space, and the tech puzzles it presents.
2. The Doctor. Very interesting how he's essentially just software like Data was, but lacking corporeal form he gets treated like junk by the crew rather than respected as Data was. The only difference being the Doctor's lack of corporeal presence.
I hate Janeway. Total "bitchy resting face." And her whole thing in the pilot when people called her "sir" as is done to all officers, and her wanting only her explicit rank or "ma'am" as an expedient minimum just screams "treat me special because I'm a girl."
I pretty much dislike the whole crew, too.
And the two aliens they pick up as quasi-crew in Delta Quadrant suck. Not quite as bad as Jar Jar Binks... but awful.
I'd like to find some sci-fi that deals with mind-boggling distances, that isn't full of 90's Roddenberry feel-good twaddle. Devonai's stuff is on my Kindle, I've got one more or Bracken's books to finish before I get to it.
Anyone got any TV or movies to recommend that deal with this sub-genre of sci-fi?
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Can anyone recommend some sci-fi that involves intergalactic travel? Seems just about all of it limits itself to a single galaxy, if it involves travel beyond a single star system.
See if you can pick up the Lensman or Skylark books of Edward E. Smith; these classic 1950's sci-fi series feature intergalactic travel on a huge level, with incredible villains, eons-old plots, and a scale seldom seen today when we know so much more about how the universe works. For example, the Lensman books start with the line "Two thousand million years ago, two galaxies were colliding . . . " and build up from there.
(BTW, if you google Lensman, you may come across a reference to a Japanese anime rip-off of the books. Ignore it for the garbage it is.)
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Can anyone recommend some sci-fi that involves intergalactic travel? Seems just about all of it limits itself to a single galaxy, if it involves travel beyond a single star system.
A. E. van Vogt, The Mixed Men. Many thousands of years in the future, humanity has a galactic empire. Persecuted minority of human derived sort-of supermen and their human sympathizers migrate to one of the Megallanic Clouds. Thousands of years later, at the time of the novel, an expedition from the main galaxy stumbles across them. '40s era space opera.
Come to think of it, the fixup novel made from his "Black Destroyer" and sequels, has our human heros scouring a scourge that threatens to spread to the MIlky Way, our of the Andromeda galaxy. The whole Andromeda galaxy.
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Anyone got any TV or movies to recommend that deal with this sub-genre of sci-fi?
If by "sci-fi" you mean TeeVee and movies, I suspect the whole concept of galaxies is vague to them.
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I think Tau Zero by Poul Anderson had intergalactic travel. It is classified as "hard science fiction".
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Not intergalactic, but if you are interested in intergalactic, Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep has interesting alternate physics explaining its intra-galactic economies and cultures. Also has obligatory interesting aliens and is distinctive in acknowledging the impact and importance of computing and computation.
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Not intergalactic, but if you are interested in intergalactic, Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep has interesting alternate physics explaining its intra-galactic economies and cultures. Also has obligatory interesting aliens and is distinctive in acknowledging the impact and importance of computing and computation.
I thought about that one. Intergalactic in the sense that there is something out there, past even the Transcend. But, sensible mortals stay down in the Beyond, where it's safe. Relatively safe.
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OK, Fire Upon the Deep seems to be more towards what I'm looking for. Something that says that laws of physics aren't constant, that reality isn't all we perceive, but wraps it in sci-fi rather than fantasy. Cool, thx!
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Yup, Devonai's works and at mention of van Vogt, if I remember right, the Mixed Men are Joseph Dell's Dellian Perfect Robots. A sample here:
http://baencd.freedoors.org/Books/Transgalactic/1416520899___9.htm
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If you don't mind Youtube fanfics....
HIDDEN FRONTIER http://m.youtube.com/index?&desktop_uri=%2F#/user/HiddenFrontier
PHASE TWO http://m.youtube.com/index?&desktop_uri=%2F#/user/startrekphase2DE
AURORA http://m.youtube.com/index?&desktop_uri=%2F#/user/Auroratrek
....sorry, only have mobile links available....
