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    How to Science Fictionally
    How to Science Fictionally
    How to Science Fictionally
    Ebook109 pages1 hour

    How to Science Fictionally

    By Camestros Felapton

    ()

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    About this ebook

    How can you make your space ship travel faster than light? How can you make your teleporter work? How are you going to send a message home and how are you going to style your beard? These and many other questions are often badly answered in this compendium of essays from Camestros Felapton. Ranging from flippant to occasionally researched, this book answers all of the least important questions in modern sci-fi.

    Essential reading for aspiring science fiction authors.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCamestros Felapton
    Release dateMay 5, 2020
    ISBN9780463943373
    How to Science Fictionally
    Author

    Camestros Felapton

    Camestros Felapton is an extended cosplay of a pair of syllogisms and their adventures in cyberspace. He is also the manager and amanuensis for Timothy the Talking Cat.

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      Book preview

      How to Science Fictionally - Camestros Felapton

      How to Science Fictionally: A User Guide to Made Up Stuff

      Collected essays 2015-2020 by Camestros Felapton

      Published by Cattimothy House

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright Camestros Felapton 2020

      ~ — * — ~

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      Thank you for downloading this ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to your favourite ebook retailer to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

      Contents

      Chapter 1 How to travel through space: an introduction of sorts

      Chapter 2 How to travel faster than light

      Chapter 3 How not to time travel

      Chapter 4 How else to time travel

      Chapter 5 How to survive as a time traveller

      Chapter 6 How to grow a beard

      Chapter 7 How to teleport

      Chapter 8 How to ansible

      Chapter 9 How to change your mind: Get Out and other things

      Chapter 10 How to keep politics out of your science fiction: Captain Bob and the Space Patrol

      Chapter 11 How not be human: The Being Not Human Awards

      Chapter 12 How to make a replicator, a replicator, a replicator…

      Chapter 13 How to be psychic

      Chapter 14 How to be a priest

      Chapter 15 How to duplicate people

      Chapter 16 How to be a pod person: Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1978

      Chapter 17 How to catch the tube

      Chapter 18 How to make something invisible

      Chapter 19 How to fly

      Chapter 20 How to make a force field

      Chapter 21 How to hover just a little bit off the ground

      Chapter 22 How to blow up the Death Star and/or other doomsday weapons but mainly the Death Star

      Chapter 23 How not to make a phaser

      Chapter 24 How to make a magic gun stopping thing

      Chapter 25 How to change a British superhero

      Chapter 26 How to tell if a film is science fiction

      Chapter 27 How to tell the difference between fictional science and fictional magic

      Chapter 28 How not to alter history

      Chapter 1 How to travel through space: an introduction of sorts

      This collection of essays and blog posts began with this post in June 2015 when my blog, camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com, was less than a month old. The style of the post hadn’t quite formed but the idea was there of mixing bits of science with various ways people have imagined doing the things people do in science fiction novels. Those included such things as teleports, warp drives and invisibility.

      For variety, I’ve also reworked some other essays that also delve, at times whimisicaly, with other aspects of the mechanics of science fiction with all the confident authority of somebody who doesn’t know what they are talking about. On the way you’ll encounter a taxonomy of beards, some musings about the film Get Out and maybe a London Tube Map of science fiction. The essays run through the five-year history of my blog and I do hope you’ll find them as entertaining to read as they were to write.

      But let’s start with the first problem first. Space opera and similar styles of space travel fiction face a problem: the distance between solar systems is vast and there is a fundamental limit to how quickly a spaceship can move. Specifically the speed at which light travels in a vacuum is actually a fundamental constrains of the universe. As far as we know that is just how the rules of our universe are.

      Getting round this constraint is a problem for science-fiction and there are numerous solutions.

      Set your story on a single planet or within a single solar system or within some kind of ‘generation ship’ that will take hundreds of years to reach its destination. All fine approaches as far as they go.

      Ignore the problem and just zip around space regardless in your story.

      A warp drive (e.g. Star Trek) that allows a spaceship to exceed light speed by warping the geometry of space around it.

      Wormholes – distort part of the geometry of space so as to create a tunnel-like short cut between the place you are the place you want to be (e.g. Stargate).

      Hyperspace – move out of the usual dimensions into a different space which is connected to our space in someway but with different relative distances. At the right spot come back out of hyperspace (e.g. too numerous to mention).

      Some kind of quantum or probabilistic event – for example the Heart of Gold infinite improbability drive used in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (used in the story as an alternative to hyperspace)

      The above approaches 3 to 6 aren’t bad physics – a theoretical warp drive is conceivable for example. The problem is that each of them solve only one aspect of the light speed problem.

      The upper limit of the speed of light arises as a fundamental property of space and time together. For narrative purposes faster-than-light travel is being used to had wave one aspect of that – large distances. However General Relativity throws up more problems than just a universal speed limit. It also results in time being relative to your frame of references and it also means notions of causality become complex when viewed over large distances.

      Now for narrative purposes a space-opera wants sensible causality and a single universal time – at least for the events of the story. If it is a complex TV/Movie series universe it is rather like the desire for continuity. Plot should make sense and events should have an order to them (even if presented out of sequence) and be connected by a sensible causality when needed.

      Now consider options 3 to 5 above. What do they all have in common? Essentially each one requires people to have mastered technology that allows them manipulate the geometry of space time and/or access other dimensions of the universe. However for plot reasons the people in this universe of warp drive etc must only use it for one thing: spaceship propulsion.

      We need to imagine a technologically sophisticated society that have discovered how to manipulate a fundamental aspect of reality AND only apply that technology in one way. This is inherently implausible. A society with the power to build one a FTL spaceship would appear to have everything they need for a time-machine of some kind or another. Further the way the plots work mean that in effect every FTL ship is a kind of time machine as to arrive at your destination at a time EARLIER than you would by traveling at the speed-of-light is the physical equivalent of traveling into the past.

      In Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed the hero Shevek is developing a new fundamental theory of physics that will allow faster than light communication. The principle of simultaneity allows for Le Guin’s ansible devices (which have appear in other notable works) to make sense within her Hainish novels. In effect every model of FTL used in fiction needs both things – a way of letting spaceships travel faster than a light and a way of stopping it making the universe crazy.

      So let’s keep it simple. Instead we will imagine a society that could manipulate space-time to make a warp drive or access hyperspace etc. What would they be able to do with this technology?

      Time travel – is a given.

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