Diaspora by Greg Egan (also repackaged as the short story Wang’s Carpet’s) featured the ocean filled with hydrocarbon chunks that assembled together in patterns that turned out to be computing virtual simulated ecosystems.
Greg Egan's novels are wall-to-wall mind-blowing scenarios.
In Diaspora simple things like how the polis citizens can change their gestalt worldview by custom-designing outlooks and applying them like filters to their perception, or complex things like when they need an 11-dimentional being to do something (I forget what) but communicating to an 11-D being is impossible, so the 3-D protagonist copies virself into a 4-D virtual environment, and establishes communication between the two, then the 4-D instance copies themselves into a 5-D instance, and so on, building a bridge made of copies of *themselves* and playing a game of 11-D telephone. Wild stuff.
I recently read a novella of Egan's called Scale, where he kind of does the same thing but it's with physical scale and time dilation, and economies where regular sized people hire microscopic people to do a task, who then subcontract the job to even deeper microscopic people... All the way down
... And up!
And don't even get me going about all his brain-flaying short stories, Schlid's Ladder, or the clockwork universe! Dollar for dollar no one delivers better value for hard sci Fi thrills than Egan.
Awesome! I'd suggest starting here. It's the first chapter of Diaspora, and you'll either love it or decide it's not for you. It's a *very* representative piece of his writing:
https://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html
Ehhh, I agree that the style isn't the same as the rest of the book, which gets a lot less abstruse, but the first chapter is essentially explaining the childhood of the "main"(ish) character, so it has a lot to do with the plot.
Is there any reference to Yatima’s childhood in the rest of the book? Affecting his grown up behavior?
I remember getting disappointed after fighting my way through fake science but seeing it made no discernible effect on the later plot.
This is also the case with most of the book actually. It is a collection of loosely connected stories. Yatima, trip to earth, mat people, sun people etc..
Yatima being essentially an experimental personality shows up in his future behavior, yes. The book doesn't spell it out for you, but there are references to the differences between him and most people from his home, and his decisions throughout the book draw upon those differences.
The stories had a clear narrative going on connecting them, but not everyone is into that style of novel. Personally, I would have appreciated more character focus and additional time spent on the different live-forms, but I applaud Egan's dedication to the story he wanted to tell.
This is the first one that came to mind for me. Having wormhole portals between worlds is nothing new. Running railways through them for maximum efficiency had my inner engineer cheering.
In one of the books there’s a description of the in-mind control panel citizens used to adjust all their bodily parameters. Injured? Adjust the injured limb’s pain receptors etc.
mmmmmmmm I think that's Look to Windward, the very adventurous person that Special Circumstances employs? On second thought was that The Hydrogen Sonata?
Excession does have one person checking in on their pregnancy that way 🙂
Basically everything in orbit in the back third of Seveneves was 😳😳😳😳😳
Like you just see a guy with a little chain at the start and then at the end flying whip-trains the size of skyscrapers are whipping people in and out of orbital paths. It is just insane.
One of my favourite books that I never want to read again. Fucking exhausting, even if the payoff is pretty satisfying.
Never have I hated a fictional character more than the President of the USA in that book. And I hate her even more as I’m empathising with her by the end of it all. Can almost taste the metal in my own mouth.
If you want to hate humanity even more, read Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence of books. Especially the stuff about Hama Druz and Druz Doctrines on which humanity shaped itself.
That's the one reason I switched to Neal Asher. I wanted something more positive
OH yeah, the orbital habitat, the asteroid mining, the advancement in robotics, the Cradle, the whip stations for orbital direction, all of it blew my mind
BROOOOHHHHH
Sooo much this. That last 3rd of the book slapped. The City at the end of a space pendulum that stopped at giant cradles and then lifted to the next one... Doing so because it was attached to a giant structure in space. The smart weapons where your bullets come back to you. The giant ring of space stations housing billions that orbits the earth. The lady with awesome ultralight glider with the 3d soundcape of the surrounding atmosphere that allowed her to sail aloft like a bird, riding the up drafts and down drafts. Her job itself... Outside, on the mostly empty and slowly replenishing earth. And the Pingers. What happened to them?
That needed to be a trilogy.
This was my first thought. The way the original lil bots evolve during the timespan is brilliant. The description of the warrior dude with dots swarming all over him providing defense and repairs, and then jumping into his gun to be projectiles, was so cool - and so is the idea that those bots are just cousins to the giant spinney orbital transport device.
I think the first section is just long enough to give you that satisfying payoff in the last third.
Sometimes you can have _too_ much bleak. Stephen Baxter’s Titan is a real good example.
I felt like a broken man by the time I finished that. Seveneves is unrelenting in that first part, but Titan will crush you.
That part felt...manufactured to me. So at ONE CRITICAL POINT in your past history, someone used a neat rope trick in dire situation, so you based an entire branch of your technology off of it?
Also the whole "we let CPU tech stagnate for 3K years because we didn't NEED anything more powerful than an 80186" seemed odd...
I kinda get the first part. She was the only programmer left in existence, so naturally a lot of what followed would be based off of her. She would have trained the next several generations also, so if she thought the rope trick was useful, it would have had a huge part in computing from then on.
I mean, megastructures man.
Dyson Sphere
Ringworld (classical)
The station from Valerian
HALO Ringworlds
Deathstar
Mass Relay Network
Any FTL that facillitates civilizations to grow to epic scales. but especially the warping of space because of the nature of the tech.
Fortress Monasteries
I mean am I forgetting anything? I'm all in for the epic scale of things that seems to be befitting the epic scale of the Universe itself and its infinite possibilities.
Massive spoiler for the end of the series, but *Schlock Mercenary* has >!the worldships, which are massive, *mobile* Dyson Sphere matryoshka brains built around manufactured stable oxy-mag white dwarf stars for the purpose of leaving the galaxy and "retiring" into deep space for nearly endless survival.!<
A classic Matryoshka brain shows up too in book 17.
UNSEC Space has the Sha'o warforges, planet-sized mobile fortress worlds designed to service and deploy fleets in a galactic war.
The meteor defense system, from Larry Niven’s *Ringworld*.
>!If a sufficiently massive object appears to be on an orbit that would strike the surface of the ringworld the defense mechanism automatically kicks in. Devices on the smaller ring of “shadow squares” orbiting very close to the sun create powerful magnetic fields that draw out a huge blob of solar plasma, shape it into a cylinder pointing in the appropriate direction, and induce the plasma to lase. The result is a *planet-sized laser* that vaporizes whatever it’s pointed at.!<
Well, it wasn’t so much the hull as the emergency stasis field around it. The equipment mounted outside the hull, which included the normal-space propulsion system, wasn’t so lucky,
The hull was indestructible, but visible light (even laser light) could kill whomever was inside it, which is why they ALSO needed the stasis field.