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Battlefield Earth has multiple universes to wok with.
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I hate Janeway. Total "bitchy resting face." And her whole thing in the pilot when people called her "sir" as is done to all officers, and her wanting only her explicit rank or "ma'am" as an expedient minimum just screams "treat me special because I'm a girl."
Where is this part of customs and courtesies? I've never called a female officer that outranked me "sir." Is this a Navy thing or something?
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Where is this part of customs and courtesies? I've never called a female officer that outranked me "sir." Is this a Navy thing or something?
Starfleet (fictional) it's customary for all officers to be addressed as sir. Regardless of gender.
Janeway wants to be "different." For whatever reason. ;/
ETA: source:
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Military_parlance
Go to the subsection labeled "Sir" about 80% of the way down.
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Ring, by Stephen Baxter, technically.....
=D
Oh now there's a depressing book. The whole universe is coming to an end, because a race that's so superior to humanity that they went back in time and tweaked their own evolution so that they could fight this war, lost out to something even stranger. The last surviving corporeal humans are dumped into a new universe that's, ahh, inhospitable.
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2. The Doctor. Very interesting how he's essentially just software like Data was, but lacking corporeal form he gets treated like junk by the crew rather than respected as Data was. The only difference being the Doctor's lack of corporeal presence.
Actually, this bit would have been one of the best bits of 'hard' scifi in media if they'd managed to pull off what I think they were trying for correctly.
To steal a term from Mass Effect - the Doctor was orginally intended to be a 'Virtual Intelligence', not an 'artificial intelligence'. Consider how Data ended up going through a trial to try to determine whether he was an AI or 'just a machine'. How realistic the holographic 'actors' were on the holodeck, Moriarty and such.
Roughly speaking, a 'Virtual Intelligence' is still just a machine, a computer program. But it's one that has been programed enough and is actually capable of some level of 'learning', but isn't actually sapiant or aware. Within it's role, it's capable of imitating intelligence very well, though outside of flawed presentations I figure that the 'real' people of Star Trek can quickly spot VIs from actual people or even AIs. You see some of this in some of the better holodeck episodes where the crew, still in uniform and some alien, enter the holodeck and representations of ancient people act like they're perfectly normal.
So the idea was that 'The Doctor' starts out as a VI, one with a particularly abrasive personality at that. Very much not a people person, because in universe most of the development was by a man who in real life would probably test as autistic - all the care for the biological functions, but a horrible interface for most people. Basically a holodeck character with realworld medical procedures wired in. A form of autodoc, if you will.
But they mostly screwed it up.
Starfleet (fictional) it's customary for all officers to be addressed as sir. Regardless of gender.
Go to the subsection labeled "Sir" about 80% of the way down.
Interesting... I've heard about some militaries in real life doing this, but I wonder where in the backstory they implimented this tradition, or have they even bothered? Could it have popped up when they started dealing with aliens that were of non-standard genders(can think of like six variations off the top of my head), or some lingering symptom of 'equal opportunity' gone mad?
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Janeway = "Sir"
Interesting... I've heard about some militaries in real life doing this, but I wonder were in the backstory they implimented this tradition, or have they even bothered? Could it have popped up when they started dealing with aliens that were of non-standard genders(can think of like six variations off the top of my head), or some lingering symptom of 'equal opportunity' gone mad?
I vote for over-the-top equal opportunity. It's already been going on here, for a couple of decades. I'm sure it has been at least that long since I've been aware of waitpersons referring to all members of mixed gender parties as "you guys." More recently, I've noticed coaches of women's basketball teams referring to the members of the teams as "the guys."
:facepalm:
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Roughly speaking, a 'Virtual Intelligence' is still just a machine, a computer program. But it's one that has been programed enough and is actually capable of some level of 'learning', but isn't actually sapiant or aware.
