Unabashed

What makes science fiction great? Yes, the story, and yes, the characters, but don’t forget all those nifty gadgets! Equipped with this list of goodies, you could go anywhere, create anything, know everything, have a faithful, useful friend, and look really cool the whole time. These are the items that represent SciFi’s greatest imaginings: 

Lightsaber
Star Wars, by George Lucas

It’s a weapon at heart, but so versatile that it is infused with gadgety cool–use it as a flashlight, to melt through metal doors, to slice open large meat carcasses, and it’ll probably slice fresh bread into instant toast (as seen in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, using a much smaller version of the tool). With an extremely rare Adegan crystal in its core, and being crafted in a month-long rite by a Jedi Knight, the lightsaber is the ultimate tool of the ultimate philosopher/warrior society. Nostalgia is one reason this futuristic gadget is so cool: the idea was obviously borrowed from feudal Japan’s Shogun warriors and their attachment to their carefully crafted artisan swords.

See also: Crysknife from Dune; Ultimate Nullifier from Marvel Comics

Stillsuit
Dune, by Frank Herbert

Quoting the book from Wikipedia:

It’s basically a micro-sandwich — a high-efficiency filter and heat-exchange system. The skin-contact layer’s porous. Perspiration passes through it, having cooled the body … near-normal evaporation process. The next two layers . . . include heat exchange filaments and salt precipitators. Salt’s reclaimed. Motions of the body, especially breathing and some osmotic action provide the pumping force. Reclaimed water circulates to catchpockets from which you draw it through this tube in the clip at your neck… Urine and feces are processed in the thigh pads. In the open desert, you wear this filter across your face, this tube in the nostrils with these plugs to ensure a tight fit. Breathe in through the mouth filter, out through the nose tube. With a Fremen suit in good working order, you won’t lose more than a thimbleful of moisture a day…

R2-D2
Star Wars, by George Lucas

You can have Threepio, you can even take HAL; I’ll take Artoo. This little robot can do almost anything from underway spaceship repair to serving drinks. He takes the AI concept to a whole new level, with built-in courage, humor, fear and devotion.

See also: HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey

Holtzman Shield
Dune, by Frank Herbert

The Holtzman Shield is a potent literary device: it makes directed-energy weaponry impossible against any worthwhile opponent, and also proves traditional projectile-based firearms and missiles ineffective, adding to the feudal atmosphere, and enforces the usage of mêlée weaponry despite other more advanced technology.

Cornucopia Machine
Singularity Sky/Iron Sunrise, by Charlie Stross

The Cornucopia can be programmed with the atomic structure of virtually any item (including another Cornucopia Machine) and, so long as it has fuel, material and time, fabricate it. (I would ask it to make everything on this list.) This is the only item on the list that hasn’t been adapted (yet) into a movie or television program; if you haven’t read these two books yet, I highly recommend them.

See also: Nutrimatic Dispenser from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; Food Replicator from Star Trek

Transporter
Star Trek, by Gene Roddenberry

The Transporter was so powerful you could almost call it the deus ex machina of Star Trek, but you can’t, because it wasn’t spontaneous; it was there from the beginning. Still, though; how many times have Trek characters escaped imminent doom by uttering the phrase: “Beam us up”? There are many incarnations of teleportation devices, but none done so well as Star Trek’s Transporter. It was in almost constant use in every movie and throughout every television series, making it one of the most useful gadgets on this list.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

Complete with it’s Don’t Panic! mantra, this wholly remarkable “book” can tell you anything you want to know about anything in the universe. The Guide was an electronic guidebook which was connected to the galaxy-wide Sub-Etha network for updates. The book was published in 1978, making the Sub-Etha one of the first imaginings of what the Internet could be. 

Iron Man’s Armor
Marvel Comics, by Stan Lee

Super strength, supersonic flight, repulsors, missiles, and pimped out with a red and gold titanium alloy…Nothing is cooler.

See also: KITT, from the 80s TV show Knight Rider

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: , cool, coolest, Fiction, gadgetry, greatest, sci-fi, Science, scifi, sf, tool, Tools

I am really loving io9. If you don’t read it, get on over there because they are consistently putting out great content. Today, for instance, they’ve posted a little space porn, some comics industry opinion, and this bit of writing advice, on “how to bring the weird” in your near-future SciFi stories. This is another one of those posts I want to print and paste to the wall by my desk, one of those I wish I’d written. Apologies for posting this word for word, but it is really all excellent and I want it filed away in my little internet brain for future reference:

Extrapolate from current trends…

Certain things happening now will probably carry on, and even accelerate, over the next two decades. The icecaps will keep melting, natural disasters will probably come more often, and droughts may affect more regions. Rich countries will become fortresses of the elderly, with fewer young people who aren’t immigrants. Corporations will probably keep becoming more powerful and diversified, unless the next economic meltdown actually weakens their power somehow. There will be less oil, and more fighting over oil. Food prices will keep going up for third-world countries. China and India will be economically resurgent, unless they fuck up. Some forms of social deviance will be marginally more accepted, within wealthy societies at least.

