I'd love to hear about your favorite concept or idea you've read about or seen in scifi media.

My personal favorite is the Conjoiner Drive out of the Revelation Space series. These ship drives are dual drives on either side of a lighthugger and have a living being inside the drives to act as a supercomputer, which holds a wormhole open inside the drives. The wormhole links far in the past to the big-bang and uses the energy from the big-bang for propulsion.

In most scifi I've come across wormholes are used for FTL travel, and I thought this was such a unique and creative use of a wormhole it has stuck with me for years after reading about it.

So what are your favorite devices or ideas that have come out of scifi media?

Anne Leckie’s Translators. Aliens so alien that the only way we can have any shred of common ground is by them taking a few humans and rebuilding them specifically to be their ambassadors, with interesting results.

Is this from Translation State? That's what came up when I searched Anne leckie translators, but sounds like something I'd enjoy.

Have you read Embassytown? It has some funky linguistics going on that sounds like it might be up your alley

The wormhole network of the Nasqueron Dwellers in "The Algebraist."

Niling d-sinks, from Peter F Hamilton's Commonwealth novels.

The Planet Express ship from Futurama (it would take too much energy to move the ship at FTL, so it moves the universe instead.)

my favorite trope that i dont see enough of in movies is realistic galactic travel and all the tech that would require.. travel to another star system.. usually multi-generational attempts. feels like there is a lot of this in books.

you often see a brief glimpse, or some hand waiving with hibernation techniques. not much feels real.

Planet express ship is cool and all but I think the finglonger takes the cake

The book writing technique of the D'ni from Myst. It was not magic, it was essentially math and virtual reality. It just was in hand written books you could enter by placing your hand on a window instead of walking into a big room like the holodecks of Star Trek.

Fully agree, give me non-ftl space is really really fucking big scifi and I'm a happy camper

Sounds interesting. Is this from the game Myst or is there another piece of scifi that goes by the same name?

The details of how the books work mostly comes from the book series, specifically The Book of Ti'Ana, which IIRC is the second book in a trilogy. I haven't played more than the first one and a little bit of 3 tho. Always wanted to play Riven after reading the books, since they all take place right before the events of that game. But the book series and the games were written by the same people, so it's all the same lore.

Good to know I'll have to check the series out, thanks

piers anthony has a series called I think kirilian quest. There is no ftl and the law of physics as we know them can't be circumvented (I think its been awhile but maybe its real difficult and rarely used). Anyway all civilizations eventually realize astral projection is possible and time and space make no difference. Thing is it takes two types of people to work. People with strong auras can project and people with weak auras can be possesed. Its not a requirement but more it will work better and last longer. Anyway people with the strongest auras get jobs traveling and people with the lowest get jobs as vessels. This is how communication between societies in an intergalactic culture communicate and interact.

Yea thats pretty cool definitely gonna check this out

I'm a big fan of Adrian Tchaikovsky's work, but one concept of his that I am fascinated by comes from his book "Alien Clay":

Since I read Stranger in a Strange Land long ago. I keep coming back to the idea of an indoor lawn.

It's an idea that seems fairly complicated when you get into the details, but also there's no real reason it can't be done.

just one word of warning he is more of a fantasy writer so the alien species are a bit fantastic. On the other hand they are not all humanoid. In fact quite the opposite. So sci fantasy but definately different.

Not gonna read the spoiler because I already have it on my list to read, but I really enjoyed the children series. Excited to get to Alien Clay now

I was a building engineer for years and this sounds like an absolute nightmare, but it would definitely be super cool.

A universe/dimension where everything takes place inside a giant creature can be pretty fun one. The bloom in torment: tides of numenera is the example I recall but I'm sure there's more.

I can't believe how prolific that guy is. He puts out like 3 novels per year, and the vast majority of them are absolute bangers. Just finished book 4 in the Children series the other day, and it blew me away.

People permanently grafted into ships is pretty cool. That does come up a lot, doesn't it?

Translation State is a standalone book in her Imperial Radch universe, which includes the Ancillary Justice trilogy, which is a great series. I highly recommend it.

I think my favourite is just when they play with the unknowable. Things so different from humans they operate on different principles and see the world differently.

Sure you see this in fantasy and horror a lot with like the house in House of Leaves or Cthulhu but I'm also thinking the TechnoCore and Shrike in Hyperion, maud'dib in Dune, or the black stuff in the Expanse series. I just like alien stuff that's, well, alien

There were definitely a few other instances of that happening on accident but I think the conjoiner drives were the only ones that were on purpose.