Democrats ??? =|
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I vote for over-the-top equal opportunity. It's already been going on here, for a couple of decades. I'm sure it has been at least that long since I've been aware of waitpersons referring to all members of mixed gender parties as "you guys." More recently, I've noticed coaches of women's basketball teams referring to the members of the teams as "the guys."
:facepalm:
Meh... I don't know if you've studied any other languages than English, but pluralization often involves choosing a gender for the group of objects you are referring to. Spanish, for instance, you would use "ellos" for a group of men, "ellas" for a group of women, but a mixed group will default to "ellos." Just the rules of the language. I've never studied German but I understand they have 3 genders in their verb conjugations and object references.
Speaking to royalty in Spanish and using classic Castillian Spanish, you would address the King as "vuestra merced." Note the feminine tense of vuestra. You are literally calling him "Your Mercy" or Your Mercifulness, and it carries connotation of speaking to a person who can grant favors the likes of which no Italian Mob Don would ever be capable of doing... but the gender of the term is feminine. Despite "El Rey" (the king) being masculine. Vuestra Merced is also a plural conjugation, despite the king being a singular entity.
Languages are all so weird (don't even get me started on Japanese) that the notion of calling a woman officer "sir" 400 years from now doesn't strike me as anything close to out of line. It's probably that way in the Federation so that alien species can simplify their ability to speak English, and humans know what to call a Federation-related officer without being able to determine gender of an alien species.
And then BRF Janeway wants to screw up all of that customary behavior across all the other thousands of Federation ships and outposts, so she can feel more girly. ;/
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Languages are all so weird (don't even get me started on Japanese) that the notion of calling a woman officer "sir" 400 years from now doesn't strike me as anything close to out of line. It's probably that way in the Federation so that alien species can simplify their ability to speak English, and humans know what to call a Federation-related officer without being able to determine gender of an alien species.
So we basically have one vote for each hypothesis. Sort of. One reason for the 'human change' theory is that universal translators are quite good, but WWIII and the associated fallout seemed to change quite a few behaviors(the whole 'no money' thing seems confined to humans). It could also be something picked up from the Vulcans(or Andorians).
Perhaps it was something that became prevalent when militaries of different countries and languages had to combine to fight the threat the augments posed, and after the smoke cleared the remaining forces had a few different customs. One of which is to call everyone 'sir' in the sense that we're all one team and don't want to sexualize anything.
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I'd call Janeway "Skipper" incessantly, and blame it on a defective Babelfish in my ear.
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There is the EVE Universe. (gamers will know about this one, I think) There are 3 novels spun off: EVE:The Impyrean Age, EVE: The Burning Life and EVE: Templar One. These stories are long (centuries) after humans have left our galaxy through a mysterious gate which collapsed and trapped humanity elsewhere. I'm just finishing the 3rd one. Quite a lot of stuff to sort out and remember while reading, but interesting and enjoyable nonetheless.
I highly recommend David Kantrowitz' (Devonai) stories.
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The Uplift Series by David Brin (http://www.davidbrin.com/) is built on intergalactic cultural and political doings, but makes rather little of the intergalactic background until the last book. Shameless space opera, Brin's own description, it is great fun.
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Meh... I don't know if you've studied any other languages than English, but pluralization often involves choosing a gender for the group of objects you are referring to. Spanish, for instance, you would use "ellos" for a group of men, "ellas" for a group of women, but a mixed group will default to "ellos." Just the rules of the language. I've never studied German but I understand they have 3 genders in their verb conjugations and object references.
I used to be fluent in French, and my wife is from Sud America so I am well aware of the Spanish usage. But we're not talking about Spanish here, we're talking about English. And, even if we were talking about Spanish, first of all the word "guy" is a noun, not a pronoun. Secondly, a women's basketball team doesn't (by definition) include any male players, so if it were being discussed in Spanish the speaker would not use "ellos" but "ellas."
