Bruce Sterling wrote a wunnerful little short story -- "Our Neural Chernobyl" -- about this kind of thing.
A gene-hacker kid whips up a microbe which stiches in new neural connections, and infects himself with it.
He goes sh*t-smearing nuts.
Fortunately, the germ doesn't spread easily between humans.
Unfortunately, other mammals catch it easily. Raccoons drive humanity from many rural places with guerilla warfare; coyotes start wearing cast-off clothing and demanding tribute (sacks of dog treats) from ranchers.
One of the old home computer mags -- not Creative Computing, but something in that genre -- had a listing of a simple four-room text adventure game. It was mostly an exercise in picking up and dropping things, but the parser and display/action loop were easily adaptable.
I adapted and expanded it to create "Haunted House," AKA "Radley Mansion." The player took the role of a kid who had hit a baseball into a second-story window of an abandoned (?) house.
The goal was to get the ball back. You had to do quite a bit to reach the upstairs room where the ball ended up.
You couldn't get killed, or even muck things up so bad you couldn't eventually win.
I eventually re-wrote it in TurboBasic, and have started on an Inform version.
Forbidden Planet can be enjoyed as both as ludicrous camp Sci-Fi (Leslie Nielson in a serious role! Robbie the Robot! Cheesy electronic music!) and as a surprisingly foresightful cosmic warning story.
"Twenty miles . . . twenty miles . . . twenty miles."
"My poor Krell . . . after a thousand centuries of shining sanity that could hardly imagine what was happening to them."
Then watch the original pilot of Star Trek, and realize how much of a rip-off it is of Forbidden Planet.
Freeman Dyson's 1979 paper "Time Without End: Physics and Biology in the Open Universe."
http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Omega/dyson.txt
Abstract:
"Quantitative estimates are derived for three classes of phenomena that may occur in an open cosmological model of Friedmann type. (1) Normal physical processes taking place with very long time-scales. (2) Biological processes that will result if life adapts itself to low ambient temperatures according to a postulated scaling law. (3) Communication by radio between life forms existing in different parts of the universe. The general conlusion of the analysis is that an open universe need not evolve into a state of permanent quiescence. Life and communication can continue for ever, utilizing a finite store of energy, if the assumed scaling laws are valid."
Dungeons & Dragons v3.5 can reach about 1,240 yards but some some inexplicable reason is more popular.
The old Chivalry & Sorcery RPG had a range of nearly five miles, but figuring out how to shoot it could take years.
Eh? Re:Tactical Stratics Rules
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 1
You meant Tactical Studies Rules, right?
Remember: PONDS ARE CASTLES!
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 2, Informative
A few months back, I found a copy of Avalon Hill's WILDERNESS SURVIVAL (Or was it OUTDOOR SURVIVAL?) at a thrift shop.
It was not only complete, but OVER complete. It had two map boards!
This was very important, because as old timers out there know the original D&D called for a copy of this map for wilderness (outside of a dungeon) adventures.
There was a note that the ponds on the map should be treated as castles. The whole point of the game seemed to be to put together enough wealth to be able to afford to buy a castle and hire men-at-arms.
This makes sense when you remember D&D's roots in minatures games. All that dungeon delving and monster fighting was just a prelude to playing CHAINMAIL miniatures games with your Superhero (Fights as 10 men+1) leading the way.
Like the fabled, ever-promised Air Car, this would be great for getting around if you were the only person who had one.
Stir in crowds and typical human behavior, and things turn rapidly nasty.
Think about it. Say 10% of Long Island's tens of thousands of car-commuters buy air cars or rocket packs. Can you imagine the traffic control problems? No traffic signs, no colored lines, no stop signals. Unless you have automated governors that restrict you to certain flight paths, the skies at rush hour would look like a gnat swarm, only with random collisions and your occasional explosion.
Manhattan airspace would probably be off limits. (Think suicide bombers able to take out corporate board meetings on the 75th floor of the Consolidated-Amalgamated tower.)
And then there are recreational users. Can you imagine a troupe of teenagers with these things? People would start putting up chicken-wire domes over their back yards to prevent adrenelin-addled punks from snatching cats and lawn flamingos.
We might have to carry umbrellas on Friday nights, because you just know what ideas a drunk rocket packer will come up with.
So. Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.
Portland, Oregon is home to "Free Geek," a really neat PC recycling / refurb effort:
http://freegeek.org/
They charge $5 to recycle a PC or monitor. If it has usable parts, they strip them out and use them to build Linux-loaded PCs for schools, nonprofits, and the like.
Labor comes from volunteers. They will give you a PC for every six you build / refurb.