The Uplift Series is a gem. Copied directly from Wiki because it's succinct yet thorough:

The Five Galaxies are filled with alien races, all of whom were "uplifted" into sentience by another race through the use of directed breeding. As "payment" for being made sentient, the uplifted races are subservient to their uplifters for a period of time. All existing races have reached sentience through this process, and follow a common evolution in which the races become free of their uplifters, enter a period of independent power, and then fade and eventually disappear.

The arrival of a human ship at a populated star upsets the established races as humanity reached sentience on their own. This had been believed to be impossible, nothing of the sort is known in the eons-old galactic library. This leads to great arguments among the alien powers. Humanity begins to uplift other species on Earth, including chimpanzees and dolphins, but does not demand subservience.

There was that kids movie, recently I don't know if I should spoil it but I liked it.

I love that, of all the out-there ideas in Stranger in a Strange Land, that's the one that sticks with you. Honestly, I think you're right to favor it! 😄

This is a bit of a general one, but I have a fondness for very large space structures. A number of my favorite scifi stories take the premise of "exploring a (usually abandoned or tech-regressed) alien megastructure".

Dyson spheres and ringworlds and stellar engines and the like are the obvious candidates, but honestly I like smaller (but still huge) ideas like oneill cylinder colonies just as much, because what I like in them is a function of both size and how close to understood physics they follow, and the latter tend to be easier to make plausible.

There's a certain sense of inspiration that comes of someone describing something almost incomprehensibly huge, explaining that it is designed by intelligent entities, and then justifying it with enough real science as to convince you that something at least somewhat like it really could exist, someday, or maybe already does somewhere out in the vastness of the universe.

Megastructure Enioyer spotted.

Seeing the Beyond Coast space colony in Policenauts use the o'neill cylinder for its design was pretty cool. I think its the only time I have seen one in a video game, and pretty neat considering its age.

Im with you i love a good megastructure. I know the bobiverse books are a bit cheesy but I really enjoyed the oneill cylinder world that was the main focus of book 4 I think it was. Pushing Ice, Ringworld, and Rendezvous with Rama were all good as well. Got any other good superstructure stories I could get into?

You named virtually all of the ones I'd mention first lol. I guess I'd probably add "bowl of heaven" to that, I'm not sure it's design is the most plausible form for the concept really but it features a stellar engine (specifically, one using the star as a sort of rocket thruster, to move something like a ringworld around).

Nice didn't know a 4th was released

Nah, Chronicles of Riddick has ship telepaths who live in pods. Battlestar Galactica has something similar. The video game Homeworld had galactic travel ships that were controlled by a human grafted to the computer, that turned out to he reversible and had lower stakes as time went on. That's probably the closest thing because the ship controller is responsible for plotting hyperspace jumps by ripping holes in reality.

The navigators in Dune are almost like this but you can carry them offship in a giant fishtank. So not grafted but kind of non-ambulatory outside of spaceflight.

I guess the theme I latch on to here is people who trade their body and autonomy to gain interstellar flight and provide for others. Is it not the same with conjoiner drives?

Yup! Just a couple months ago.

My bad I thought you were talking about within the Revelation Space universe. Great examples of that trope in different media. Didn't know that was a trope used in homeworld I didn't pay much attention to the story when I played it ages ago

I don’t recall which book. But there was one with truth in advertising laws. I feel like it was Larry Niven. Anyway, the laws were the result of improved sucsess rates for organ transplants. It's really only a side point, but I loved how they were connected.

A Translator appears in Ancillary Sword, and it's pretty much "try to simulate a human" silly stuff for comic relief.

I love science and technology vs. the supernatural. I think it started with Ghostbusters when I was a kid.

Any time any movie or TV show attempts to battle the supernatural with technology I am glued to the screen. Anything from movies like Oculus where you try to confront an ancient evil with real-life modern tech to inverse movies like Event Horizon where oops...my future tech unleashed evil.

Speaking of Alastair Reynolds, concept of Pattern Jugglers - benign algae-like pools that oscillate in strange image-like patterns and can physically connect, read, and modify human brains. A person entering the Pattern Juggler could experience someone else's life, temporarily gain skills or knowledge, or... die.

In Ursula LeGuin's Left Hand Of Darkness, I love the idea of society without war. There is still violence and murder, but fighting on someone else's behalf must be viewed as incredibly absurd and unacceptable.

Department Of Truth comics are based around the idea "what if what we believe becomes true?". So cryptids, UFOs, and conspiracies exist because enough people believe in them.

