My main interest is science fiction & fantasy literature. I've read most of the contemporary authors of the day, Card, Weis & Hickman, McCaffrey, Herbert the younger, and many others. All have written fabulous books that I have read more than once.
What I'm asking is this. What technologies and/or physics related problems that are not a part of our world do you find to be interesting? When I say physics related things, i'm talking more of things like super large inhabitable worlds the size of the sun or something along those lines that according to our science are impossible, but in the fictional world would be feasable.
I have been browsing scientific journal websites and such for a bit to see what interesting stuff is there to use as background material.
What do you guys and gals think?
However, I am a regular reader of Popular Science and Scientific American as well as an occasional reader of National Geographic and Discover magazines.
I also, when time allows, watch The Universe and other science-related series on The History Channel.
Other than that, I get inspiration from every day life, which can often be stranger than fiction, especially when the situation is given a little twist.
As far as "impossible science", there has been a consistent drive in the last several decades to make the "science" in science fiction as true to fact as possible. Most decent writers go to great lengths to research the science behind their world or technology to make it as believable as possible.
[This message has been edited by DerekBalsam (edited August 15, 2010).]
I saw the author has a new series on one of the sciency cable channels I get, you might be able to find the tv show, too.
For me, I think stuff like what is presented in Ringworld is really fascinating, and Rendevous with Rama. The way the authors figured out some nifty weather problems unique to their artificially constructed worlds was cool. Of course anything to do with wormholes and FTL travel is also interesting to me.
My personal interests take me smaller-scale, closer to home, with the ideas of evolving machine intelligence or artificial intelligence. I tend to put these into my stories.
For instance, if I was making a story about faster than light travel, the biggest obstacle is how far away other stars are. (Answer: really far.) The ways to circumvent this problem are pretty well established in the genre (warp drives (like in Star Trek), Einstein was wrong (like in K-Pax), wormholes, colony ships, etc...) So I choose which one of those I want to concern my story and then go from there.
Incidentally, this is also what I find interesting about science fiction. I think there is a reason such technologies have become science fiction staples: they are interesting!
My personal list of interesting stuffs includes ramifications of new discoveries of currently unknown phenomenon:
-Magnetism
-Gravity
-Dark energy/matter
-nuclear stuffs (meaning atomic properties, not big explosions)
(And don't try to say we understand gravity or magnetism, because we don't- we just know a little bit about how it works, not why...)
...and stuff we'd do if we had advanced technology:
-terraforming/space colonies/solar system mining
-interplanetary travel
-alien civilations/species
[This message has been edited by Teraen (edited August 16, 2010).]
argh-misspellled werds... especially the easy ones
[This message has been edited by DRaney (edited August 16, 2010).]
The FTL in my novel is completely built on the rules I created before FTL was discovered. Then, when it happens and is explained it's accepted within the story.
If I met you on the street and explained just how the FTL works you would think I was mad.
Regarding story ideas, I think browsing the scientific journals is brilliant. I can see myself doing that at some point in the future if/when I need a new idea.
You never know when an idea will strike. I find I've been very lucky with my ideas hitting me in the face over the years. Once, I looked at my Nintendo SmashTV cartridge and got an idea. I wrote around a thousand words and put it away, forgotten. Fifteen years later those words were the foundation for my entire novel. A hundred thousand words because I looked at a video game.
Good thing I didn't listen to my mother and put it away like I was supposed to.
Axe
If you really want some good ideas for SF books, go talk to a group of 3rd graders and ask them what the world will look like in 50 years. In a group of 5 kids you’ll probably get 100 ideas.
A couple of minor points on some comments above:
Magnetism is fairly well known - it is simply static electricity at relativistic velocities. Some of superconductivity is less well understood, and gravity, well. The real difficulty is where gravity meets quantum theory - there they don't fully know yet what happens. (One famous scientist has speculated that gravity is what causes quantum behaviour to revert to classical behaviour.)
Also, I would have thought that Get Smart was as important as Star Trek for popularising the cell phone.
What in the world does that mean? I've never heard of it before! Do you have any links or stuff that explain this?
What I meant by we don't understand magnetism is based on the "why" phenomenon. Three year olds really understand this. Take any phenomenon, and ask why. After a few steps, you eventually reach the limit of understanding:
"Why does the magnet stick to the fridge?"
"Because the fridge is made of steel, magnets attract steel."
"Why do magnets attract steel?"
"A magnetic field produced by the electrons in the magnet produce an attractive force with the field of the electrons in the steel."
"Why do spinning electrons make a magnetic field?"
"I don't know. Something about relativistic velocities of static attraction. Ask Brendan about it."
Some people may know a few more levels than I do, but eventually almost everything peters out after a few "whys." Notice, I could have equally asked why a field creates an attractive force, why a field exists, etc. A physicist trained in quantum field theory is more likely to answer a few more whys than I can, but soon the limit is reached -- and this is the case on all stuff we apparently "know."
That's why science is so cool!)
Like teleportation and faster than light travel, As long as it is presented in a logical, believable method, one can accept just about anything if it is crucial in the story and the story follows the rules it presented from the start.
People accept fantasy so one, in the end, can do whatever is needed to create the story.