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John Scalzi's Redshirts Wins Hugo Award for Best Novel
The Hugo awards were presented last night, providing recognition to the best science fiction of the past year. The award for Best Novel was presented to John Scalzi for Redshirts, a comedic work playing on the trope of low-ranking officers frequently getting themselves killed in sci-fi works. Best Novella went to Brandon Sanderson for The Emperor's Soul, and Best Novelette went to The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi by Pat Cadigan. Best Graphic Story was awarded to the creators of Saga. Best Dramatic Presentation (long form) was given for Joss Whedon's The Avengers movie, and (short form) was presented for the "Blackwater" episode of the Game of Thrones TV show. The Best New Writer was Mur Lafferty. Here's a full list of the nominees and winners.
So, it's come to this.
Wait a minute - this isn't a first post.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Good, that no Disneyland this time. I know, it's a matter of taste. A lot of people value Scalzi or Adams. But... where is Asimov-like Sci fi? Deep, intelectual, but not "geek".
Chief O'Brien and Yeoman Rand are the only two I can think of.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
cosmonaut?
COSMONAUT?!?!?
You fucking asshole. You can't even get your troll right.
It's Coruscant!!!11!
Fuck you.
The reviews on Amazon made it seem mediocre at best. Really, there was no better science fiction this year?
I think the really remarkable fact here is that the Dramatic Presentation award (Short Form) went to something other than Doctor Who.
It's funny how the scarcity thinking that's been beaten into you blinds you to the hundreds of thousands of years that mankind lived without money.
So, I may be living under a rock or something, or maybe it's because I don't really dig Game Of Thrones, or I'm horribly misinformed about the Hugo awards...
But how is Game of Thrones Sci-Fi?
> no, yes, maybe (tagging beta)
Without paper money, but there has been an economy equivalent for as long as abstract thinking has existed among humans. Sea shells and beads were a form of money for all intents and purposes in many cultures for thousands of years.
But what I think the OP is missing is if you have essentially free energy, and the ability to turn energy into almost any form of matter (Star Trek did note some limits to this, but very few), then what does economy mean? The only meaningful resources would be those few things you can't replicate with energy to matter conversion and skills not possible through expert systems (computers). You'd probably want some way to allocate those, but it would take an interesting form of economy to do so. Sadly, it might come down to slavery. Individuals would be important for their skills, but since you can't offer them anything tangible to convince them to work for you (they could just work for themselves on whatever they find interesting), some people would convince them through torture, I think.
Suddenly, that utopian future looks a lot more distopian to me.
Trek fabricators can make all the simple stuff, like food and standard medicines, displays and data storage. People probably don't drive individual cars as much, but then the transporter works at least for earth-moon distances. Per Roddenberry himself, the basics for the average person are dirt cheap. The real question is, how much does it cost if you get a disease that Dr. McCoy can't cure with the wave of a salt shaker and has to actually work on - and those diseases are probably limited to exotic ones the show has to go into deep space to find. Back on Earth, or Vulcan, or any high population core world of the Federation, the chance of getting, say, bitten by a Mugatu, is one in trillions.
On the other hand, building starships takes lots of manual labor from well trained people, and they don't come cheap. Whether those resources are tracked with money or just allocated by computer analysis, they must be pretty expensive. This fits what we've seen in the original series with engineering being a matter of individually tuning the warp drive, power plants, and such, and using exotic materials like 'dilythium'. That's why, in the original series, there are only 12 ships of the Enterprise's class. The cost for building one is a lot more proportionately to feeding and clothing and even entertaining and educating people, or the Federation would have cruisers in the same numbers, relative to all the worlds they need to defend, as the US navy has cruisers relative to the real world,
By the way, it just occured to me that a Cruiser capable of very long range operations (5 year mission), working unsupported by ships of the main line (not attached to a fleet with battleships or some sort of Carrier arrangement at the center), is frequently called a Fleet Intruder. In war, the original Enterprise's job is probably to strike high-value targets such as munitions shipping, well behind enemy lines and get away quickly to harrass the enemy somewhere else. If the Federation is not used to fighting that way, the Enterprise could be expected to join a fleet under Dreadnaught command in time of war. That's what we see in Next Gen., but the original series seldom shows the Enterprise teaming up with any other vessels. Probably every time the Enterprise approaches a new star on that five year mission, her bridge crew is running training exercises to practice finding in-system shipping, ammo depots, intercepting millitary communications, and so on. It's a good thing "Starfleet is not a military organization", so the crew isn't doing what their big, expensive tool is so perfectly designed for.
Who is John Cabal?
The holodeck looks like fun. I'd like to spend most of my evenings playing there with my friends.
Also, I'd like a big cabin with a large forward facing window.
Both of those are scarce. How are they allocated?
What if I'm willing to take a smaller cabin in return for more holodeck time?
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The label "cruiser" as used by the Federation is a lot more like the original use of the word (ship capable of going a long way without replensihment), unlike the modern USN usage (big anti-air destroyer).
In other words, the two things you're comparing aren't really comparable in ways other than spelling....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Why would holodecks be scarce if everything else can be magicked into existence?
And if holodecks offer perfect replication of the view, why not just live in one and have a grand mansion of a cabin programmed into it?
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Money is necessary when there's competition in society. When society transitions to cooperation (and not what passes under that name today), only organisation would be necessary, not money.