The depth and mechanics of Orogenes in N.K. Jemisin's Fifth Season / Broken Earth. It's not just "I cast frost", it's heat and energy manipulation, with sense, direction, and geometry.

Besides the whole uplift concept, I've also liked the concept that the galactic civilization is really old - like hundreds of millions if not billions of years old. Some of the ships flying around are tens of millions of years old.

I have to say the second and third books, Startide Rising and
The Uplift War, are some of my favorite sci-fi novels of all time. The first book is David Brin's first novel and it kind of shows. It's not a bad book, but it's a bit weak. The last three books are a trilogy and they start getting pretty weird and I didn't care for it as much. The second and third books are standalone so you can read them without the first book very easily. I actually had read the second and third books a few times before looking into it a bit more and realizing there was a first book.

the various forms of FTL, including dimensional teleportation. hyperspace seems quite common between 3 scifi universes. wormhole drives. the most unique seems to be doctors who tardis which uses a form time travel/ftl. that doesnt violate the C velocity, its a way to explain away/bypass, unlike warp drive.

favorite in trek is the vortex drive(xindi,spherebuilders) is similar to transwarp of voth and borg(voth seems to have a more advanced version than the borg since they can cloak at high warp/transwarp which most species can use both tech at the same time, the borg needs a subspace field for thier transwarp and coils), and slipstream of aucturs species.

other unusual ones is the caretakers intergalatic ftl, which uses thier array to produce a wave of energy that makes them pass through a rift, or subspace so almost instantaneous travel.

asgard seems to have the fastest hyperdrives out there unassisted with zpms(although they use massive generators), not even the deadalus class, or even the zpm powered odessey is that fast.

Wormholes always kinda rubbed me wrong in sci-fi. They're always depicted in a way that screams fantasy, not science, with only one exception that comes to mind, which was Interstellar's depiction of a wormhole as a sphere, even taking the time to explain why it looks that way.

The only got it half right though, since as soon as they enter the sphere it's straight back to the fantasy BS with the blue tunnel. That scene could have been a really cool transition of entering the one 'side' of the sphere while exiting the other simultaneously. Cut from the crew's perspective seeing lens-like distortion of the stars, to an external view of the ship moving into the sphere.

I kinda feel like that's how they intended to do that scene, with the whole buildup about the sphere, but decided to throw a nod to oldschool science fantasy for some reason.

Oh well. They got it half right, and that half was pretty fucking sick - it was the first presentation of a wormhole that didn't instantly yoink me out of suspension of disbelief. Until the blue tunnel ofc, at which point, yoink.

To answer OP's question, I guess for me it's less a specific concept as it is presenting something possible only in theory in a believable way. The whole lens-distortion style transition would have been way less flashy, but less can be more.

I've always thought of scifi being very adjacent to fantasy.

Dune, star wars are basically fantasy stories packaged with scifi elements.

I've always wondered what makes a SciFi story SciFi and I've come to the conclusion that for it to be SciFi it must be an exploration of how technology effects the human condition.

What do you think?

To Be Hero X (2025) is an anime with a similar concept to department of truth and was done really well. Peoples Trust (and fear) in someone can grant people powers according to their followers faith/desires.

I have just finished Peter F. Hamilton's latest excellent duology The Archimedes Engine and The Helium Sea and slower than light interstellar travel, and the time dilation that ensues, is a constant theme. There is some hand-wavy magic technology for speeding ships up to 99% of lightspeed (and slowing them down again) using massive gates, which means the main parts of the story are told over decades.

So many original ideas in Hamilton's work, I too liked Niling D-sinks.

Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang has children with severe physical disabilities given new lives, bodies, and possibilities as 'shell people' - brains grafted into ships. An amazing new view on what it is to be human.

One thing that absolutely stuck with me as an idea was the plot premise of the short story The Road Not Taken by Harry Turtledove. In this story not only is FTL travel by gravity manipulation possible, but also very very easy to discover. It's so easy that many aliens discovered it early on and then their progress on technology is basically halted. So humankind is a very advanced civilization because we never discovered FTL travel which led to our advanced technology. Then one day one of the "prehistoric" alien races try to conquer the earth and can't grasp what they're up against.

I can't remember what book it came from, maybe one of Peter F. Hamiltons, but portals was a thing. So naturally the superrich had houses where rooms were not on the same planet. The doors between the rooms looked normal, but was portals to the next room somewhere else.

Especially the toilet tickled me. That was situated on an open raft on a deserted ocean covered planet.

I'm sure I've read this book, but I have no clue about the title, the author, or anything else in the plot :(

Spoilers ahoy! (yes, old series. Still.)