Yes, the two mouths with prehensile lips suggest all sorts of kinky possibilities, but if you make a "home run" you might end up with a hungry puppeteer larva inside of you, and man, you just know that that's not going to be a fun pregnancy.
This guy brings up a legitimate point. I don't think he deserves to be modded "troll."
I loved Ringworld back in the day; it was one of the first grown-up genre SF novels I read, and I flipped head over heels for it and Niven's other stuff. I read it and the other "Known Space" books many times.
Now, I wonder what the heck I was thinking. It's heavy on sense-of-wonder, but there really is not much to the story.
The setting itself turns out to be kind of shabby: Niven had to add all sorts of kludgy patches to keep the poor Ringworld together and viable. If your aim is to create lots of secure living space, you are far better off building lots of self-contained space habitats.
Looking back, I suspect I was blown away by the Big Thingness of it, and the intricate background material that added versimilitude. I know more about people now, and more about science and engineering too. Ringworld just doesn't cut it for me any more.
Before I'm accused of having "too small a mind" to appreciate it, go read another book I first read way back when but still respect: Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker.
That non-novel fictional future history is utterly lacking in interesting characters, but dang, talk about scale! Talk about scope! Star Maker details the rise and fall of galactic civilizations over a span of billions of years. There are battles involving mobile planets and nova bombs. Dozens of bizzare races. Water-filled artificial worlds full of aquatic sapients linked together with webs of nervous tissue. The good guys have something like the Prime Directive. Their big ultimate project runs so long that it is threatened by the heat death of the universe.
And, hey! This Stapledon guy? He INVENTED the Dyson Sphere . . . go ask Freeman Dyson*. The far-future super-civilizations in the book use enveloping spheres to gather every bit of sunlight from the few remaining stars.
Stefan
* Or, if you don't have his email address, go read Disturbing the Universe, where he directly credits Star Maker for the "sphere" idea.
When you click the "Accept these Terms" button, you agree, if you share your downloaded files, to be hunted down and slashed to bloody bits by that floating yellow price-cutting happy face.
Those things are the real secret behind Wal-Mart's success. They lurk behind the shelves looking for shoplifters*, and God forbid employees even whisper "union" within a hundred feet of a SmileBot.
Stefan
* You know that weird-tasting fatty meat served on top of the Wal-Mart lunch counters? Ever wonder where it comes from?
You are probably thinking of limestone. Calcium carbonate.
If memory serves, limestone isn't necessarily laid down by critters, but finding stromatolites or chalky cliffs ala Dover would be a very good sign indeed.
As would finding a fossilized opabinia, or one of the cannons the Martians used to launch their cylinders to Earth back in 1898.
Stefan
Cutting Edge Re:Eh.. What ??
on
The Zenith Angle
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Maybe it would help to define the trailing edge first:
* Stories about interstellar empires that look and smell like the British or Roman empires.
* Yet another Civil War alternate history story.
* Any SF future which doesn't fully take into account scientific fact and technical innovation.
* . . . and other SF that seems more like comfort food than brain food.
Whether a piece of fiction is "cutting edge" or not doesn't determine whether it's well written or entertaining.
I've read plenty of really well written comfort food SF, and plenty of cutting edge stuff that just did nothing for me.
Stefan
Sterling not Stirling Re:Authors
on
The Zenith Angle
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Not being picky about spelling; there's an SF author Stirling who writes very different stuff.
Suggestion: Start with bruces' short fiction. There are a couple of collections out there. Globalhead is uneven, but the good stuff ("Our Neural Chernobyl", "The Shores of Bohemia") is really, really good.
A Good Old Fashioned Future has more consistently good stories, including a doozy ("Maneki Neko") about a network-enabled gift economy.
From what I have read, Sterling doesn't want anything to do with Hollywood, so don't fret too much.
Don't judge Sterling just by The Difference Engine. Check out some of his short stories:
"Our Neural Chernobyl" is a hilarious what-iffer about a gene-hacked virus that raises the intelligence of North America's mammals.
"The Shores of Bohemia" at first looks like something set in an alternate history rennaisance city state . . . then perhaps a post-holocaust story. What's really going on is just frigging awesome.
Slashdot Mirror
Bruce Sterling wrote a wunnerful little short story -- "Our Neural Chernobyl" -- about this kind of thing.
A gene-hacker kid whips up a microbe which stiches in new neural connections, and infects himself with it.
He goes sh*t-smearing nuts.
Fortunately, the germ doesn't spread easily between humans.
Unfortunately, other mammals catch it easily. Raccoons drive humanity from many rural places with guerilla warfare; coyotes start wearing cast-off clothing and demanding tribute (sacks of dog treats) from ranchers.
If they were named "Bush" and "Cheney," they would have found an excuse to stay on Earth.