…but don’t be their bitch.

Don’t assume that every current trend will continue in a straight line — it’s never worked that way in the past, and it’s unlikely to start now. New technologies will help stem some of the negative trends we’re dealing with right now. And unimaginable disasters will spark new cycles of misery that will sweep us all down. Nobody in 1988 could have predicted 9/11 or the girl who hanged herself because her MySpace friends turned out to be mean grownups. (How would you even explain the “MySpace hoax” to someone in 1988?)

The technologies of tomorrow already exist.

Nanotechnology is already turning up in socks and medical devices, and everyone’s predicting it’ll replace basic circuitry and lead to miracle cures within a few years. People are already chuffed about home robotics, and robots are already helping us fight our wars. There’s a lot of talk about amazing replacement limbs that will use nanotech, and even be able to interpret signals from your brain. And there’s a lot of reason to be optimistic about gene therapy.

Don’t just pick one technology to update.

One of my pet peeves is the near-ish future story where everything’s more or less the same, except that there’s one miraculous new technology that is transforming the world. It’s way more likely that there’ll be half a dozen semi-miraculous technologies that will be nudging the world in different directions. (And we can’t discount the possibility that things will go to shit so badly that none of those amazing new technologies will come to fruition.)

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: Fiction, Future, sci-fi, scifi, writing

Generally, I like to refer to things that I write as “Speculative” fiction, because I often utilize rules of SciFi and fantasy in the same piece, that is, I write fiction with fantastic elements but I expound on the details as if it were SciFi. Is that a bad thing? There was a time when it would be looked down upon, maybe even be considered heretical, as Michael Crichton pointed out a long, long time ago:

“As a category, the borders of science fiction have always been poorly defined, and they are getting worse. The old distinction between science fiction and fantasy - that science fiction went from the known to the probable, and fantasy dealt with the impossible - is now wholly ignored. The new writing is heavily and unabashedly fantastical.”

“The breakdown is also seen in the authors themselves, who now cross the border, back and forth, with impunity. At one time this was dangerous and heretical; the only person who could consistently get away with it was Ray Bradbury. Science fiction addicts politely looked the other way when he did books such as Dandelion Wine and the screenplay for John Huston’s Moby Dick. It was assumed he needed the money.”

Consider a movie like Jurassic Park, where the concept of bringing back dinosaurs is perfectly believable. You believe it, don’t you? We believe it because we want to believe fantastic things are possible, and this is especially the case with readers of SciFi. One advantage SciFi has over fantasy, however, is that SciFi generally resounds with possibility. Even though its ideas may be impossible now, one who has the foresight to dream of tomorrow can see the inherent potential in virtually any work of SciFic.

There are two basic ways to write fantasy, and neither of them have to be believable in the least:

1. Real world, whether it be historical or modern-day.
2. Other world, in which another universe is created specifically for the story.

Sure, fantasy can take place in the future, but generally if it does, it’s called science fiction, and it’d better stick to the laws of physics as we understand them. On that same note, present-day fantasy is often called horror, therefore it should really be classified as a sub-genre of fantasy. It’s difficult to make a sweeping epic of orcs and dragons set in our present day, unless you create an alternate reality, which is generally how it’s handled. The teen is swept into a book, goes down a rabbit hole, whirled away in a tornado, or opens a door that allows them to enter a fantastic realm. Rarely do we get an insight as to how the portal works. We just get a stock line of explanation stating that the door or book was magical, if we get any explanation at all. In SciFi, this would hardly ever do. Readers of SciFi want the exposition of how things work:

• Why did the wormhole appear?
• How does it work?
• To where does it lead?
• How long is the travel time through it?
• What happens when you travel through it? Do you get sick?

This, to me, is one of the great dividing differences between the genres.

When the science of something is explained plausibly, within the laws of physics it is SciFi.
When the science of something is not explained, it is fantasy.

For SciFi, you can’t simply talk about a world of orcs and dragons, you have to give the planet a name, talk a bit about the history of it, how it evolved, and it wouldn’t hurt to have them flying a spaceship. But with fantasy, if it’s a good enough story the hows and the whys aren’t really all that important.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: fantasy, Fiction, sci-fi, Science, scifi