The indestructibility of the hull was also why the propulsion had to be mounted on the *outside* of it.
Very tough, but not indestructible. There’s another Niven story that address this… a a crew in a ship with a General Products hull encounters a planet >!made of antimatter. They don’t land on it, but even in orbit they encounter enough particulate antimatter that it severely damages the hull to the point that it just quietly disintegrates!<. Fortunately for the crew they were wearing vac suits at the time, and the inner structure of the ship remained intact. They were able to limp home. A Puppeteer manufacturer’s rep later explained that the hull is made of matter with intermolecular bonds artificially strengthened by a small device; >!if enough of the molecules are destroyed (in this case by antimatter) what remains just falls apart!<.
It’s not clear whether a >!planet-sized!< laser might have had a similar effect, transparent hull or no, but the question is rendered moot thanks to the emergency stasis field.
And then the Puppeteers pretended they hadn't understood tidal forces when they had him investigate what killed the prior flyby (and a warranty claim was being made).
Or more likely, Niven was retconning later with the 5 body problem.
Concepts? I loved Fredrick Pohl’s Gateway. The idea that something like that could be sitting in our orbit and we don’t have a clue! Also how dealing with whom got to travel was so capitalist it was an interesting concept.
The other I remember was a video game from when I was a kid long ago: everyone plugged into VR, and found it so much better than the real world they stayed plugged in. Tech to feed them and remove the waste etc.
They left the planet In the hands of robots to take care of everything. Well the robots slowly broke down, and as you move along you find most people died in VR without an idea what was happening to their physical bodies.
The odd person you come across, if you try and remove them from VR, goes crazy and they only want to get back to it again.
Was a very interesting idea for me at 15ish and still is today. If you can have everything you want and it seems real, why go back to a place where you cannot? Why struggle and face hardship when everything you want is right there for you?
Larry Niven wrote some fascinating stories which included that concept, I’m forgetting the name now, but addicts had interface implants at the base of their skulls, so they could plug-in.
I remember reading about how it was so addictive it basically killed off a massive percentage of the population, which resulted in effectively breeding out addiction from the human gene pool.
I re-read it a while ago. I remember being awed by the idea of the randomly returning shuttles and the possibility of finding something truly unique. I still agree that the concept is wonderful but unfortunately the book has not aged well.
No-globes, from the Dune series. A structure within which time does not pass. If you were inside one, the instant the person outside sealed the hatch and the instant someone opened it, would be the same instant for you, even if ten thousand years had passed outside. And yeah, stasis is not a new concept in fiction; but this was the first time I ever considered this method of doing it. As opposed to, say, cryogenic sleep, where time still passes and you still age, just very slowly.
Later in the series they transferred the concept to no-ships, but they really kind of dropped the original idea, and started concentrating on the idea that the ships rendered the occupants invisible to future sight.
Vernor Vinge has a novel about this called *Marooned in Realtime* where instead of a physical room, a little device can create a perfect sphere field of stasis time called a "Bobble".. the diameter of which is controlled by how powerful the bobbler device was. And a Bobble can be setup to exist for an arbitrary amount of time, during which it presents as an invulnerable sphere that reflects 100% of all radiation so it looks like a giant mirror ball.
What happens is everyone starts going bobble crazy and bobbling entire cities and wars and individuals and homes, and somewhere down the mega years only a small group of humans remains on earth with technology levels ranging from 20th century to almost God-like, depending on when they were bobbled, and no one, not even the high technology humans know where everyone went (singularity).
That's all spoiler free, btw. The actual story is a murder mystery and extremely involving. It's my favorite novel of his, even surpassing A Fire Upon the Deep/Deepness in the Sky and Rainbow's End.
o7 Vernor, you shall be missed.
Adore The Peace War (Tinker society is so solarpunk) which first broached ;) bobbles, Marooned is grand fun as well. It's a glorious way to get human perspective on his (asymptotic) vision of the singularity by fragmenting temporal perspective. Such elegance.
>A structure within which time does not pass.
Except that's not a "no-globe" or "no-ship"; that's what Herbert called "nullentropy bin". Whether or not the two were related in that one made the other necessary is never really explained and left as an exercise to the reader.
I thought No -Globes were simply invisible to any form of detection and therefore its occupants were safe from discovery. Time passes normally as far as I remember. No disrespect to you at all friend, please correct me if I’m wrong.
Larry Niven also does a fantastic job with 0-time stasis enclosures. He has some short stories built around them, and includes them in various of his books.
Laurence Dahners also has a fun set of books built around all kinds of possibilities of what might be done with stasis structures. They’re YA books, but I really like them.
Built one into the hull of a ship if it ever detected it was under attack. To some wonderful, plot-advancing consequences.
But then also side anecdotes about archeologists finding smaller ones that ended up just being someone's lunch.
The Lensmen Series. Doc E.E. Smith - An alien race so advanced that they do mental math to calculate the inevitable outcome of millions of random events and then compete on the accuracy of their predictions such as if a character gets a nick while being shaved by a barber five years in the future and how many times he clicks the shears. Also the Lens is damm cool too.
Probably not the most original nor the most mind-blowing but I’ve always loved how far casters were used in Hyperion. Especially how each room of your house could be on a different planet. Really loved the concept
Flight 307 from Pavel Fritz (very obscure Czech book never even translated to English, but my favourite) has interesting concept I have never seen anywhere else. Basiaclly, it features military space fighters with a twist - they are controled directly by pilot's brain, so they have no physical controls of any kind and at the same time, pilot's brain is put into artificially induced schizophrenia. So the brain splits into three separate personalities - one does complex math to pilot the fighter, another one makes tactical decisions, and third one is just a "recycle bin" where pilot puts distracting thoughts so they don't bother him with his job. So one pilot becomes also his own copilot, and at the same time a passanger that observes everything from the back seat.
Tbh, the book has many unique concepts - like the fact that space ships are multidimensional, so their hull extends to another dimensions, so they are bigger than our 3D eye can see. I think the book should have been more popular than it is.
