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Favorite scifi concept?
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2026
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my favorite trope that i dont see enough of in movies is realistic galactic travel and all the tech that would require.. travel to another star system.. usually multi-generational attempts. feels like there is a lot of this in books.
you often see a brief glimpse, or some hand waiving with hibernation techniques. not much feels real.
Chasm City has a pretty realistic take on generation ships.
Oh yes, and the deep dark fear of people on the first ever flotilla that someone back home will build a second FTL capable one that would OVERPASS them before their destination and they would arrive to an already colonised world.
ill take a look, thanks!
By way of warning, the generation ship isn't a major setting of the story, but it does come up.
I think because once you break the seal on generation ships, that becomes the story. There’s so much required for humans to actually commit to that plan. It would shape everything, and you’d need to explain how they overcome certain problems.
You’d need to show what was worth the commitment to begin with - what’s the goal / where are they going and why? And you’d need to show how they selected crew for their fertility and genetic composition overall, probably not with a 1:1 female:male ratio. And you’d need to explain how they got people to commit to their children dying in space. And, once that generation was raised, how they kept it from revolting and turning the ship around to Earth so they could see the sky before they die. Would they raise them on lies? And how many generations of humans do they need to go through to reach the destination? How are they going to solve all the gravity, radiation, and thermodynamics problems? Whats going to fuel a ship for hundreds of years? And of course your book starts to have the Foundation problem of having multiple whole sets of characters in one book. I think that’s just challenging for any story, or at least you can see why I say it takes over and shapes the entire story.
There’s just so much to it that it takes over the narrative. So in your comment where you say you’d like to see more of it… do you mean more stories about this? Or you just sort of expect it to be in the background of more stories?
I guess it was kind of in the background for The Expanse, with the Navoo Mormon generational ship. Which in one fell religious stroke answers many of the questions in a believable way, including the male/female ratio and how anyone would be crazy enough to do it.
The issue with multigenerational stuff in movies is that you would need a new cast for each generation. Foundation series is for example very hard to adapt and they diverged from the books to make things more convenient by having the emperor clone himself and cryosleep. I think currently it's very hard to get a series through that requires people to pay attention when they're literally on their phones while watching.
Fully agree, give me non-ftl space is really really fucking big scifi and I'm a happy camper
I have just finished Peter F. Hamilton's latest excellent duology The Archimedes Engine and The Helium Sea and slower than light interstellar travel, and the time dilation that ensues, is a constant theme. There is some hand-wavy ~~magic~~ technology for speeding ships up to 99% of lightspeed (and slowing them down again) using massive gates, which means the main parts of the story are told over decades.