Darth Hoth wrote:When I talk about "limited" in this respect it is with regards to concepts, rather than stories in the sense of person-to-person interactions. Scale and scope, for one thing, are severely hampered by a realistic treatment of space travel, which more or less requires that the story take place inside Sol System.
Not really. Like I said, you can easily have interstellar war, politics, what have you in a no-FTL universe. You just need to drop the assumption that future people have the same mayfly planning horizons as ourselves. Two hard SF civilizations that control substantial portions of the galaxy clashing could give you scale and scope to make universes like Star Wars and WH40K look small, for instance. Quintillion-strong fleets of robot and upload crewed warships tearing through the galaxy, executing strategems and manuevers that may take thousands of years, consuming the resources of entire solar systems to swell their numbers, the entire war dragging on for hundreds of thousands of years as the tides of battle flow over the spiral arms - you want epic, you can have it.
Plus, as Destructionator XIII pointed out, there's also the factor that a lot of soft SF ignores what a huge place a single solar system actually is. Even in a single heavily populated solar system you could have events happening on a human scale that would dwarf anything in the modern world, and in a lot of soft SF star empires for that matter.
Hard technology also eliminates a number of plots, technologies and so on that you may want for your story - say, if you want to include time travel for what you think is a funny and original twist, for example.
Yes, but on the other hand it may lead you to interesting things that you wouldn't have gotten with soft SF because the issues that create them can be just handwaved away. Like the "follow two upload copies of one person and watch their personalities diverge as they have different experiences" idea, which would probably never have occurred to me in the context of a soft SF setting because it's easier just to postulate mile-long FTL ships crewed by meatbags and handwave away all the difficulties, whereas with hard SF you start thinking a lot harder about "how can I shave down mass on my lighthugger so the energy requirements are less obscene, oh yeah, I can probably reduce it by a couple of orders of magnitude if it carries uploads instead of living humans".
Or, perhaps you want to keep a more personal and immediate feel to combat and have it operated by humans, rather than scared people in two spaceships simply hoping that their computer will do a better job than the other guys'. Such a scene can be a very tense read as well if written well, but that may not be the feel I am looking for right there in my awesomely epic final battle.
You could always suggest cultural factors. Like, you have a culture that fights by a code of battle that demands that they use mile-long dildodreads with giant pew pew guns that have to pew pew at each other uselessly for ten minutes before they can kill each other. Then that might suggest other avenues to explore, like what would happen if somebody broke the rules.
Anyway, my point isn't that hard SF isn't to some degree limiting, any set of rules is. My point is it's hardly a creative straightjacket if you're willing to use some effort and imagination.
Such an increase in life span will most certainly have great effects on society at large; the demographic implications alone will be difficult to work out (I tried that once when I was designing a "hard" RPG setting, and gave up eventually; I am not saying that it cannot be done, but at that point I at least did not feel up to it). Given what such a revolution would do for such things as family, marriage, politics and so on I could easily think of scenarios that would suffer disruption from it.
Yeah, but unless the fact that these things are similar is vital to your setting I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I mean, if you're dead set on writing the modern world with starships and lasers I guess that's cool, but I question how many authors really write that way because they couldn't do it any other way and how many do it just because it's easier to follow in the path everyone else has already trodden. Maybe as an author it wouldn't be a bad idea to try to think of the ways in which the future might logically be different as opportunities to be embraced rather than problems to be desperately handwaved away, and see if that approach really does totally break your vision or if that's just fear and laziness speaking. I know my personal work became much less of a generic unremarkable setting after I started doing that.
The hard limits are also there regardless - yes, twenty years from here to Sirius (or whatever) might not feel much to me personally (especially when you factor in time dilation, &c.), but the time has still passed for the people I sought to visit. It is still impossible to maintain the kind of close ties that we in modern society take for granted when distances are that great and communications have such a hard upper limit.
Well, you could always do stuff like join a social circle of uploads who run themselves at something like 1/1000th normal human clock speed so you can go gallivanting around the galaxy and when you get back only a few years will have passed for your friends. If you have an entire culture that decided to go that route you could actually get something relatively similar to your typical soft SF empire.
The Race in Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series had something a little like this; there were groups of frequent space travellers among them that tended to form their own social cliques as they had a common experience of having been out of touch with the rest of society for decades while they were in cryosleep during the STL interstellar journeys.
RedImperator wrote:Of course, in an uploaded brain setting, then you wouldn't even need eccentric millionaires. There would be literally no limit to what kind of setting you could create--even, if you wanted, a Buck Rogers zap gun setting inhabited by uploaded pulp sci-fi enthusiasts and a quadrillion AI-generated NPCs. You start running into dramatic problems there, however, what with functionally immortal protagonists and a "Load last saved" button if things go completely tits-up.
Maybe they're hard-core extreme sports types who think the risk of genuine suffering and death is part of the fun?
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- PeZook
). "ZOMG no FTL means I can't have interstellar politics or wars or anything but depressing visions of 200 guys spending 300 years stuck in a tin can so they can sit in the mud on Alpha Centauri!" is a good example. Yes you can have those things in a no-FTL universe. Most of the objections to them stem from the silly and depressing assumption that future people would be limited to something like our mayfly lifespans and planning horizons. Frankly, unless you're writing a dystopia or it serves some profound plot point your setting will probably not be harmed by not having life extension arbitrarily plateau at some three digit number for no good reason.