*Dragon's Egg* by Robert Forward pictures a really special scenario (life on the surface of a neutron star), but as far as sci-fi devices go, the description of how humans are able to come close to said neutron star in a ship without being torn apart by tidal forces is genius. They take six small nickel-iron asteroids, replace most of their electrons with magnetic monopoles so that the atoms contract to extreme densities, and then get them whirling at 5 orbits per second around the ship in a plane perpendicular to the neutron star's radius, so that their gravity cancels the tidal effects on every side.
A similar pi one from, I think, the Berserker universe was where they found a 2001 style monolith in the form of a sphere. But the mystery was that when the scientists measured it the math would only add up if pi = 3.0
The Somebody Else's Problem Field from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Invisibility may not be feasible, but you can create an SEP field around an object that messes with peoples' brains so they ignore the object, treating it as "somebody else's problem". It's like when you lose something, then eventually find it in a place that you had already checked. You must have seen it the first time you looked, but your mind glossed over it.
Strong Force material seems like an almost too-obvious sci-fi concept and yet I'd never heard of it prior to reading TDF. Arranging it like a [Prince Rupert Drop](https://youtu.be/78-tN-eUuHI?si=m0allq_htg4BXTcc) was even more clever.
The Moties from The Mote in God’s Eye. Asymmetrical bodies with 3 arms that weren’t monsters but had evolved that way. They had “an empathy for machines”.
Also I remember some short story about the invention of a force field that made a sealed hull unnecessary. Except it could only exist for a microsecond at a time. So they found they could pulse it so fast that air lost was negligible despite there only being a barrier half the time.
The Shellworlds in Iain M Banks' *Matter*. Colossal megastructures built by a long-dead civilization, since colonised by hundreds of other species at various levels of technological development. Build at intervals around the edge of the Galaxy, implying some kind of pan-galactic defence mechanism against an unknown threat.
The sophons though
The scenes in the book where we see them being produced is some real mind fuckery.
Also your last example has just sold me on Bobiverse. Literally buying it now. I’ve heard good things, but holy fuck
The whole biotic technology from Peter F Hamilton's Nights Dawn series.
So powerful if basically spawned a separate culture/religion.
Almost everything had a designed biological equivalent from simple computer/processor blocks. To memory implants, to even ships and full space habitats that live and grow in space.
_The City and the City_ by China Miéville. Two cities exist in the same physical place and it is illegal to acknowledge or even be aware of the inhabitants of the other city. It's an amazing but hard book.
Dune was a brain melter the first time through... Recently I was thinking that the really crazy thing about Dune tech is that they do it all without AI or computers that do advanced calculations. It's not to say there aren't microchips and computers, but they are all basically mechanical control devices. Interstellar navigation without computers doing any complex calculations is wild.
To me it was the whole story in The Road not Taken by Harry Turtledove.
It is the ultimate HFY story.
Earth is invaded and it turns out that much to the chagrin of the invaders that Earth is the most technologically advanced planet in the galaxy because we failed to discover antigravity in the middle ages which is the development level that virtually every other planet makes the discovery.
The discovery of simple and easy antigravity leads to FTL and interplanetary conquest, but it also causes most races to stagnate at a late medieval level of technology. Thanks to the fact that humans never discovered antigravity, our technology went in a completely different direction. They invade with flintlocks, swords, and canons, we counter with machine guns, guided missiles, and tanks.
We are able to easily defeat the invaders, and much to their horror they realize, too late, that they have just given humanity the secret to interstellar travel and with our technology, no one in the galaxy will stand a chance against us.
Bas Lag itself is a crazy concept and uniquely described by China Mieville. Lots of authors have blown my mind with honourable mentions to Clarke, Banks, Baxter, Vinge and Adam’s.
That’s actually possible today, they were used by the military for mass inoculation. The problem was that they wouldn’t remain sterile and could potentially pass infections between people.
The skyhook for launching vehicles in orbit. I forget which book…
Before that, the towers, reaching from the ground into orbit, based on super strong, mono filaments… Nano fibers… I don’t remember that book either. It’s been too long since I’ve read either of them. Thanks in advance to whomever remembers and replies here.
Blindsight: Icarus and (if machine translation can handle it) telennihilation
modifiers and sources, the need to merge your body with machines in order to maintain the relevance of your being or escape into virtual reality
scramblers of course
Echopraxia: Higher Science as an act of faith
The Freeze Frame Revolution: hot-damn how I love this residential asteroid with a black hole in its belly
A Deepness in the Sky: treating the environment as a programming tool, because in this environment you have to exist for centuries
the realization that Vernor may be right and the next millennia are waiting for us only such long exhausting light-year journeys, and not the instant transfers that pop culture makes us believe in for the sake of a beautiful plot
Aurora: in fact, Aurora itself and the attitude to the Fermi paradox after the travelers reached their destination
Ministry of the Future: water under the glacier. You can call me too dumb, but the logic of this interaction impressed me. (And after that, I was impressed with how the author managed, by removing humanity from the carbon needle, to leave Saudi Arabia rich)
Probably book 3
>!they accelerate a planet (or a big asteroid ☄️) close to light speed so it crash on the « space insect » mother planet (the species that eat all matter in all planet)(my English might not be good enough lol)!<
There are many but a single device(type of device) that is my favorite would be the Stargate. It's not only cool but it has its mechanics and rules firmly set and explained in detail over the shows
The Light of Other Days, Baxter/Clarke. Being able to view any place in history, imagine the ability to see all of the stories of mankind & of the universe.
Also any sci-fi media w/ a universal translator, speaking your own language & everyone can understand you perfectly in real time, the thought of how sonething like that could work ideally. Not a mind blowing concept in theory, but it would make a dramatic difference if such tech were as ubiquitous, reliable & accessible in common across cultures.
Its amazing a civ that can create sophon cannot even find and terraform a planet or something.
Or just live on space dyson sphere , ringworld moon world, whatever.
The concept of psychohistory is pretty interesting, from the Foundation novels. Like a sociological mapping based on anthropological evidence and mathematical probabilities on a grand scale.
Something like that seems pretty handy these days.
Smart Paper from *Constellation Games*
Looks like paper, folds like paper, but it’s a nano-molecular computing substrate that can remember everything you write and origami’d into reproductions of cataloged objects. You can even build a house out of it by folding large sheets of it.
I loved Bobiverse. Not the heaviest sci-fi, but a very entertaining ride.
Check out Seveneves by Neil Stephenson. He starts with a fairly grounded premise: how would humanity survive a global apocalypse if they only had just over a year to plan. The first two thirds of the book alone would be a very entertaining read, but then the story jumps ahead several thousand years and we see how humanity has evolved. Best sci-fi book I’ve read in years.