One of the old home computer mags -- not Creative Computing, but something in that genre -- had a listing of a simple four-room text adventure game. It was mostly an exercise in picking up and dropping things, but the parser and display/action loop were easily adaptable.
I adapted and expanded it to create "Haunted House," AKA "Radley Mansion." The player took the role of a kid who had hit a baseball into a second-story window of an abandoned (?) house.
The goal was to get the ball back. You had to do quite a bit to reach the upstairs room where the ball ended up.
You couldn't get killed, or even muck things up so bad you couldn't eventually win.
I eventually re-wrote it in TurboBasic, and have started on an Inform version.
Stefan
"Twenty miles . . . twenty miles . . . twenty miles."
"My poor Krell . . . after a thousand centuries of shining sanity that could hardly imagine what was happening to them."
Then watch the original pilot of Star Trek, and realize how much of a rip-off it is of Forbidden Planet.
Possibly relevant here:
t
Freeman Dyson's 1979 paper "Time Without End: Physics and Biology in the Open Universe."
http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Omega/dyson.tx
Abstract:
"Quantitative estimates are derived for three classes of phenomena that may occur in an open cosmological model of Friedmann type. (1) Normal physical processes taking place with very long time-scales. (2) Biological processes that will result if life adapts itself to low ambient temperatures according to a postulated scaling law. (3) Communication by radio between life forms
existing in different parts of the universe. The general conlusion of the analysis is that an open universe need not evolve into a state of permanent quiescence. Life and communication can continue for ever, utilizing a finite
store of energy, if the assumed scaling laws are valid."
The blindingly bright advertising and public service announcements that run down the sides all hours of the night would be a dead give-away.
GURPS has a range of 1,650 yards.
Dungeons & Dragons v3.5 can reach about 1,240 yards but some some inexplicable reason is more popular.
The old Chivalry & Sorcery RPG had a range of nearly five miles, but figuring out how to shoot it could take years.
You meant Tactical Studies Rules, right?
A few months back, I found a copy of Avalon Hill's WILDERNESS SURVIVAL (Or was it OUTDOOR SURVIVAL?) at a thrift shop.
It was not only complete, but OVER complete. It had two map boards!
This was very important, because as old timers out there know the original D&D called for a copy of this map for wilderness (outside of a dungeon) adventures.
There was a note that the ponds on the map should be treated as castles. The whole point of the game seemed to be to put together enough wealth to be able to afford to buy a castle and hire men-at-arms.
This makes sense when you remember D&D's roots in minatures games. All that dungeon delving and monster fighting was just a prelude to playing CHAINMAIL miniatures games with your Superhero (Fights as 10 men+1) leading the way.
Stefan
. . . they'd be called F.U.D.
Follow the money, and ask yourself:
Who is more likely to be venal, deceptive, and prone to manipulate data:
Flacks for fossil fuel industries and pro-business think tanks, or atmospheric scientists and climatologists?
Like the fabled, ever-promised Air Car, this would be great for getting around if you were the only person who had one.
Stir in crowds and typical human behavior, and things turn rapidly nasty.
Think about it. Say 10% of Long Island's tens of thousands of car-commuters buy air cars or rocket packs. Can you imagine the traffic control problems? No traffic signs, no colored lines, no stop signals. Unless you have automated governors that restrict you to certain flight paths, the skies at rush hour would look like a gnat swarm, only with random collisions and your occasional explosion.
Manhattan airspace would probably be off limits. (Think suicide bombers able to take out corporate board meetings on the 75th floor of the Consolidated-Amalgamated tower.)
And then there are recreational users. Can you imagine a troupe of teenagers with these things? People would start putting up chicken-wire domes over their back yards to prevent adrenelin-addled punks from snatching cats and lawn flamingos.
We might have to carry umbrellas on Friday nights, because you just know what ideas a drunk rocket packer will come up with.
So. Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.
Stefan
He was the publisher of many early "pulp" SF magazines, and a big popularizer of the genre.
He wrote a bit too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Gernsback
He doesn't judge a thing, being dead. The award was named in his honor.
Portland, Oregon is home to "Free Geek," a really neat PC recycling / refurb effort:
http://freegeek.org/
They charge $5 to recycle a PC or monitor. If it has usable parts, they strip them out and use them to build Linux-loaded PCs for schools, nonprofits, and the like.
Labor comes from volunteers. They will give you a PC for every six you build / refurb.
Stefan
I would try to come up with a name for it that is an acronym for "Borg," but I'm feeling really tired this afternoon.
Do NOT screw a puppeteer.
Yes, the two mouths with prehensile lips suggest all sorts of kinky possibilities, but if you make a "home run" you might end up with a hungry puppeteer larva inside of you, and man, you just know that that's not going to be a fun pregnancy.
