#hard sci-fi

[ruindunburnit]

I say I want to read/watch more cosmic and hard sci-fi shit, then keep putting off watching Christopher Nolan's Interstellar.

[kjudgemental]

The Three-Body Problem - Science-Fiction Novel Review

Author: Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu) Publisher: Head of Zeus (US publisher) Country: China Year: 2014 (orig 2006) The first in a trilogy. When it got translated into English a decade ago, it won the Hugo Award for best novel, making Liu the first Asian writer to claim the prize. In the past few years, author Cixin Liu’s remarks have come under fire. Very much pro Chinese government,…

[rancid-references]

NICOLL-DYSON BEAM

[void-thing]

a good approximation for the population capacity of the solar system is to imagine a solid Dyson shell with the population density of Europe. Such a sphere would have room for about 9.61327353e+18 - 9.6 quintillion - people.

this is part of why most of my OCs live in the solar system. there's plenty of room here for a huge space empire, folks.

[owlbear33]

Asking here before I resort to Reddit, but does anyone know any good hard sci-fi ttrpgs, nothing massively crunchy, I don't want to be calculating orbital velocities and the like for transport times or anything but I'm not a massive fan of rules-lite either

I'm already familiar with Eclipse Phase (which I love dearly) and the Expanse RPG (which I have 100% no interest in)

important things are no FTL, no space magic/ESP/psionics, and a good sense that space is fucking huge, (yes I know EP has Psi and the Pandora gates, fuzzy edges are allowed but don't go too far)

It's just I've come to the conclusion that the subgenre categories on drivethru are completely useless and am hoping word of mouth will be better

[mintaka-iii]

Reading a new book and losing my goddamn mind!!!!

[novanhistorian]

The Fundamentals

Finally, I get around to introing the blog. If you like this, there’s more: I posted two of five(?) parts of a summary of history today.

I am here to talk about the Imperium Novel, which I must immediately clarify is not a novel. What it actually is is a rather massive and intricate worldbuilding project. Now, I could tell you that its name is a relic of the earliest days of its development, when it was really to be one novel with an increasingly cartoonish amount of backstory, and that would be true enough; but the heart of the matter is that I am a painfully pretentious artiste in this specific way. I could have changed the name; I didn’t.

(As for why it is no longer a single novel: As I write this, the [pseudo]historical period I concern myself with covers almost fifteen centuries, most of them quite complicated. Any attempt to cover the whole in one novel would wind up a gargantuan, winding, likely quite boring mess possessing more pages than a medical textbook and less plot than a wet blanket.)

Anyhow, hard segue.

The other basics you need to know are the following:

We are not in our solar system. References to the sun are to the star Scientia (to us, Era Cassiopeiae A), and references to Forsuno or the Far Sun refer to, well, Forsuno (Eta Cassiopeiae B).

The main planet, Terranovo,* has twenty-six-hour days and slightly stronger gravity than Earth. Its days are the standard in most other regions; we are ignoring Ilajn for now because I haven’t formally named their planet. (It has 21.5-ish-hour days and markedly weaker gravity. Let’s hear it for large, fast-rotating terrestrial planets.)

All the planets we care about after 2300 orbit Scientia, and—at the risk of misrepresenting the gravitational dance—the orange dwarf Forsuno basically does too. Scientia’s stellar classification is G0 V, which is to say that it is more or less like our sun, though slightly brighter. Forsuno’s is K7 V, which makes it either an orange or a red dwarf, depending on which classification system one follows. Basically, it’s small, it’s dim (only 6% of the Sun’s luminosity, still far brighter than a full moon), and it will live a very long time after Scientia is dead. Although their orbit is very eccentric (that is to say very elliptical rather than circular), the closest approach between the stars is 36 AU, or just this side of the Kuiper Belt; this allows for stable, although compact, planetary systems around both stars safe from the worst of the gravitational interference of the other star.

Novanity (non-collective singular novan and plural novans) is the sapient species the Novel follows for most of its history. They are, as many of them will bitterly tell you, the products of genetic engineering and a whole lot of moral stupidity on the parts of various humans—but we shall get to that in the history.

* At other points in its history, Terranovo was also known as Terra Nova, Terranova, Tero Nova, and Nova Tero. By the current working date, 745, variation is only historical.

The gender trinary is probably the most relevant thing in here besides the location, but thanks to narrative flow I have to put it down here. The three novan genders occupy roughly the same position as the human two, which is to say that the majority of the population falls into one or another, but there are a large number of outliers besides.

Two of the dominant genders are descendants of our concepts of male and female, and they remain mostly similar and are called by their names. The third is called sendua (an adjective), and people who have it are called senduoj. Its name derives from a shortening of senduuma, a rather nonstandard way of saying “nonbinary;”* it somewhat evolved from the use of the word as an overcategory for a variety of genders,

* It literally means “without a binary;” the human standard, neduuma, is a calque from English.

If you encounter something like Ĉlr or Nŝx/n, that’s reference shorthand, a standardized system used in the Imperium (with War-Era predecessors); it tells you a person’s gender and pronouns, and sometimes their preferred grammatical gender and physical sex.

The capital letters stand for gender and are derived from the gendering suffixes in the Imperium’s dominant language: Ĉ stands for male, N for female, S for sendua, and X (from crossing out the category on a form) for anything else. The lowercase letters, of which there are often more than one, stands for pronouns: l for li, the equivalent of “he;” ŝ for ŝi, “she;” r for ri, “re;” and x for anything else (which is quite rare, but in practice means “ask”).

