Science Fiction doesn't have to be fantasy, it can be speculative. But if your setting or plot relies on something we know to be scientifically untrue, and you don't put some effort into explaining why it somehow works in your setting, it's fantasy and not speculative.
Someone like Asimov never considered his books to be fantasy and that he could just insert whatever he wanted with no justification. In fact, he never considered sci-fi to be a genre, he always argued it was a setting and that his most famous stories were detective stories in a sci-fi setting. But detective stories don't work if your world isn't grounded in something real. Otherwise the reader can't reasonably build their own theory or deduce the answer because it's based on what the author thought was cool and not what logically connects.
The appeal of something like The Expanse just falls apart if you introduce a FTL engine just because it makes for a more dramatic story moment somewhere in the plot unless there is some serious justification as to why the author didn't just break all the rules of their world (which is supposed to be our world, but in the future).
"But detective stories don't work if your world isn't grounded in something real."
No, it just has to be grounded in something consistent and if the book starts by explaining the mechanics of the world(or is in a world with known mechanics), a detective story very well can work.
It can’t be too different from what people are familiar with. So it has to be consistent with itself and with reality.”It’s like our reality except …” but the except part (faster than light travel, mind reading, time travel, dragons, magic, etc) can’t get arbitrarily complex or unreasonable or the reader will be lost or confused.
"can’t get arbitrarily complex or unreasonable or the reader will be lost or confused."
Indeed, but that is always the challenge of a writer. But if you introduce magic in your story, and you do it in a way to show the limitations and what is roughly possible, then you can give hints later, if there was a murder with the help of a magic trick. But I actually think I only ever read one detective fantasy story
It mostly works, but in one instance there was a surprise fantasy ability, that I could have not guessed before. But the actual murderer in the end, there were enough hints that gave them away despite magic, as the skills were explained and then you could combine.
True but at that point objects travelling faster than sound had been demonstrated.
It was just hard to engineer a manned plane that could do it. For example during WWII the V2 rockets travelled much faster than sound. They were just unmanned. Or more simple, bullets were supersonic for longer too.
What I mean is, nobody thought the sound barrier was a hard limit we could never break.
A magic unobtainium drive which works in a consistent way is fine, just call it “hyperspace” or whatever
There’s a difference between hard sci-fi and soft sci-fi, but they are both still sci-fi, you can tell optimistic stories of the future with a “battle drive”, as long as you keep it consistent. If the drive cancels relativity effects and allows travel at 5000c that’s fine. Just ensure you travel at 5000c, no hoping across the galaxy in a few days, but travelling to another star in a few days or even hours is fine.
> But if your setting or plot relies on something we know to be scientifically untrue, and you don't put some effort into explaining why it somehow works in your setting, it's fantasy and not speculative.
Agreed but only because "some effort" could be as little as a single paragraph.
> But detective stories don't work if your world isn't grounded in something real. Otherwise the reader can't reasonably build their own theory or deduce the answer because it's based on what the author thought was cool and not what logically connects.
If you only change a tiny bit, this isn't a major issue.
> The appeal of something like The Expanse just falls apart if you introduce a FTL engine just because it makes for a more dramatic story moment somewhere in the plot unless there is some serious justification as to why the author didn't just break all the rules of their world (which is supposed to be our world, but in the future).
That specific story falls apart but you could have lots of thematically similar stories with FTL. No need for "serious justification" unless you're trying to pull it out of nowhere halfway through the plot. If it's there from the start, there's no problem.
> No need for "serious justification" unless you're trying to pull it out of nowhere halfway through the plot. If it's there from the start, there's no problem.
Yeah I think most readers care more about consistency than realism. Being completely realistic makes consistency easy but a harder sell in terms of entertainment.
Maybe one way to view consistency is modelling the story world as a network of criss-crossing character threads. Where one axis is time and the other(s) are uh something? Anyways, consistency is how predictable (smooth / linear) the thread is. We follow the main character's thread pretty closely so that thread is allowed to suddenly curve (plot twist) without risk of losing the reader. We only catch glimpses of the supporting cast / antagonist so those have to be either predictable or the narrator has to backtrack and reveal any twists where necessary. And maybe how intricate yet well-behaved this network appears is what gives the feeling of stories coming alive. Or maybe I'm just on too much caffeine and ranting.
