Charlie StrossJul 19, 2023

#WritingWonders 19 — Does your MC support the status quo in her world?

My WIP is a very far future SF novel, set two-thirds of a million years hence. Our strain of humanity is extinct, replaced by multiple successor hominids. Science as an exploratory enterprise is finished—all the questions that can be answered have been. The status quo is monumental, of geological proportions, and our protagonists are embedded in it … yet as a minority species they're imperilled outsiders. So, no they don't.

Show threadStephen Shankland
@cstross Main characters aside, I do worry that it'll get prohibitively harder to scientifically probe deeper into the universe's underpinnings. LHC is monumentally expensive and pushed back the knowledge frontier notably but also only modestly. Perhaps computer simulations will get profoundly better, in particular with quantum computing.
Jul 19, 2023 at 8:27pmWeb
Show threadCharlie StrossJul 19, 2023

@stshank I'm positing a no-singularity future—no superhuman AI, no mind uploading, no real posthumanity (but loads of genemodded post-human hominins). The one "cheat code" I've used was to give them wormhole travel between star systems. So 10-100 million inhabited worlds for two-thirds of a million years, average population about a billion …

Yes, these monkeys HAVE banged out Shakespeare. And Kafka. And Borges. And then misplaced them in the archives …

Show threadTim BrayJul 19, 2023
@cstross @stshank Your readers send you thanks for sucking it up and ignoring the physics problems with wormholes. We must suffer for our art.
Show threadCharlie StrossJul 19, 2023
@timbray @stshank I'm trying to play by Mundane SF rules and do space opera (again): you're allowed one impossible/magic mcguffin per book, at most (you don't have to use one, though). It's up to you to make everything hang together consistently without needing to rely on multiple magical gizmos to keep the plot working. Otherwise it's just a fantasy subgenre with Space Wizards instead of Pointy Hat Wizards.
Show threadTim BrayJul 19, 2023
@cstross @stshank Stross’s Law, you heard it here first.
Show threadGeoff 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿Jul 19, 2023
@timbray @cstross @stshank My favourite kind of hard SF - the one "what if?". Dollhouse took this to extremes with "what if we can download/edit/upload human minds", and went with the old idea of predicting the traffic jam, not just the car.
Show threadptrourkeJul 19, 2023
@cstross @timbray @stshank I've been looking forward to this book since you first mentioned it as the Interstellar analog to the Stasis, however many years ago.
Show threadStephen ShanklandJul 19, 2023
@timbray @cstross Always intrigued at idea of "let's lift some of today's limits for a more exciting story," e.g. superheroes, time travel, wormholes, wizard school, in tension with the need to keep lots of constraints so things don't go off the rails. That time turner in Harry Potter could have been a big mess.
Show threadLisPiJul 20, 2023

@stshank @timbray @cstross As several fanfics showed, it could also have been pushed way further and for much more fun.

The rails are non-euclidean semi-sapient monstrosities and they don't like the trespassers. Fun times.

Show threadjwzJul 19, 2023
@cstross Did you find a way to do wormholes without them turning into time travel? I recall you being irritated by that before...
Show threadJonathan LennoxJul 20, 2023
@jwz @cstross Something something Chronology Protection Conjecture something something vacuum fluctuations.
Show threadRui CarmoJul 19, 2023
@cstross @stshank so, ChatGPT 10^24 converged asymptotically towards slightly less idiocy then, as expected. Venture capitalists will hate that future :)
Show threadRob SynnottJul 19, 2023
@cstross @stshank Wormholes in space, or Peter Hamilton’s interstellar wormhole-trains?
Show thread: j@fabrica:~/src;  Jul 19, 2023

@cstross @stshank So no “thou shalt not violate causality within my historical light cone” dei will be exing the machina?

I guess I won’t really miss the insane clowns.

Wait, will there be clowns?