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Time travel and energy
I was reading this neat summary of time travel rules in fiction and thinking about a couple of things basically angles and effort. The idea that a small change at one point leads to a big change in the future (aka two different kinds of things both known as a butterfly effect) predates modern science…
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Book Launch: How To Science Fictionally
To celebrate five years of all this stuff and nonsense, here is a new collection of posts spanning the nearly two-thousand day history of the blog. We answer all the important topics! How can you make your space ship travel faster than light? How can you make your teleporter work? How are you going to…
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The Being Not Human Awards
Robots, aliens, talking (or at least sapient) animals, AIs, demons, gods, vampires, entities, orcs, goblins, trolls, elves, dwarfs, giant spiders and guests, welcome! Please take your seats, there is plenty of room in this elegant if ageing theatre that we call Camestros Felapton’s Experience of The Science Fiction and Fantasy Genre. Get comfortable, introduce yourself…
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How to make a replicator
Replicators are more of a staple of Star Trek than other franchises. As we’ve seen in Star Trek: Picard, DS9 and Voyager, the fun concept can be a bit limiting to plot and characterisation to the extent that later versions of Trek find ways for people to cook and make stuff without the use of…
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How to be psychic
Are psychic powers a trojan horse from the world of magic that have snuck into science fiction? Psychic powers are almost indistinguishable from wish fulfilment in aggregate and only take on a resemblance of speculation about reality when codified into subtypes with Graeco-Latin names with sciency connotations. But psychic powers aren’t going to vanish from…
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How to make a force field
Force fields want to be two different kinds of thing at the same time. They want the physical presence, fixed location and barrier qualities of matter but somehow at the same time be energy. The nearest natural example is Earth’s own magnetic field which does not operate as a barrier per se but does effectively…
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How to hover just a little bit off the ground
In my ongoing quest to consider how to accomplish all sorts of fictional feats fictionally, I must confess to being a little bit stumped by a recurring one. Flying is one thing but hovering just a little bit is a repeated visual indication of futuristic technology. Star Wars in particular is replete with a kind…
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A priest in a novel
There was a whole other essay that spun off into to far too many tangents. Metaphors, analogies and examples gather their own velocity and head off in directions that take them beyond what is useful. However, I ended up with this instead, which works on its own. I’m thinking about reader expectations and how they…
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Invasion of the Body Snatchers – 1978
I realised much later that I had missed off an important subset of examples from my post on how to duplicate people. If you are some sort of plant-based alien species drifting on the solar winds you can just use pods to grow duplicates of people while they are sleeping. This is the premise of…
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How to duplicate people
As a trope of science fiction there is a gulf between the fantastical idea of ‘clones’ and the mundane reality of the actual science of cloning. As of yet, actual human cloning has not taken place but primates have been succesfully cloned, specifically two crab-eating macaques called Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua. Part of the…
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