Start trek transporters work because of a Heisenberg compensator. Great, no idea how it could possible work but it’s enough to know it does.
The typical poorly received uses aren’t when the cre beams down from orbit, or even when they can’t beam down, it’s when they de age people and retrieve their pattern from the buffer to cure an illness, and never do it again, or when they beam light years away for a throw away story element.
30s to 60s, sci-fi wasn't just driven by the "makes for great stories", but by the optimism for scientific advacements and the idea that these could get within reach in the future.
It was "science fiction" and not merely "space fiction".
Presumably these are equally likely because you could build a DNA-printer and thereby create a dragon of some sort (not sure if it could have fully functional fire breathing though)?
Dragons are physically impossible in many more ways than the firebreathing. For one, things that large would probably struggle to fly. We can make larger things fly, but have to cheat using jet (or rocket!) engines to generate incredible thrust in ways not typically accessible to living beings.
And now I'm picturing a dragon with bombardier-beetle style pulsed jet boosters. And while I'd typically question your assumptions of how big dragons need to be in order to deserve the name, I'll assert that quetzocoatlus nothropi[1] was big enough.
"Dragon" as a classification is odd, because when you look at every kind of mythological creature that gets classified as such nowadays, sometimes from cultures that wouldn't have recognized the concept, you find that they have little in common beyond some vaguely reptilian vibe and being scary.
And I'm sorry but that thing is too goofy looking to be considered a dragon.
That's begging the question. We don't need to look "at every kind of mythological creature that gets classified as such nowadays" from "cultures that wouldn't have recognized the concept".
One could stick on those classified as such in western culture - which is where the fantasy novel about dragons and knights and spells and the rest are based on.
And in there, dragons have quite specific characteristic and vibes, as evidenced from medieval iconography of St George to countless fantasy book covers and illustrations.
But if we do expand the set under consideration then I'd suggest they do in fact have specific things in common. Large flying carnivorous reptiles. That won't cover all the various edge cases but I think it describes the vast majority of the popular usage of the term.
That definition would imply that sufficiently large flying dinosaurs qualify as dragons. And at least personally I think I agree with that conclusion. Dragons aren't purely fantasy, they're merely extinct (and never breathed fire IRL).
Hence eco-systems, yes. But that's probably a harder problem than radiation shielding + hibernation. You'd still need the radiation shielding but it would be far, far more of it (because non-local).
These are interesting problems to think about, right now they are solidly SF but dragons are and always will be fantasy because physics says they can't exist in the way they are described. But you can't 100% rule out that one day descendants of humanity will visit the stars in person, assuming we don't blow ourselves up first.
That's one of the main reasons I dislike Musk so much: he takes people motivated by positive dreams (a clean planet, off-world travel and living) and then subverts their energy for grift. But 'DOGE' has shown the world who he really is, the mask is off now and anybody still empowering that asshole is co-responsible.
> physics says they can't exist in the way they are described
If we assume advanced genetic as well as bio engineering that admits the possibility of self reproducing cybernetic organisms that closely match many or all of the key characteristics. I'm not sure it's actually a cyborg if the lineage is fully independent without involving any technology external to the species but I use the term there because that's the easiest way to communicate the idea.
No, then it still wouldn't work. Not until you use that other thing to get you to a planet where gravity is low enough that a dragon would be able to take off. The whole power-to-weight and wing-surface-area-to-weight ratio simply does not work. It (barely) works for bats though some of them can be of impressive size. The idea that something the size of a dragon can fly with that size wings on Terra is something that I do not believe is supported (hah!) by physics.
I think you're making an awful lot of assumptions there and have failed to provide even ballpark specifications for the thing you're supposedly refuting. Weight seems to be a secondary characteristic related only to size. There are also plenty of examples of "small" dragons in fantasy literature.
We've already got examples of dinosaurs that come fairly close to qualifying so I'm sure something vaguely in the ballpark is within the realm of possibility. Exactly how close to the mark though I have no idea.
