“TheFutureIsDesigned” bluechecks thusly:
You: takes 2 hours to read 1 book
Me: take 2 minutes to think of precisely the information I need, write a well-structured query, tell my agent AI to distribute it to the 17 models I’ve selected to help me with research, who then traverse approximately 1 million books, extract 17 different versions of the information I’m looking for, which my overseer agent then reviews, eliminates duplicate points, highlights purely conflicting ones for my review, and creates a 3-level summary.
And then I drink coffee for 58 minutes.
We are not the same.
I want to live in the world of Hyperion, Ringworld, Foundation, and Dune.
You know, Dune.
(Via)
Since nobody else has mentioned it:
The (fictional) Ringworld is an immensely old mega-engineering project, requiring super-strength materials to put a habitable ring around a sunlike-star; a day-night cycle is provided by solar-collecting shadow squares in a smaller (thus faster-moving) orbit, connected by super-strength wire.
This is an unstable arrangement, and requires repeated adjustments every century or so. Naturally, that system broke down (via capitalists grabbing the expensive fusion power plants for their own purposes) and the backup system was destroyed by a bioengineered weapon.
The resolution to all this depends on psychic luck produced by evolutionary processes over the course of a handful of generations on Earth.
Truly, “hard SF” means that enough details have been given that you can be sure it won’t work.
This is kind of what I have to give to Niven. The guy is a libertarian, but he would follow his story all the way into such results. And his series where organs are being harvested for minor crimes? It completely flew over my head that he was trying to criticize taxes, and not, say, republican tough-on-crime, mass incarceration, and for profit prisons. Because he followed the logic of the story and it aligned naturally with its real life counterpart, the for profit prison system, even if he wanted to make some sort of completely insane anti tax argument where taxing rich people is like harvesting organs or something.
On the other hand, much better regarded Heinlein, also a libertarian, would write up a moon base that exports organic carbon and where you have to pay for oxygen to convert to CO2. Just because he wanted to make a story inside of which “having to pay for air to breathe” works fine.
Oh and don’t forget the cat people that used to be more aggressive but now they are nicer because of all the long wars in which the aggressive ones killed each other. I liked Ringworld overall, but indeed there is an awful lot of eugenics thinking in there.
pls let me know who thinks Ringworld is ”hard SF” so I can punch them
@gerikson I found it hard to finish, doesn’t that count?