Well, money has existed for as long as there has been writing, and before that personal property was a pretty big deal.... so I hate to break it to you but 'scarcity' is how humans have been living for a very long time.
Well, in the mythology I gather people just worked because they wanted to (since automation pretty much eliminates menial work I guess), though I have never seen a good explanation about how things like land ownership and transfer happens.
...but it's really science fiction or fantasy, because there is a difference.
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Sure it was. Ancienty civilizations worked just like this. Currency has been anything from food, to tobacco, to sea shells. Some with intrinsic value some without it. Even in tribal society, there were goods useful enough to be universally accept and used as currency to facilitate trade.
If you are interested in Pat Cadigan's novella, the preview / kindle sample of "edge of Infinity" includes the complete story. It can be found here.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Scarcity will always exist. Even if you can supply all the basic needs of humankind you will always have new scarce things to desire. And that is a good thing, because this desire is the only thing that moves humankind forward, fairy tales aside.
And although humankind did lived without formal money in the tribal past, there were always exchanges and some people always had more than others. Money came as a tool to facilitate those exchanges and nothing else.
Because it takes energy, and raw materials to "magick" anything into existence, and those are finite resources, and will always be.
And that is one of the great flaws of the concept in Star Trek. Star Ships for example are scarce resources, as is Teleportation, Holodecks, and several others. All things that would have high demand by any sane assessment. All controlled by the government and used by its members and the military, and as money does not exist, the common people need government authorization to have access to any of these "privileges". This seems an awfully dystopic and unfree society to me not the utopia as which they try to paint it
Yeah, until they invented slavery.
Why would holodecks be scarce if everything else can be magicked into existence?
And if holodecks offer perfect replication of the view, why not just live in one and have a grand mansion of a cabin programmed into it?
Engineering constraints force limited ship space. Also, although dilithium crystals and matter/anti-matter reactors could theoretically provide near-infinite power, the availability of given power over a an amount of time is scarce - if you're running 10x holodecks, maybe the sheilds or weapons (ie, phaser banks) can't run at full power (clearly outlined in every combat situation - not enough power to run both at full) Thus, holodeck time is scarce.
And adding to that, time is scarce - Humans do get older in the show, so we can derive the fact that they eventually die (though like most other sci-fi, lifespan may be greatly extended compared to our present "neo-feudalist" backwards age). Given that, for most individuals time is scarce.
If you have ship duties, this scarce time could be greatly curtailed so as to make it impossible to, for example, experience the holodeck every night.
So yes, an economy of sorts is required to determine who gets that scarce time... it would be interesting to see how that economy is portrayed. Many sci-fi books have good ideas of how this may play out (e.g.: Culture series, Void trilogy, etc), so it's not new.
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If they're spending time the way the USN does, there's generally going to be 4-6 hours per day free to do whatever you'd like (depending on maintenance schedules, paperwork, things like that).
Somehow I can't see the Utopian society of ST having LESS leisure time than we have now.
And almost all of us can manage enough time daily to see a movie, if we want (which was one of those popular things we did on the boats when we weren't doing something that required us to be quiet)
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Without paper money, but there has been an economy equivalent for as long as abstract thinking has existed among humans. Sea shells and beads were a form of money for all intents and purposes in many cultures for thousands of years.
But what I think the OP is missing is if you have essentially free energy, and the ability to turn energy into almost any form of matter (Star Trek did note some limits to this, but very few), then what does economy mean? The only meaningful resources would be those few things you can't replicate with energy to matter conversion and skills not possible through expert systems (computers). You'd probably want some way to allocate those, but it would take an interesting form of economy to do so. Sadly, it might come down to slavery. Individuals would be important for their skills, but since you can't offer them anything tangible to convince them to work for you (they could just work for themselves on whatever they find interesting), some people would convince them through torture, I think.
Suddenly, that utopian future looks a lot more distopian to me.
The late Iain M Banks' Culture novels were set post the Age of Scarcity, and most of his human characters look like hedonistic arseholes.
Alistair Reynolds. Charles Stross. Gregory Benford. There's three.
I've always had a feeling that the similarities between the Blake's 7 Federation badge and the Star Trek Starfleet logo aren't entirely co-incidental.
There will always be scarcity - even in a star trek like fairyland where they say there is "no money". Ask any geek whether they would like the job of being captain of the enterprise, and they will probably say "Hell Yeah!!!" (What's not to like? - Bang alien chicks, be involved in something important, and have amazing adventures!) However, it ignores the important realities, such as "Who cleans the toilets on the enterprise?". Ask who wants that job, and you will get a lot less enthusiasm. Even without monetary scarcity, there will always be haves and have nots. For one person to be a Captain Kirk, hundreds of others have to be an Ensign Ricky.
Sounds like a good way to motivate people, some sort of hierarchy with ranks. No way people would ever value such things above money, or even their lives...
#HistoricalPrecidentExists
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That is why the Series Firefly struck a cord of 'sifireality' where the 'trek and variations never hit that. I like them all, just how it struck me.
Your imagination needs some upgrades...
Everyone who wants a holo-room isn't going to be living on a ship in the star fleet, and the typical economy-sized holohome on the 30th floor of the center-city bachelor tower doesn't need weapons OR shields....
Can you be Even More Awesome?!