For example, what would you make of something visually resembling a massive western dragon but with a largely hollow body? I don't think that would disqualify it in most people's eyes. Pushing the concept a bit farther could yield something vaguely like a living cross between a hot air balloon and a deep-sea anglerfish with a weaponized tail.
Vaguely related to that hypothetical, we've got examples in the fossil record of 2 foot wide dragonflies estimated to have weighed in at under 150 grams. There's a pretty large solution space to explore here.
Sorry, not going there. The physics of the impossible are not for me to take apart but for you to show. I've postulated ways in which you could get to other solar systems, I don't see anything here that would lead to a dragon as it is commonly described in fiction. Fire spewing, heavier than air, intelligent and willing to let themselves be mounted and directed by humans, that's the bar.
Archaeopteryx would have you for lunch long before you realized that it doesn't spit fire.
Well you've decided that it's impossible but you certainly haven't convinced me of that fact (neither am I certain that it is possible though).
I'm not even clear what the criteria are. We've got examples in fiction that run the gamut. Even limited to fairly traditional post-Tolkien western high fantasy examples of creatures with a long neck, two wings, a distinct abdomen, and a tail we've still got concrete examples ranging in size from a small lap dog up to larger than a McMansion. Plenty of reasonably canonical examples don't spit fire (although being able to certainly furthers the general vibe). And weight? As I said earlier, that's (imo) solidly in the domain of secondary characteristics.
Semantic arguments aren't any fun (and are largely pointless). Is Pluto a planet or not? Unless it's a technical discussion where the distinction matters for some reason, who cares? What matters is if Pluto fits the pattern that you (ie the people conversing) care about.
Hence my posing the example of a particularly buoyant variety of dragon. I think most people would consider it to fit the pattern well enough but I'm sure there would be at least some disagreement.
Also as long as we're talking about wild far future sci-fi possibilities such as visiting other stars in person then you can't rule out dragons in the form of a wildly advanced, needlessly decadent military technology show piece. Something like a nuclear powered bio engineered cyborg for use as some sort of fighter jet. (Apologies if I just inadvertently ripped off some anime I've never heard of.)
Creating some sort of genetically-engineered dinosaur-derived ‘dragon’ may be more plausible than actually reaching another star system. It’s not going to breathe fire though.
> Not sure your point. It's fiction. Are we closer to finding dragons, faeries, or magic?
No, but we've become increasingly superstitious, and cultish. A lot of the day to day parts of sci-fi (screens everywhere , instant communication) have become reality so it's not as exciting anymore. Sci-fi no longer serves as escapism. Anymore, it reminds us of our limitations.
My old friend and usenet denizen Laura Creighton was the one who wrote the device driver and verified the story. (Not that your should trust anything ESR writes in his polluted version of the Jargon file, but Laura says it's true, and she's trustworthy.)
"At this writing, the Jargon File claims the incident actually happened, at Toronto in 1979 or 1980, and that the sysadmin on duty was actually interviewed. The account doesn't provide enough details to track down an independent account, however.
Current University of Toronto sysadmins have expressed skepticism. For one thing, in almost all versions of the story, including the ostensibly documented one in the Jargon File, the computer is a VAX; at the time a VAX would have been a very unusual platform for this kind of data acquisition (they used PDP-11s). The Toronto zoology department has never been licensed to work with primates; the only section of the university that could have done experiments of this nature was the School of Medicine. Investigation continues."
ableal on May 7, 2010 | root | parent | next [–]
Actually, the original story does say it was Medicine buying the Vax and doing the experiment, with Zoo helping. The VAX 11-780 was the hot machine of 1979/80 ("a 1 MIPS beast!", I heard).
I've seen Laura Creighton's name on Python lists - I believe she's on LinkedIn. The author's "Statistically Invalid Sampling of My Life" (http://edp.org/index.htm) is also pretty amusing - don't think he'd need to embellish that incident.
Laura's done a lot of work on PyPy, which I described in this email (c. 2007):
>Laura and three other members of the PyPy team are doing a benevolent world domination tour, and visiting the bay area soon.
I think you would enjoy meeting each other and talking about PyPy!