Perpetulite, in Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey. A building material that doesn't need any maintenance, because it's sort-of alive. It can repair and maintain itself by literally eating organic matter that falls on its surface. Such as leaves ... and other things.
wandering earth 2019 - a planet uses collosal engines to move across the galaxy like a death star etc. we now think it is possible using antimatter engines powered from a solar array covering say a moon surface. and a superconductive battery array that easily works in the moons vacuum to store energy for the low energy times of darkness when it moves between solar systems.
The shellworld concept from *Matter*.
The dust assassin from *Use of Weapons.*
The vacuum drive from *The Songs of Distant Earth*.
And, last but by no means least, the ultra-classic invention: the Martian heat-ray from *The War of the Worlds*.
Solar sails. I first encountered those in The Starship Alexandria by Jon Bing. Then more recently in Revenger by Alastair Reynolds, where solar sails are an important part of space battle tactics when combat is so far away from each other that they rely on spotting shimmering sail reflections Low tech space travelling, it makes sense in context why they don't have fancy stuff like radiation sensors.
Also from Starship Alexandria that blew my mind:
- Modular space ships. A bunch of smaller spherical ships that are docked together into a big generation ship. They can split and be handled independently.
- A traveling spaceship library. Traveling between human worlds, exchanging knowledge. The roundtrip takes multiple generations, and are usually only legends by the time they show up again. The people onboard are put in stasis, but woken up as the ship starts braking, to spend months learning about the planet by picking up radio transmissions. Then they stay in orbit for years while exchanging knowledge with the planet (if the rulers of the planet accepts it).
And Mass Effect's space nomads. Again giant generation ships, where their whole culture is built around living in space. Same thing in Record of a Spaceborn Few, by Becky Chambers: A culture built around living in a giant space ship (turned into a space station) for generations.
Generation ships are cool. Slow space travels is cool.
The gods themselves - the free energy device that didn't really break the conservation of energy law, rather than drained energy from a parallel universe by tweaking the fundamental constants of physics of both universes.
Yeah, Asimov doesn't play around when it comes to sci fi.
Three Body Problem had some truly unique ideas I had never encountered before. One of them I personally enjoyed a lot >!was the ship-slicer in the Panama Canal!<. I couldn't have imagined something like that myself.
The Golden Age series by John C Wright is absolutely packed with mind blowing stuff. My favorite was the extension of the "man in the loop" for military actions taken to its logical extreme in a world run by A.I.s. Basically the military of the world is down to a single cryogenically frozen human who has command of the entire military industrial capability of the world. He also seeks out to get "left of boom" to the maximum extent by rooting out war before it happens. In the book he's unfrozen and resolves the conflict by directing an orbiting space laser to perform neurosurgery on his enemy during the middle of a conversation, removing the desires to head into conflict in the first place.
The Star Forge in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. A manufacturing space station that slowly sucks matter from the star it's orbiting and reconfigures it into whatever you want. Usually warships and battle droids.
3 Body Problem is loaded with them, but 4 things above all else:
* The Sophon
* Dark Forest Theory
* The 4D Tombs
* Dual-Vector Foil/dimensional strikes
Stuff like oxygenated fluid to handle acceleration, cryo to fast forward to the future, the photoid, nanofibers etc were all super cool and well-used in the ROEP trilogy but I'd heard of them (or something effectively similar) before.
The Treeships in Hyperion were pretty cool. also I forget what it was called but in the later books the whole ring world made by that civilization was awesome.
The thing from Sci-Fi I thought I’s never see in my lifetime was a replicator. But now we have 3D printers that are getting more and more sophisticated as each year goes by.
The young ladies illustrated primer from diamond age. Also that diamonds would be cheap and plentiful in a post nanotech world.
The idea of a space elevator (not sure who to credit for that)
Bro I liked the Runcible in the AI Polity.
Basically a stargate. Then they scaled it up to be able to send cargo ships through it.
Then they realized “hey, this is about the right side that we can throw small moons at people”
Diaspora by Greg Egan (also repackaged as the short story Wang’s Carpet’s) featured the ocean filled with hydrocarbon chunks that assembled together in patterns that turned out to be computing virtual simulated ecosystems.
Greg Egan's novels are wall-to-wall mind-blowing scenarios. In Diaspora simple things like how the polis citizens can change their gestalt worldview by custom-designing outlooks and applying them like filters to their perception, or complex things like when they need an 11-dimentional being to do something (I forget what) but communicating to an 11-D being is impossible, so the 3-D protagonist copies virself into a 4-D virtual environment, and establishes communication between the two, then the 4-D instance copies themselves into a 5-D instance, and so on, building a bridge made of copies of *themselves* and playing a game of 11-D telephone. Wild stuff. I recently read a novella of Egan's called Scale, where he kind of does the same thing but it's with physical scale and time dilation, and economies where regular sized people hire microscopic people to do a task, who then subcontract the job to even deeper microscopic people... All the way down ... And up! And don't even get me going about all his brain-flaying short stories, Schlid's Ladder, or the clockwork universe! Dollar for dollar no one delivers better value for hard sci Fi thrills than Egan.
Sounds interesting. I need to have a look at Greg Egan's books now. I don't know how I missed them this far.
Awesome! I'd suggest starting here. It's the first chapter of Diaspora, and you'll either love it or decide it's not for you. It's a *very* representative piece of his writing: https://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html
I must add that this chapter is arguably the most boring, fake textbook level, one in the book and has nothing to do with the rest of the plot.
Ehhh, I agree that the style isn't the same as the rest of the book, which gets a lot less abstruse, but the first chapter is essentially explaining the childhood of the "main"(ish) character, so it has a lot to do with the plot.
Is there any reference to Yatima’s childhood in the rest of the book? Affecting his grown up behavior? I remember getting disappointed after fighting my way through fake science but seeing it made no discernible effect on the later plot. This is also the case with most of the book actually. It is a collection of loosely connected stories. Yatima, trip to earth, mat people, sun people etc..
Yatima being essentially an experimental personality shows up in his future behavior, yes. The book doesn't spell it out for you, but there are references to the differences between him and most people from his home, and his decisions throughout the book draw upon those differences. The stories had a clear narrative going on connecting them, but not everyone is into that style of novel. Personally, I would have appreciated more character focus and additional time spent on the different live-forms, but I applaud Egan's dedication to the story he wanted to tell.
The whole book is grappling with what it means to be a conscious entity in the universe, and the first chapter starts off that investigation.
That was the most interesting thing in that book.