The lowercase letter after the slash, if it exists, describes grammatical gender—and boy do I wish English had a shorter way to say that. The Imperium’s dominant language is largely non-gendered, and for words which could be gendered—titles, professions, and so on—the default is to use the genderless base word rather than add on one of the gendered suffixes. But some titles are routinely declined by gender, and several minor languages gender their adjectives at a minimum and their verbs at a maximum. As a result, some portion of the population has a preference about which gender is used, and that’s usually denoted like this. (The letters themselves follow the same rule as the actual gender indicator, and good lord have I said “gender” a lot of times in this paragraph.)

Occasionally, an italicized x or y or a centered asterisk, placed after the pronouns, indicates physical sex. The x and y, mean roughly what one would expect—XX or XY chromosomes respectively, without any sort of intersex condition. The asterisk, which in some state governments has subcategories, indicates that the person is intersex. Sex is mostly irrelevant in social life, so its denotation is circumscribed to medical and governmental records.

As you may have guessed by now, the dominant language is Esperanto—or, well, a version of Esperanto that’s evolved like a (fairly regulated) natural language for a millennium and a half. Some people speak one or more of the so-called “minor languages,” usually regional dialects descended from natlangs.

There are two different calendars in use over the course of the Novel, one that continues roughly directly from the Gregorian calendar and is dated relative to the traditional year of birth of Jesus Christ and another dated relative to the Year of Fortifying the Peace (the official end of the War Era, covered in the last two sections of the Sketch of History).

The first or human calendar can be identified because it will almost always have a four-digit year, and in cases where it doesn’t it gets labeled (B.)C.E. The second or novan calendar can usually be identified by having a three-digit year, or else because it uses a minus sign to indicate its negatives. It may also be distinguished by the ᴊ (from jaro, “year”) that precedes single- and double-digit years, as well as any three-digit years that require disambiguation. The novan calendar has a year zero; this is, as can probably be predicted, the Year of Fortifying the Peace.

Technically there are four major dating systems (standard, human, Terranovan orbital, and Ilajnaplaneta orbital). The orbital calendars exist because neither of the inhabited planets have years particularly close to 365 days, so their seasons are wildly out of sync with the administrative calendars. I should probably also note that neither planet has 24-hour days, and that the administrative calendars are standardized on the 26-hour Terranovan day.

I think that’s about it. I’ll write up instructions on how to pronounce all the random Esperanto words soon; for now, the vowels are like Spanish and the J makes a Y sound.

[davidjhiggins]

Oxygen by John B. Olson & Randy Ingermanson

Olson and Ingermanson blend crisply realistic astronautics with the untidiness of human emotions, creating a thriller about people who must���yet cannot—trust each other if they want to survive. Continue reading Oxygen by John B. Olson & Randy Ingermanson

[threeravenspublishing]

Are you ready to kick off the weekend with a bang?

Contested Landing has launched! Buckle up for an explosive ride into the heart of battle with ‘Contested Landing’ – the ultimate anthology of military science fiction that’ll leave you on the edge of your seat!Get ready to dive headfirst into the fray as fearless defenders clash with relentless invaders in heart-pounding actions across the cosmos. From pulse-pounding firefights to jaw-dropping…

[chantireviews]

The Cygnus Awards SciFi Round Up for the 2023 First Place Winners!

The Cygnus Awards Close at the end of June! Submit today! The Cygnus Book Awards recognize emerging new talent and outstanding works in the genre of Science Fiction, Steampunk, Alternative History, and Speculative Fiction. The Grand Prize Winner, Timothy S. Johnston’s book, The Shadow of War will be promoted for years to come in our annual Hall of Fame article, as well as be featured on the…

[soillodge]

Listen/purchase: Multiversal Network by Ion Plasma Incineration

[spirk-trek]

Contact Fanzine | Pat Stall, 1977

[pleasestopthese]

in which i gush to you about a cyberpunk classic

there's this one fantastic sci-fi action movie about a linear city that grows alongside a newly laid railway.

the city's main water supply has been found and maintained by a single family, who are killed off so the city can claim it – but there's a secret heir! political intrigue ensues as the technocratic city founder tries to scare her away – or kill her trying. she calls on the help of two men on the run from state authorities. over the course of the story she integrates herself further into the systems of the growing city, until finally the city becomes her. the story weighs human rights against technological progress and urbanization, it asks questions of the meaning of criminality in a world where the police are employed by corporate robber barons. in the end the march of technology is not slowed, but it presents an idea of organic life and community that inevitably will find a way to grow alongside it as long as life itself is possible.

it is absolutely minblowing this prophetic cyberpunk classic came out all the way back in 1968.

of course you know i'm talking about once upon a time in the west.

[rwvansant]

No Harm No foul

No Harm No foul

Available Cyber Monday Without warning, bombs pour through a rip in the night sky, devastating the Earth. A strange constellation visible through the breach provides the only clue to the identity of the enemy. Survivors huddle in bunkers, waiting for the radiation to reach them and put an end to mankind’s history. In the middle of the chaos, an astronomer solves the mystery and offers the…

[void-thing]

cool megastructures and hard scifi stuff don’t get enough love on tumblr

so i’m going to force it on you

your homework is to watch these or at least look at the chapters (each of these videos is nearly 2 hours long so you may not actually want to but please look at them i beg you i don’t want to be the only person on this entire website that talks about these things 

[hubrishazard]

I edited together all the clips of 14 frantically twirling and climbing and sliding around in here like his life depends on it