submitted 6 days ago by ashenone@lemmy.ml to c/sciencefiction@lemmy.world

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I'd love to hear about your favorite concept or idea you've read about or seen in scifi media.

My personal favorite is the Conjoiner Drive out of the Revelation Space series. These ship drives are dual drives on either side of a lighthugger and have a living being inside the drives to act as a supercomputer, which holds a wormhole open inside the drives. The wormhole links far in the past to the big-bang and uses the energy from the big-bang for propulsion.

In most scifi I've come across wormholes are used for FTL travel, and I thought this was such a unique and creative use of a wormhole it has stuck with me for years after reading about it.

So what are your favorite devices or ideas that have come out of scifi media?

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[-] elvith@feddit.org 5 points 6 days ago

One thing that absolutely stuck with me as an idea was the plot premise of the short story The Road Not Taken by Harry Turtledove. In this story not only is FTL travel by gravity manipulation possible, but also very very easy to discover. It's so easy that many aliens discovered it early on and then their progress on technology is basically halted. So humankind is a very advanced civilization because we never discovered FTL travel which led to our advanced technology. Then one day one of the "prehistoric" alien races try to conquer the earth and can't grasp what they're up against.

[-] elephantium@lemmy.world 4 points 6 days ago

Spoilers ahoy! (yes, old series. Still.)

spoiler

This sounds like the opposite side of the coin explored in the Worldwar series, where the aliens have sublight drives and very ergonomic military equipment -- but at a level where Earth WW2 kit is close enough to be dangerous.

There are several scenes where the aliens are crowing about how they're going to give medieval knights a whuppin', based on probe data they'd seen from like 1200 AD or so.

Then in a later book, humanity discovers FTL and shows up at the alien home planet with an embassy. The implication was that the alien empire wasn't going to be quite so supreme after that...heh.

this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2026

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