strictures suggested by Mundane SF.
Yes, FTL travel is hard. But I know of at least four ways to travel very rapidly.
(a) The traditional way is to do down into the subdimensions and take shortcuts. And, no, you don’t have to do this via wormholes. Nor do you need to travel in large steel cylinders. Science finds new things.
(b) A simple method that I’ve discussed in my books Freeware and in Saucer Wisdom is to send your personality as a zipped up information file and have it unzipped at your destination. This doesn’t go faster than light, but it goes at the speed of light, and seems to the traveler to take no time at all. Charles Stross used a weaker form of this in Accelerando , where people’s codes are packed into a ship the size of a soft drink can that travels at near-light speed. But, yes, when you get back home, a lot of time has elapsed.
(c) Teleportation, based on quantum indeterminacy. There’s a finite (small) chance that I’m on planet Pengö near the Great Attractor as well as here. It’s not hard to imagine that coming improvements of quantum computation will make it possible to amplify the indeterminacy and collapse it so that I can make the trip.
(d) The yunching technique described in my Frek and the Elixir (cf. also the Bloater Drive in Harry Harrison’s Bill the Galactic Hero ). You wind some of your strings to get really big, then step across the galaxy, then shrink back down.
Gotta have the alien bar scene! Painting by R.R.
As for aliens , perhaps they come via one of these rapid travel methods. But perhaps they are already here. Living in the subdimensions. What are the subdimensions? A power chord from the 1930s. Whatever is going on below the Planck length. We have no idea. Why not assume it might be interesting? Maybe aliens are those flashes you see out of the corner of your eye sometime. Maybe they’re aethereal protozoa in the atmosphere.
When trying to justify telepathy , don’t forget that only a tiny fraction of our universe’s mass is the familiar visible matter. Most of it is dark energy and dark matter. As my physicist friend Nick Herbert has remarked, maybe some of that dark stuff is consciousness .
Alternate universes are quite popular in modern physics. Something is going on in all those extra dimensions. Why not other worlds? Looked at in a certain quantum-mechanical way, each conscious being lives in a different parallel universe. Why should we settle for consensus reality?
Implausible as time travel is, it may be the SF power chord most commonly used by non-SF writers. I’ve always wanted to write a time travel book and get it right. Surely this can be done. Rather than throwing up my hands, I prefer to continue searching for ways to be less and less Mundane.
----
Note on “Against Mundane SF”
Written July, 2007.
Appeared in The New York Review of Science Fiction , 2007.
This started as a cranky post on Rudy's Blog , and I made it into a little piece for the NYRSF . By now, the Mundane SF movement has pretty much faded away, but for a few months everyone was talking about it, and it got my goat, reactionary member of the old-guard that I’m becoming.
Psipunk
I often call myself a transrealist SF writer. This means that I turn my life and my speculations into science fiction, I watch what emerges in my novelistic laboratories, and I turn my science-fictional discoveries into scientific speculation, which in turn fuels fresh novels, on and on in an endless, rising gyre. Now and then my speculations have an impact on the real world. Today I’ll give you some specific examples of science fiction affecting science fact.
(1) First I’m going to talk about a particular idea that fueled the cyberpunk literary movement in the 1980s.
(2) Second I’m going to talk about how this idea has affected technology over the last twenty-five years.
(3) Third I’m going to talk about some ideas that I’m using in my new series of psipunk novels.
(4) Fourth I’ll
Yes, FTL travel is hard. But I know of at least four ways to travel very rapidly.
(a) The traditional way is to do down into the subdimensions and take shortcuts. And, no, you don’t have to do this via wormholes. Nor do you need to travel in large steel cylinders. Science finds new things.
(b) A simple method that I’ve discussed in my books Freeware and in Saucer Wisdom is to send your personality as a zipped up information file and have it unzipped at your destination. This doesn’t go faster than light, but it goes at the speed of light, and seems to the traveler to take no time at all. Charles Stross used a weaker form of this in Accelerando , where people’s codes are packed into a ship the size of a soft drink can that travels at near-light speed. But, yes, when you get back home, a lot of time has elapsed.
(c) Teleportation, based on quantum indeterminacy. There’s a finite (small) chance that I’m on planet Pengö near the Great Attractor as well as here. It’s not hard to imagine that coming improvements of quantum computation will make it possible to amplify the indeterminacy and collapse it so that I can make the trip.
(d) The yunching technique described in my Frek and the Elixir (cf. also the Bloater Drive in Harry Harrison’s Bill the Galactic Hero ). You wind some of your strings to get really big, then step across the galaxy, then shrink back down.
Gotta have the alien bar scene! Painting by R.R.
As for aliens , perhaps they come via one of these rapid travel methods. But perhaps they are already here. Living in the subdimensions. What are the subdimensions? A power chord from the 1930s. Whatever is going on below the Planck length. We have no idea. Why not assume it might be interesting? Maybe aliens are those flashes you see out of the corner of your eye sometime. Maybe they’re aethereal protozoa in the atmosphere.
When trying to justify telepathy , don’t forget that only a tiny fraction of our universe’s mass is the familiar visible matter. Most of it is dark energy and dark matter. As my physicist friend Nick Herbert has remarked, maybe some of that dark stuff is consciousness .
Alternate universes are quite popular in modern physics. Something is going on in all those extra dimensions. Why not other worlds? Looked at in a certain quantum-mechanical way, each conscious being lives in a different parallel universe. Why should we settle for consensus reality?
Implausible as time travel is, it may be the SF power chord most commonly used by non-SF writers. I’ve always wanted to write a time travel book and get it right. Surely this can be done. Rather than throwing up my hands, I prefer to continue searching for ways to be less and less Mundane.
----
Note on “Against Mundane SF”
Written July, 2007.
Appeared in The New York Review of Science Fiction , 2007.
This started as a cranky post on Rudy's Blog , and I made it into a little piece for the NYRSF . By now, the Mundane SF movement has pretty much faded away, but for a few months everyone was talking about it, and it got my goat, reactionary member of the old-guard that I’m becoming.
Psipunk
I often call myself a transrealist SF writer. This means that I turn my life and my speculations into science fiction, I watch what emerges in my novelistic laboratories, and I turn my science-fictional discoveries into scientific speculation, which in turn fuels fresh novels, on and on in an endless, rising gyre. Now and then my speculations have an impact on the real world. Today I’ll give you some specific examples of science fiction affecting science fact.
(1) First I’m going to talk about a particular idea that fueled the cyberpunk literary movement in the 1980s.
(2) Second I’m going to talk about how this idea has affected technology over the last twenty-five years.
(3) Third I’m going to talk about some ideas that I’m using in my new series of psipunk novels.
(4) Fourth I’ll
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