Stefan
Hey!
This guy brings up a legitimate point. I don't think he deserves to be modded "troll."
I loved Ringworld back in the day; it was one of the first grown-up genre SF novels I read, and I flipped head over heels for it and Niven's other stuff. I read it and the other "Known Space" books many times.
Now, I wonder what the heck I was thinking. It's heavy on sense-of-wonder, but there really is not much to the story.
The setting itself turns out to be kind of shabby: Niven had to add all sorts of kludgy patches to keep the poor Ringworld together and viable. If your aim is to create lots of secure living space, you are far better off building lots of self-contained space habitats.
Looking back, I suspect I was blown away by the Big Thingness of it, and the intricate background material that added versimilitude. I know more about people now, and more about science and engineering too. Ringworld just doesn't cut it for me any more.
Before I'm accused of having "too small a mind" to appreciate it, go read another book I first read way back when but still respect: Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker.
That non-novel fictional future history is utterly lacking in interesting characters, but dang, talk about scale! Talk about scope! Star Maker details the rise and fall of galactic civilizations over a span of billions of years. There are battles involving mobile planets and nova bombs. Dozens of bizzare races. Water-filled artificial worlds full of aquatic sapients linked together with webs of nervous tissue. The good guys have something like the Prime Directive. Their big ultimate project runs so long that it is threatened by the heat death of the universe.
And, hey! This Stapledon guy? He INVENTED the Dyson Sphere . . . go ask Freeman Dyson*. The far-future super-civilizations in the book use enveloping spheres to gather every bit of sunlight from the few remaining stars.
Stefan
* Or, if you don't have his email address, go read Disturbing the Universe, where he directly credits Star Maker for the "sphere" idea.
. . . they're only available in "A" and "B" cells.
Stefan
When you click the "Accept these Terms" button, you agree, if you share your downloaded files, to be hunted down and slashed to bloody bits by that floating yellow price-cutting happy face.
Those things are the real secret behind Wal-Mart's success. They lurk behind the shelves looking for shoplifters*, and God forbid employees even whisper "union" within a hundred feet of a SmileBot.
Stefan
* You know that weird-tasting fatty meat served on top of the Wal-Mart lunch counters? Ever wonder where it comes from?
It (probably) got there in the first place during Mars' formation, and perhaps later due to cometary bombardment.
As to why it was lost, crudely put: evaporation into outer space.
Molecules of volatile gasses, including water vapor, that waft into a planet's upper atmosphere occasionally reach escape velocity and are lost.
Why some gasses and not others? There are a bunch of factors at work:
Heavier gasses -- CO2, for example -- require more energy to get up to escape velocity. They statistically hang around longer.
Larger planets have higher escape velocities.
Planets farther from the Sun recieve less insolation, so there's less of a chance that a molecule will get kicked up to escape velocity.
You are probably thinking of limestone. Calcium carbonate.
If memory serves, limestone isn't necessarily laid down by critters, but finding stromatolites or chalky cliffs ala Dover would be a very good sign indeed.
As would finding a fossilized opabinia, or one of the cannons the Martians used to launch their cylinders to Earth back in 1898.
Stefan
Maybe it would help to define the trailing edge first:
* Stories about interstellar empires that look and smell like the British or Roman empires.
* Yet another Civil War alternate history story.
* Any SF future which doesn't fully take into account scientific fact and technical innovation.
* . . . and other SF that seems more like comfort food than brain food.
Whether a piece of fiction is "cutting edge" or not doesn't determine whether it's well written or entertaining.
I've read plenty of really well written comfort food SF, and plenty of cutting edge stuff that just did nothing for me.
Stefan
Not being picky about spelling; there's an SF author Stirling who writes very different stuff.
Suggestion: Start with bruces' short fiction. There are a couple of collections out there. Globalhead is uneven, but the good stuff ("Our Neural Chernobyl", "The Shores of Bohemia") is really, really good.
A Good Old Fashioned Future has more consistently good stories, including a doozy ("Maneki Neko") about a network-enabled gift economy.
Stefan
Oooh, The Culture is a perfect example of what I was writing about.
I really need to get caught up on Banks's stuff.
Stefan
From what I have read, Sterling doesn't want anything to do with Hollywood, so don't fret too much.
Don't judge Sterling just by The Difference Engine. Check out some of his short stories:
"Our Neural Chernobyl" is a hilarious what-iffer about a gene-hacked virus that raises the intelligence of North America's mammals.
"The Shores of Bohemia" at first looks like something set in an alternate history rennaisance city state . . . then perhaps a post-holocaust story. What's really going on is just frigging awesome.
Stefan