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Worldbuilding
- pavel_lishin 9y agoGreg Egan has recently released another novel, Dichronauts, which features another universe where the laws of physics are changed due to a sign change. (The first one is the Clockwork Rocket trilogy.) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30351492-dichronauts?from_search=true https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30351492-dichronauts?fro... https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9756310-the-clockwork-rocket?from_search=true https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9756310-the-clockwork-ro...
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoGreg Egan is the only sci-fi author in my adult life who makes me think "I like this, but I'm not smart enough to really understand it." Feel free to take that as a recommendation either for or against. :)
- solotronics 9y agoI recently had an existential crisis reading an Egan book where a brain modification allows people to control the collapse of quantum waveforms and therefore the protagonist can "smear" into infinite possibilities and then "collapse" to the one where the desired outcome occurs. Do we already exist across an infinite number of dimensions and we are just limited by our ability to comprehend a single possibility? it's a fun thought.
- Chattered 9y agoWhich book is that? I'd love to read. So far, Incandescence is the toughest of his novels that I've read, and the main world is an extreme and beautiful conception where the ambient forces are all peculiar and the inhabitants are figuring out their cosmology as the novel goes on. That said, I really could have used more diagrams while I was reading. I only found out after finishing that Egan has a whole bunch of Java applets on his website explaining the experiments that the main characters in the novel carry out, and why they give the results they do.
- KingPrad 9y agoPossibly "Axiomatic", a short story collection. It has incredible material.
- solotronics 9y agoQuarantine it's a full novel. I feel like minded and the Egan books hit upon so many of the things I dream about. This author along with William Gibson and Neal Stephenson really resonate with a lot of the cutting edge concepts we deal with. I had no idea Egan was a programmer but it's apparent he is a genius reading his books so it fits.
- isoprophlex 9y agoI am madly in love with this mans writing, but MAN was that a tough read. With clockwork rocket (and the 5D sequences in Diaspora) I had to take some time with pen and paper to understand what he was saying, but Dichronauts takes this to another level entirely. I'm not sure I'll ever fully grok this one... His more far-out books are fully recommended though if you want your mind blown with some exotics physics..!
- pavel_lishin 9y agoI happened to catch some sort of a fever while reading Dichronauts, and had some really unpleasant fever dreams of the Dichronauts universe...
- trynewideas 9y agoI don't know what's inspiring all these worldbuilding posts to make the HN front page, but I'm enjoying the hell out of it.
- danso 9y agoWhat other posts have there been?
- zeptomu 9y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14989538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14989538 There was recently a thread about crafting plausible maps (aka "mapmaking", a related topic).
- danso 9y agoThanks! These are titles that I imagine didn't catch my eye at the time.
- trynewideas 9y agoAlso https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14793809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14793809 last month. Three in a month (that I've seen, at least) isn't a lot, but for HN it's enough to make me notice.
- protomyth 9y agoHN seems to go in a discovery path when a really interesting subject hits the front page. People follow the initial link with new links and we get many more articles about the same subject in a big burst. I do love seeing these waves. It would be interesting to track them and see what other articles about a subject didn't get the votes.
- Jaruzel 9y agoI dip into https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/ https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/ every so often, most of it is so-so, but occasionally there's some good stuff in there.
- AlanSE 9y agoJust an FYI, I am one of the supporters of this guy on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/nyrath https://www.patreon.com/nyrath There are a few things I really liked on the site and believed very strongly were important to continue disseminating. My particular interest was in some of the rocket designs and space colonization material. The author has done a good deal of genuine original research and covers some very granular design details.
- praptak 9y agoWorldbuilding has its own Stackexchange which sometimes has interesting discussions about difficulties in creating internally consistent fantasy worlds. https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com
- oelmekki 9y agoWanted to mention that as well. This stack exchange is incredible, it's like soundcloud for science fiction. I don't contribute myself, but I'm subscribed to weekly newsletter, I always enjoy it.
- pmoriarty 9y ago"When you are trying your hand at worldbuilding, please try to avoid ice planets, desert planets, swamp planets, farm planets, volcano planets, and other single-biome planets. The pejorative term for this mistake is Monocosm..." What about arguably the most famous and most successful planet in science fiction? Dune, a desert planet, was a monocosm.
- Iv 9y agoThat's a trope, an overused cliché. Dune magnifies it, as can often be done. But if your universe involves travels between places, it is a waste to make a planet a single place with no variation. That would be like saying that USA is just a giant corn field. I find Starwars stupidly annoying about it, where a planet is usually a single place and present no variation. Seeing that there are swamps on Dagobah, I expect there also must be nice sunny beaches somewhere.
- jacobolus 9y agoStar Wars (the original film and its two sequels) uses this (and similar shortcuts in other aspects, like making the storm troopers wear full body armor to be completely interchangeable, or putting the main characters in a small insular group with no outside friends or living relatives, or giving the evil empire an unspeakable super weapon, or giving the Jedi characters arbitrary convenient magical powers, or making the robot R2D2 able to do almost anything in the empire’s computer systems) as a way of simplifying and clarifying the story. The universe of Star Wars is not supposed to be a realistic one. It’s a mishmash of previous (terrestrial) movie plots, themes, characters, and scenes lightly painted over with a space setting. The different planets are single places, with settings chosen to fit the needs of the storytelling. Think of them as backdrops in a stage play. As far as the films are concerned anything not on screen might as well not exist, and the rest of the various planets don’t need to be consistent with a realistic broader universe. Trying to paint them all in would waste scarce screen time and confuse the audience. Arguably this is one feature that made the “Star Wars universe” hopeless to adapt to try to tell stories with broader context. If you start trying to flesh out the details, the planets, galactic government, spaceship technology, concept of the Jedi, etc. all start to fall apart, because they were never very carefully designed in the first place, but just hacked together to meet the particular needs of the original story.
- perryprog 9y agoReally cool subreddit for this type of discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/ https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoAlso a Stack Exchange! https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/ https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoIf you like this, be sure to flip to the bottom of the page for the site's full table of contents. The (literal) Worldbuilding section is just one small part of Atomic Rockets, which covers practically every aspect of sci-fi and the real science (or lack thereof) behind it, in wonderfully well-researched and illustrated detail.
- fernly 9y agoWhat a gorgeous site! The Internet is an amazing place; thank you!