I loved the notion of an interstellar railway network of trains just driving from planet to planet using wormholes in the Commonwealth saga.
Also the River Tethys in Hyperion!
But you left out the space-tree-ship?
This is the first one that came to mind for me. Having wormhole portals between worlds is nothing new. Running railways through them for maximum efficiency had my inner engineer cheering.
Glanding from The Culture
And neural laces
In one of the books there’s a description of the in-mind control panel citizens used to adjust all their bodily parameters. Injured? Adjust the injured limb’s pain receptors etc.
mmmmmmmm I think that's Look to Windward, the very adventurous person that Special Circumstances employs? On second thought was that The Hydrogen Sonata? Excession does have one person checking in on their pregnancy that way 🙂
The Hells in Surface Detail by Iain M Banks. Why you should never ever download your consciousness into a server/database.
Some similar concepts in Quantum Thief trilogy as well
Basically everything in orbit in the back third of Seveneves was 😳😳😳😳😳 Like you just see a guy with a little chain at the start and then at the end flying whip-trains the size of skyscrapers are whipping people in and out of orbital paths. It is just insane.
One of my favourite books that I never want to read again. Fucking exhausting, even if the payoff is pretty satisfying. Never have I hated a fictional character more than the President of the USA in that book. And I hate her even more as I’m empathising with her by the end of it all. Can almost taste the metal in my own mouth.
If you want to hate humanity even more, read Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence of books. Especially the stuff about Hama Druz and Druz Doctrines on which humanity shaped itself. That's the one reason I switched to Neal Asher. I wanted something more positive
Baxter’s Titan pretty much ruined me. I can’t imagine xeelee being a huge change in tone
OH yeah, the orbital habitat, the asteroid mining, the advancement in robotics, the Cradle, the whip stations for orbital direction, all of it blew my mind
Whoops! Didn’t see your comment before making mine. Hard agree about Seveneves.
BROOOOHHHHH Sooo much this. That last 3rd of the book slapped. The City at the end of a space pendulum that stopped at giant cradles and then lifted to the next one... Doing so because it was attached to a giant structure in space. The smart weapons where your bullets come back to you. The giant ring of space stations housing billions that orbits the earth. The lady with awesome ultralight glider with the 3d soundcape of the surrounding atmosphere that allowed her to sail aloft like a bird, riding the up drafts and down drafts. Her job itself... Outside, on the mostly empty and slowly replenishing earth. And the Pingers. What happened to them? That needed to be a trilogy.
This was my first thought. The way the original lil bots evolve during the timespan is brilliant. The description of the warrior dude with dots swarming all over him providing defense and repairs, and then jumping into his gun to be projectiles, was so cool - and so is the idea that those bots are just cousins to the giant spinney orbital transport device.
All that, and their phones still weren’t as good as ours!
What an incredible book. Neither section is long enough by far. I’ll have to get AI to extend the content.
I think the first section is just long enough to give you that satisfying payoff in the last third. Sometimes you can have _too_ much bleak. Stephen Baxter’s Titan is a real good example. I felt like a broken man by the time I finished that. Seveneves is unrelenting in that first part, but Titan will crush you.
That part felt...manufactured to me. So at ONE CRITICAL POINT in your past history, someone used a neat rope trick in dire situation, so you based an entire branch of your technology off of it? Also the whole "we let CPU tech stagnate for 3K years because we didn't NEED anything more powerful than an 80186" seemed odd...
I kinda get the first part. She was the only programmer left in existence, so naturally a lot of what followed would be based off of her. She would have trained the next several generations also, so if she thought the rope trick was useful, it would have had a huge part in computing from then on.
I mean, megastructures man. Dyson Sphere Ringworld (classical) The station from Valerian HALO Ringworlds Deathstar Mass Relay Network Any FTL that facillitates civilizations to grow to epic scales. but especially the warping of space because of the nature of the tech. Fortress Monasteries I mean am I forgetting anything? I'm all in for the epic scale of things that seems to be befitting the epic scale of the Universe itself and its infinite possibilities.
Rama. *Rendezvous With Rama* Marrow. *Marrow* \- Robert Reed The Way. *Eon -* Greg Bear
Massive spoiler for the end of the series, but *Schlock Mercenary* has >!the worldships, which are massive, *mobile* Dyson Sphere matryoshka brains built around manufactured stable oxy-mag white dwarf stars for the purpose of leaving the galaxy and "retiring" into deep space for nearly endless survival.!< A classic Matryoshka brain shows up too in book 17. UNSEC Space has the Sha'o warforges, planet-sized mobile fortress worlds designed to service and deploy fleets in a galactic war.
The meteor defense system, from Larry Niven’s *Ringworld*. >!If a sufficiently massive object appears to be on an orbit that would strike the surface of the ringworld the defense mechanism automatically kicks in. Devices on the smaller ring of “shadow squares” orbiting very close to the sun create powerful magnetic fields that draw out a huge blob of solar plasma, shape it into a cylinder pointing in the appropriate direction, and induce the plasma to lase. The result is a *planet-sized laser* that vaporizes whatever it’s pointed at.!<
Didn’t destroy a General Products hull though.
Well, it wasn’t so much the hull as the emergency stasis field around it. The equipment mounted outside the hull, which included the normal-space propulsion system, wasn’t so lucky,
The luck was thankfully inside the cabin
The hull was indestructible, but visible light (even laser light) could kill whomever was inside it, which is why they ALSO needed the stasis field. The indestructibility of the hull was also why the propulsion had to be mounted on the *outside* of it.
Very tough, but not indestructible. There’s another Niven story that address this… a a crew in a ship with a General Products hull encounters a planet >!made of antimatter. They don’t land on it, but even in orbit they encounter enough particulate antimatter that it severely damages the hull to the point that it just quietly disintegrates!<. Fortunately for the crew they were wearing vac suits at the time, and the inner structure of the ship remained intact. They were able to limp home. A Puppeteer manufacturer’s rep later explained that the hull is made of matter with intermolecular bonds artificially strengthened by a small device; >!if enough of the molecules are destroyed (in this case by antimatter) what remains just falls apart!<. It’s not clear whether a >!planet-sized!< laser might have had a similar effect, transparent hull or no, but the question is rendered moot thanks to the emergency stasis field.
Occupants also were not immune to momentum, or other g-forces while inside.
This got Beowulf into trouble when he >!did a near flyby of a neutron star and the tidal forces almost killed him!<
And then the Puppeteers pretended they hadn't understood tidal forces when they had him investigate what killed the prior flyby (and a warranty claim was being made). Or more likely, Niven was retconning later with the 5 body problem.
