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 ShanklandJul 19, 2023
@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.
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 threadStephen Shankland
@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.
Jul 19, 2023 at 8:42pmWeb
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.