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Probably not what you had in mind but the WH40K universe is intergalactic.
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I used to be fluent in French, and my wife is from Sud America so I am well aware of the Spanish usage. But we're not talking about Spanish here, we're talking about English. And, even if we were talking about Spanish, first of all the word "guy" is a noun, not a pronoun. Secondly, a women's basketball team doesn't (by definition) include any male players, so if it were being discussed in Spanish the speaker would not use "ellos" but "ellas."
Hawkmoon, my point is that the gender of an object in its language has no bearing on the masculinity/femininity of the object.
"La verga," for instance, is a perfectly manly and virile slang term for male genitalia, despite its feminine object label. Maricon or puto are both masculine objects, but mean sissy or queer. A slang term for semen commonly used is "la leche" (milk). Fertility is a big thing in Mexican culture, but when boasting of virility they will talk big about verga and leche.
It's extraordinarily common for a word to simply have an assigned gender, regardless of the gender of the person bearing that title, or the perceived "manliness/girliness" of the object. Comandante, for example, is masculine... even if a woman is a comandante.
This is true across all the latin/romantic languages. I've found Japanese and Mandarin Chinese to be more social heirarchy-focused than gender-focused when referring to objects, and there isn't much gender reference except against living creatures. I assume most asian languages will conform more closely to the Mandarin model on which most of them relate, not unlike the romantics relating to Latin. But I believe that most of the languages in the world operate with some sort of awareness of implied gender of many objects. Arabic has sun and moon letters, and gender of nouns... in Arabic a flower is feminine in all sentences that will refer to it, even if the flower has stamen only and no female reproductive components. In English, many objects have implied genders. Ships come to mind in particular, but there's implied assumptions when encountering other objects.
But "Comandante" fits this argument perfectly. Regardless of the lactating capabilities of the breasts being referred to as "comandante," it is still going to be written in the ship's logs that "El comandante ha dicho que el barque tiene que navigar a Mexico." The commander has dictated that the ship must navigate to Mexico.
In the Starfleet utopian universe, you can either have alien species attempting to ogle all the crewmembers and being paranoid about whom to refer to as sir or ma'am, trying to keep tabs on which alien species have breast-like structures on the torso of their females, or which male species have reproductive organs on their knees, ad nauseum, or you can simply respect the role and give it an implied genderless shorthand title that will work for all instances. While English has unisex definite and indefinite articles ("the" and "a/an"), it does not have unisex suffixes to replace lay titles (sir, madam, mister, miss) and it lacks any capability to truncate more formal titles (doctor, professor, captain, lieutenant, etc).
It's either have interspecies boob-gazing, or get over the gender crap and accept the respect for the role in a quick "sir" while moving on with the real problems. As evidenced by 100+ years of Trek lore, up until Janeway opens her yap.
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Wow. Doc Smith and Van Vogt in one thread- mom raised me on this stuff. And Kenneth Roberts...
Anyway, you might enjoy Iain M Banks- RIP. A really fabulous sci fi writer.
http://www.iain-banks.net/books/#sf
I did not know he wrote fiction under Iain Banks, without the "M".
May 11th, 2011 in Awards & Accolades, Global
UK-based tech news website The Register has been running an online poll, asking it's readers to nominate the 'best sci-fi films never made'; books that have so far, somehow, been over-looked by Hollywood's movie moguls in favour of yet a.n.other sequel and / or re-hash.
And the winner, by a significant margin, was our very own Iain M. Banks' Use of Weapons.
The Register reports:
"The 50 candidates attracted a whopping 27,088 votes, with the winner securing 10,032. Runner-up was Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's The Mote In God's Eye, which was honoured with 7,099 votes. You can see the full results right here.
Worth noting that Consider Phlebas, Excession, The Player of Games and The Algebraist also featured, polling a few hundred votes between them. But it's clearly Use of Weapons that people want to see on the big screen.
Hollywood movie moguls, take note!