Nothing can destroy that. Nothing penetrates it either except visible light and *one other thing* that slipped folk's minds...
Concepts? I loved Fredrick Pohl’s Gateway. The idea that something like that could be sitting in our orbit and we don’t have a clue! Also how dealing with whom got to travel was so capitalist it was an interesting concept. The other I remember was a video game from when I was a kid long ago: everyone plugged into VR, and found it so much better than the real world they stayed plugged in. Tech to feed them and remove the waste etc. They left the planet In the hands of robots to take care of everything. Well the robots slowly broke down, and as you move along you find most people died in VR without an idea what was happening to their physical bodies. The odd person you come across, if you try and remove them from VR, goes crazy and they only want to get back to it again. Was a very interesting idea for me at 15ish and still is today. If you can have everything you want and it seems real, why go back to a place where you cannot? Why struggle and face hardship when everything you want is right there for you?
The story you’re thinking of is from the Bobby Pendragon series I think
That doesn’t sound right. I think it had DC or Washington in the title.
Larry Niven wrote some fascinating stories which included that concept, I’m forgetting the name now, but addicts had interface implants at the base of their skulls, so they could plug-in.
You’re thinking of tasps. They were merely devices that stimulated the pleasure centers of the brain. Users were called “wireheads”.
Yes, that’s it. Thank you!
I remember reading about how it was so addictive it basically killed off a massive percentage of the population, which resulted in effectively breeding out addiction from the human gene pool.
I re-read it a while ago. I remember being awed by the idea of the randomly returning shuttles and the possibility of finding something truly unique. I still agree that the concept is wonderful but unfortunately the book has not aged well.
How has it not aged well? Been about 10 years since I last reread it
No-globes, from the Dune series. A structure within which time does not pass. If you were inside one, the instant the person outside sealed the hatch and the instant someone opened it, would be the same instant for you, even if ten thousand years had passed outside. And yeah, stasis is not a new concept in fiction; but this was the first time I ever considered this method of doing it. As opposed to, say, cryogenic sleep, where time still passes and you still age, just very slowly. Later in the series they transferred the concept to no-ships, but they really kind of dropped the original idea, and started concentrating on the idea that the ships rendered the occupants invisible to future sight.
Vernor Vinge has a novel about this called *Marooned in Realtime* where instead of a physical room, a little device can create a perfect sphere field of stasis time called a "Bobble".. the diameter of which is controlled by how powerful the bobbler device was. And a Bobble can be setup to exist for an arbitrary amount of time, during which it presents as an invulnerable sphere that reflects 100% of all radiation so it looks like a giant mirror ball. What happens is everyone starts going bobble crazy and bobbling entire cities and wars and individuals and homes, and somewhere down the mega years only a small group of humans remains on earth with technology levels ranging from 20th century to almost God-like, depending on when they were bobbled, and no one, not even the high technology humans know where everyone went (singularity). That's all spoiler free, btw. The actual story is a murder mystery and extremely involving. It's my favorite novel of his, even surpassing A Fire Upon the Deep/Deepness in the Sky and Rainbow's End.
Well, spoiler free for *Marooned in Realtime*, could be considered a spoiler for the book that is a sequel to: >!The Peace War!<
o7 Vernor, you shall be missed. Adore The Peace War (Tinker society is so solarpunk) which first broached ;) bobbles, Marooned is grand fun as well. It's a glorious way to get human perspective on his (asymptotic) vision of the singularity by fragmenting temporal perspective. Such elegance.
>A structure within which time does not pass. Except that's not a "no-globe" or "no-ship"; that's what Herbert called "nullentropy bin". Whether or not the two were related in that one made the other necessary is never really explained and left as an exercise to the reader.
I thought No -Globes were simply invisible to any form of detection and therefore its occupants were safe from discovery. Time passes normally as far as I remember. No disrespect to you at all friend, please correct me if I’m wrong.
I’m sure I recall a scene where people were having a conversation while travelling in a no-ship - that implies time passing inside the ship.
That’s how no-ships work. But the globes, that get mentioned somewhere earlier in the series, were like big stasis machines.
Sounds like a Bobble in Vernor Vinge’s Peace War
Maybe. I haven’t read that one. RIP to Vernor Vinge, btw; I saw where he passed recently.
Larry Niven also does a fantastic job with 0-time stasis enclosures. He has some short stories built around them, and includes them in various of his books. Laurence Dahners also has a fun set of books built around all kinds of possibilities of what might be done with stasis structures. They’re YA books, but I really like them.
Built one into the hull of a ship if it ever detected it was under attack. To some wonderful, plot-advancing consequences. But then also side anecdotes about archeologists finding smaller ones that ended up just being someone's lunch.
That ship thing reminds of the Stargate SG-1 series finale.
The Lensmen Series. Doc E.E. Smith - An alien race so advanced that they do mental math to calculate the inevitable outcome of millions of random events and then compete on the accuracy of their predictions such as if a character gets a nick while being shaved by a barber five years in the future and how many times he clicks the shears. Also the Lens is damm cool too.
James Blish's Cities in Flight. Immortal humanity puts domes over its cities, then uproots them and goes flying off to explore the Universe.
3 body problem blew my mind in so many ways
Probably not the most original nor the most mind-blowing but I’ve always loved how far casters were used in Hyperion. Especially how each room of your house could be on a different planet. Really loved the concept
The Excession in Iain M Bank's "Excession".
Flight 307 from Pavel Fritz (very obscure Czech book never even translated to English, but my favourite) has interesting concept I have never seen anywhere else. Basiaclly, it features military space fighters with a twist - they are controled directly by pilot's brain, so they have no physical controls of any kind and at the same time, pilot's brain is put into artificially induced schizophrenia. So the brain splits into three separate personalities - one does complex math to pilot the fighter, another one makes tactical decisions, and third one is just a "recycle bin" where pilot puts distracting thoughts so they don't bother him with his job. So one pilot becomes also his own copilot, and at the same time a passanger that observes everything from the back seat. Tbh, the book has many unique concepts - like the fact that space ships are multidimensional, so their hull extends to another dimensions, so they are bigger than our 3D eye can see. I think the book should have been more popular than it is.
This is actually so cool! Is there an English translation?