>Laura does all kinds of other interesting stuff, with python in particular and computers and reality in general, like writing a device driver to interface monkeys to a VAX. (Google "always mount a scratch monkey"!)
>Laura Creighton has 20 years experience in software training, and Human Factors Engineering. She is a founder of AB Strakt, and a founder and Treasurer of The Python Business Forum, an international non-profit trade association for businesses which develop in Python.
>Yes, that is me. I actually think that Medicine had an 11/something-or-other dual space machine that was running Berkeley 2.98 bsd, not an 11/780 vax, but otherwise, seems correct enough to me.
I'm just guessing but this chaff sounds like it wouldn't actually change the latency or delivery of your actual keystrokes while buffering or jitter would.
So the "real" keystrokes are 100% the same but the fake ones which are never seen except as network packets are what is randomized.
Oh good. I have a spare spot in my front yard to place it. Or maybe I'll just set it down on my dining room table.
Wait...I might want something more secure than that. And if I have a lot of gold I might need to pay people to protect it. These storage costs are going up.
Ridiculous. Gold takes very little space. No individual really has a lot of it where storage becomes a constraint. It is obvious when someone has an agenda against it.
You've never mis-dragged something in the GUI or had a flaky mouse button which lets up randomly while you're dragging which left your folder "somewhere" that you now have to find?
HN is the ONLY place I've seen Kagi recommended as useful. So much so I bought it for a year and had to move back to google. I was missing so many search results.
Maybe I didn't configure Kagi enough? But I don't want to configure a search engine.
This is interesting to me. I've done basically no configuring (except frequent use of a "site:reddit.com" lens) and it's been great. Now when I see Google or Bing results it's jarring how bad they seem.
For search I'm increasing just using Claude + web search tool, it's better than Google has been in years. I have my own local ollama-powered RAG setup as well which isn't as good but may serve alright if/when Anthropic starts with ad insertions.
I find doing more focused searches with bang patterns work well for me, I.E searching wikipedia, manpages, mdn etc directly. Sometimes coupled with LLM to more quickly understand the syntax because docs tend to be sparse with examples.
I still miss something for quickly finding random facts like "how long to boil an egg" but for programming the above works quite well.
DuckDuckGo has also been my goto for years, but it is also getting swamped with SEO-rigged spam sites.
2 days ago I was making multiple searches looking for the websites of specific hotels and spa facilities, and none of them showed up in the first 4 pages of results, even when searching by exact name.
Out of desperation I switched back to Google, and, surprisingly, it was willing to give me what I was looking for on the first page. (But not as first result, of course..)
> DuckDuckGo has also been my goto for years, but it is also getting swamped with SEO-rigged spam sites.
True, but DDG seems, at the very least, no more afflicted than other engines. If I'm supposed to pay for a search engine, I expect something better than DDG.
Kagi systematically doesn’t return any good answer whatsoever. It’s such an awful quality that I can’t imagine anyone seriously promoting it, therefore I bet these comments about Kagi are advertising posted by bots. It’s not possible otherwise.
I find it to be more reliably useful than the other non-Google alternatives I’ve tried. I find its “PDFs Only” filter to be awfully handy too. Proudly not a bot, but I freely admit that, because I pay for it and our incentives seem aligned, I’m biased toward giving it the benefit of the doubt.
Always open to new horizons, though—are there non-Google search products that you find to consistently work better?
I share the same sentiment. I know many people praise Kagi, and I respect the effort behind it too. I tried it for three months and realized it was not for me. Google works just fine for my needs.
Haha… no bot here. Been using Kagi for years now. Not sure what you‘re searching for. My own tests, admittedly early, found no instances, where Google gave better results.
The tough part is someone with 20 million "in the bank" will have a hard time constraining themselves to 200k/yr expenses. It seems like a lot but next to 20 million the temptation to spend a little, like 1m on a house, 100k on a car seems like nothing and a potentially reasonable purchase. But it drastically changes the trajectory of that balance.
And you wouldn't feel as good spending 1m on a house or 100k on a car with a 200k salary and zero in the bank.
and the further you get from the actual work that created the nest egg the greater the temptation - because no one treats found money like earned money.
Visiting remote planets is as unlikely as riding a dragon. But both make for great stories.
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