What are your favorite Sci Fi concepts?

[offog]

A lot of my favorite ideas have come from short stories of which I've read a lot more in the last couple of years.


Apocalyptic

Pesthouse - Jim Crace
"The End of the World as We Know It - Dale Bailey
"Speech Sound" - Octavia E. Butler
"The People of Sand and Slag" - Paolo Bacigalupi

Singularity/post-human

Counting Heads - David Marusek
"Wang's Carpets" - Greg Egan

Bio-engineering

"Blood Music" - Greg Bear

Enhanced Intelligence

"Flowers for Algernon" - Daniel Keyes
"Understand" - Ted Chiang

[megaphage]

Have you read Schild's Ladder?

no, I'm intrigued by the descriptions I've read of it though. It sounds like I might enjoy it. I read this on Amazon...

Building up from ideas of human intelligence in disembodied storage or artificial bodies, Egan finally takes his lead characters on a mind-boggling joyride through novo-vacuum, mapping them into a space where a tense eight-hour flight from deadly predators covers just one millimetre. There's a lot of room in there.

Does this feature much in the story?

On the list
thanks

[Ropie]

Does this feature much in the story?

As I remember it makes up most of the last third of the book. It was a strange novel - partly Egan tried hard with characterisation and background. I don't know if that's how he normally writes but it almost worked, though I found it a bit schmaltzy in places. The rest of it was pretty hard-concept stuff and genuinely complex (to me at any rate). Overall I'd say it was definitely worth reading.

[psikeyhackr]

Newtonian Physics!

Authors that mention things involving that but then get it wrong are really annoying. It os only 300 years old.

psik

[psikeyhackr]

Science Fiction will not be televised!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhQbjoDx0p8

psik

[The Void]

My favourite is about struggle to escape the gravity wells of a planet, against local government policy and society's popular ideas. Ben Bova's return to Mars is an example. Generally, I tend to enjoy stories about science advancement, about how people keep going despite of public scorn, limited budget, and many more challenges.

[noori noori]

i think the concept of a time-machine, like h g wells's 'time machine' is one of my favorite SF Concepts. the cover-picture of the book i read years-ago there was like a contraption that has always reminded me of: a car ! SO as i love Saucers, a car fits my idea for my favorite SF Concept _



..

[megaphage]

Have you read Schild's Ladder?

As I remember it makes up most of the last third of the book. It was a strange novel - partly Egan tried hard with characterisation and background. I don't know if that's how he normally writes but it almost worked, though I found it a bit schmaltzy in places. The rest of it was pretty hard-concept stuff and genuinely complex (to me at any rate). Overall I'd say it was definitely worth reading.

Thanks for the recommendation...

I managed to get hold of it and I finished it yesterday. I enjoyed it... interesting concept and some intriguing fresh ideas. Squeezing decent characters into this was always going to be difficult, but I thought Egan had it about right to generate a bit of human interest and a setting that the reader can relate to.

He'd obviously put a lot of thought into the physics and stuff but I did find some of that difficult to follow and I had to get on with it and accept I wouldn't be able to understand it exactly.

I would have liked a more conclusive ending.

Anachronauts are awesome!

[Steven L Jordan]

I'm most fascinated by the next stage of civilization: How we will develop beyond today's over-populated, environmentally-insensitive, resource-imbalanced, Manifest Destiny-obsessed culture.

Concurrent with that, I love examples of living in these environments of tomorrow, including spaceships and orbital habitats, arcocities and post-collapse remnants. (My own novels reflect these interests as well.)