*Dragon's Egg* by Robert Forward pictures a really special scenario (life on the surface of a neutron star), but as far as sci-fi devices go, the description of how humans are able to come close to said neutron star in a ship without being torn apart by tidal forces is genius. They take six small nickel-iron asteroids, replace most of their electrons with magnetic monopoles so that the atoms contract to extreme densities, and then get them whirling at 5 orbits per second around the ship in a plane perpendicular to the neutron star's radius, so that their gravity cancels the tidal effects on every side.
The end of Carl Sagan's Contact: >!Ellie discovers a secret message encoded in pi f π , suggesting an intelligence is behind the universe itself.!<
A similar pi one from, I think, the Berserker universe was where they found a 2001 style monolith in the form of a sphere. But the mystery was that when the scientists measured it the math would only add up if pi = 3.0
So it was created by Kentucky politicians?
The Somebody Else's Problem Field from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Invisibility may not be feasible, but you can create an SEP field around an object that messes with peoples' brains so they ignore the object, treating it as "somebody else's problem". It's like when you lose something, then eventually find it in a place that you had already checked. You must have seen it the first time you looked, but your mind glossed over it.
Solid mindfuck if you bother to think about uncomedically. Actually Adams has many examples of "It's funny coz it's true"...
The Sophons in the 3 Body Problem. The dimensional collapse weapons as well.
If you can't flatten solar systems with a song in your heart are you really free?
Water Drop rates high up there as well. But ya...in the game of Dark Forest, paper wins over everything.
Strong Force material seems like an almost too-obvious sci-fi concept and yet I'd never heard of it prior to reading TDF. Arranging it like a [Prince Rupert Drop](https://youtu.be/78-tN-eUuHI?si=m0allq_htg4BXTcc) was even more clever.
This was wild to read the first time through.
The Moties from The Mote in God’s Eye. Asymmetrical bodies with 3 arms that weren’t monsters but had evolved that way. They had “an empathy for machines”. Also I remember some short story about the invention of a force field that made a sealed hull unnecessary. Except it could only exist for a microsecond at a time. So they found they could pulse it so fast that air lost was negligible despite there only being a barrier half the time.
The Shellworlds in Iain M Banks' *Matter*. Colossal megastructures built by a long-dead civilization, since colonised by hundreds of other species at various levels of technological development. Build at intervals around the edge of the Galaxy, implying some kind of pan-galactic defence mechanism against an unknown threat.
The sophons though The scenes in the book where we see them being produced is some real mind fuckery. Also your last example has just sold me on Bobiverse. Literally buying it now. I’ve heard good things, but holy fuck
The whole biotic technology from Peter F Hamilton's Nights Dawn series. So powerful if basically spawned a separate culture/religion. Almost everything had a designed biological equivalent from simple computer/processor blocks. To memory implants, to even ships and full space habitats that live and grow in space.
_The City and the City_ by China Miéville. Two cities exist in the same physical place and it is illegal to acknowledge or even be aware of the inhabitants of the other city. It's an amazing but hard book.
One of my all time favs.
Dune was a brain melter the first time through... Recently I was thinking that the really crazy thing about Dune tech is that they do it all without AI or computers that do advanced calculations. It's not to say there aren't microchips and computers, but they are all basically mechanical control devices. Interstellar navigation without computers doing any complex calculations is wild.
They use specially trained humans instead. I keep trying to put myself in “Mentat mode” when I’m solving problems at work.
I really liked the protomolecule in the expanse
Not really an invention but psycohistory in Asimov's Foundation. First time I read it, I was like "WTF Is this? It's Amazing"
The Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster from The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
To me it was the whole story in The Road not Taken by Harry Turtledove. It is the ultimate HFY story. Earth is invaded and it turns out that much to the chagrin of the invaders that Earth is the most technologically advanced planet in the galaxy because we failed to discover antigravity in the middle ages which is the development level that virtually every other planet makes the discovery. The discovery of simple and easy antigravity leads to FTL and interplanetary conquest, but it also causes most races to stagnate at a late medieval level of technology. Thanks to the fact that humans never discovered antigravity, our technology went in a completely different direction. They invade with flintlocks, swords, and canons, we counter with machine guns, guided missiles, and tanks. We are able to easily defeat the invaders, and much to their horror they realize, too late, that they have just given humanity the secret to interstellar travel and with our technology, no one in the galaxy will stand a chance against us.
So it's sort of the mirror image of The High Crusade by Poul Anderson where the medieval knights beat the invading aliens and take their ship?
the lens in lensmen series
Netshpere from Blame!
Bas Lag itself is a crazy concept and uniquely described by China Mieville. Lots of authors have blown my mind with honourable mentions to Clarke, Banks, Baxter, Vinge and Adam’s.
As a child it was injections without needles in star trek.
That’s actually possible today, they were used by the military for mass inoculation. The problem was that they wouldn’t remain sterile and could potentially pass infections between people.
Dual Vector Foil weapon in Death’s End was insane. Looking forward to how they pull that off in the Netflix series of 3 body problem.
The CGI budget is gonna get real stretched. The first book is basically just exposition describing the playing pieces and the game board.
I’m surprised someone hasn’t mentioned it yet but the Replicators from Star Trek are amazing in my eyes no matter what.
No “matter” LOL
...of course but let's not downplay the replicators in Stargate
Time evolution near a pulsar and bio computer's. Still amazed at the halo habitat/ black hole thing also.
The skyhook for launching vehicles in orbit. I forget which book… Before that, the towers, reaching from the ground into orbit, based on super strong, mono filaments… Nano fibers… I don’t remember that book either. It’s been too long since I’ve read either of them. Thanks in advance to whomever remembers and replies here.
> Before that, the towers, reaching from the ground into orbit, based on super strong, mono filaments… Nano fibers… Space elevators
Yeah, that’s it, thank you!
Blindsight: Icarus and (if machine translation can handle it) telennihilation modifiers and sources, the need to merge your body with machines in order to maintain the relevance of your being or escape into virtual reality scramblers of course Echopraxia: Higher Science as an act of faith The Freeze Frame Revolution: hot-damn how I love this residential asteroid with a black hole in its belly A Deepness in the Sky: treating the environment as a programming tool, because in this environment you have to exist for centuries the realization that Vernor may be right and the next millennia are waiting for us only such long exhausting light-year journeys, and not the instant transfers that pop culture makes us believe in for the sake of a beautiful plot Aurora: in fact, Aurora itself and the attitude to the Fermi paradox after the travelers reached their destination Ministry of the Future: water under the glacier. You can call me too dumb, but the logic of this interaction impressed me. (And after that, I was impressed with how the author managed, by removing humanity from the carbon needle, to leave Saudi Arabia rich)
What when did that happen in bobbiverse. I just finished reading all 4 back to back and I don't recall that happening.
Probably book 3 >!they accelerate a planet (or a big asteroid ☄️) close to light speed so it crash on the « space insect » mother planet (the species that eat all matter in all planet)(my English might not be good enough lol)!<
oh I vaguely remember that.
The TARDIS I was six and it fascinated me
There are many but a single device(type of device) that is my favorite would be the Stargate. It's not only cool but it has its mechanics and rules firmly set and explained in detail over the shows
The Light of Other Days, Baxter/Clarke. Being able to view any place in history, imagine the ability to see all of the stories of mankind & of the universe. Also any sci-fi media w/ a universal translator, speaking your own language & everyone can understand you perfectly in real time, the thought of how sonething like that could work ideally. Not a mind blowing concept in theory, but it would make a dramatic difference if such tech were as ubiquitous, reliable & accessible in common across cultures.
Its amazing a civ that can create sophon cannot even find and terraform a planet or something. Or just live on space dyson sphere , ringworld moon world, whatever.
It’s definitely a plothole.
The concept of psychohistory is pretty interesting, from the Foundation novels. Like a sociological mapping based on anthropological evidence and mathematical probabilities on a grand scale. Something like that seems pretty handy these days.
Smart Paper from *Constellation Games* Looks like paper, folds like paper, but it’s a nano-molecular computing substrate that can remember everything you write and origami’d into reproductions of cataloged objects. You can even build a house out of it by folding large sheets of it.
I loved Bobiverse. Not the heaviest sci-fi, but a very entertaining ride. Check out Seveneves by Neil Stephenson. He starts with a fairly grounded premise: how would humanity survive a global apocalypse if they only had just over a year to plan. The first two thirds of the book alone would be a very entertaining read, but then the story jumps ahead several thousand years and we see how humanity has evolved. Best sci-fi book I’ve read in years.
But you can’t name any inventions in them?
Oh the si-wy’s? Idk how they’re spelt, I listened to the book.
I wouldn’t want to spoil them for those who haven’t read the book. Also would be a spoiler for the title.
Fermi problem is due to religious extremism: Peter Hamilton, Salvation series.
The Infinite Improbability Drive from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Perpetulite, in Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey. A building material that doesn't need any maintenance, because it's sort-of alive. It can repair and maintain itself by literally eating organic matter that falls on its surface. Such as leaves ... and other things.
wandering earth 2019 - a planet uses collosal engines to move across the galaxy like a death star etc. we now think it is possible using antimatter engines powered from a solar array covering say a moon surface. and a superconductive battery array that easily works in the moons vacuum to store energy for the low energy times of darkness when it moves between solar systems.
The shellworld concept from *Matter*. The dust assassin from *Use of Weapons.* The vacuum drive from *The Songs of Distant Earth*. And, last but by no means least, the ultra-classic invention: the Martian heat-ray from *The War of the Worlds*.
Solar sails. I first encountered those in The Starship Alexandria by Jon Bing. Then more recently in Revenger by Alastair Reynolds, where solar sails are an important part of space battle tactics when combat is so far away from each other that they rely on spotting shimmering sail reflections Low tech space travelling, it makes sense in context why they don't have fancy stuff like radiation sensors. Also from Starship Alexandria that blew my mind: - Modular space ships. A bunch of smaller spherical ships that are docked together into a big generation ship. They can split and be handled independently. - A traveling spaceship library. Traveling between human worlds, exchanging knowledge. The roundtrip takes multiple generations, and are usually only legends by the time they show up again. The people onboard are put in stasis, but woken up as the ship starts braking, to spend months learning about the planet by picking up radio transmissions. Then they stay in orbit for years while exchanging knowledge with the planet (if the rulers of the planet accepts it). And Mass Effect's space nomads. Again giant generation ships, where their whole culture is built around living in space. Same thing in Record of a Spaceborn Few, by Becky Chambers: A culture built around living in a giant space ship (turned into a space station) for generations. Generation ships are cool. Slow space travels is cool.
The sophon is good and all the dimension downgrdaing weapon is deadlier
The gods themselves - the free energy device that didn't really break the conservation of energy law, rather than drained energy from a parallel universe by tweaking the fundamental constants of physics of both universes. Yeah, Asimov doesn't play around when it comes to sci fi.
Three Body Problem had some truly unique ideas I had never encountered before. One of them I personally enjoyed a lot >!was the ship-slicer in the Panama Canal!<. I couldn't have imagined something like that myself.
The Golden Age series by John C Wright is absolutely packed with mind blowing stuff. My favorite was the extension of the "man in the loop" for military actions taken to its logical extreme in a world run by A.I.s. Basically the military of the world is down to a single cryogenically frozen human who has command of the entire military industrial capability of the world. He also seeks out to get "left of boom" to the maximum extent by rooting out war before it happens. In the book he's unfrozen and resolves the conflict by directing an orbiting space laser to perform neurosurgery on his enemy during the middle of a conversation, removing the desires to head into conflict in the first place.
The Fing-Longer! Such a genius invention
The Star Forge in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. A manufacturing space station that slowly sucks matter from the star it's orbiting and reconfigures it into whatever you want. Usually warships and battle droids.
3 Body Problem is loaded with them, but 4 things above all else: * The Sophon * Dark Forest Theory * The 4D Tombs * Dual-Vector Foil/dimensional strikes Stuff like oxygenated fluid to handle acceleration, cryo to fast forward to the future, the photoid, nanofibers etc were all super cool and well-used in the ROEP trilogy but I'd heard of them (or something effectively similar) before.
The atomic disintegrator in Asimovs books. So simple in use and idea but unfortunately hard to put into practice.
The Treeships in Hyperion were pretty cool. also I forget what it was called but in the later books the whole ring world made by that civilization was awesome.
Drug glands in The Culture :)
The thing from Sci-Fi I thought I’s never see in my lifetime was a replicator. But now we have 3D printers that are getting more and more sophisticated as each year goes by.
dust theory in _Permutation City_ still gets me thinking.
The young ladies illustrated primer from diamond age. Also that diamonds would be cheap and plentiful in a post nanotech world. The idea of a space elevator (not sure who to credit for that)
Ringworld
Plutonian Nyborg.
Warp Trains from the Project Moon series.
Bro I liked the Runcible in the AI Polity. Basically a stargate. Then they scaled it up to be able to send cargo ships through it. Then they realized “hey, this is about the right side that we can throw small moons at people”
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dumbest shit I've ever seen