clacke
"He moved toward the giant vision screen with a graceful flowing motion that no mere biped could ever hope to imitate."
I love a scifi story where aliens are more alien!
"Rescue Party", a short story by Arthur C. Clarke
Earth is doomed to death and aliens come to find out about humans, find some human artifacts, and hopefully find some still-alive humans, before the planet is consumed by the Sun.
Richard Hendricks
@clacke Wait, what the heck am I thinking?!? *This* is my favorite part:
"The engineers, as usual, made a tremendous fuss. Again as usual, they did the job in half the time they had dismissed as being absolutely impossible."
Richard Hendricks
@clacke My favorite part is this.
"But Klarten was not impressed. The first radio sets his race had built were now fossilized in strata a thousand million years old. Man, who had possessed electrical machines for only a few centuries, could not compete with those who had known them for half the lifetime of the Earth."
It's a little dated and incorrect, but just imagining aliens whose vacuum tubes and transistors were fossils in rocks a billion years old. 🤯
clacke
hypolite
@clacke @hendric It had been a long time since I read any science-fiction, so I gave this short story a try, and I'm starting to understand why.
I'm not fascinated (anymore?) by techno-babble like "Ultimate Overdrive" and "paralyzers", tentacled beings or massive scales being hand-waved (like "Lords of the Universe" or extraterrestrial beings measuring time in "years"?). More generally, I was also frustrated by the descriptions which turned out to be very different in the author's mind than in mine, resulting in poor understanding of the implications of the characters' actions.
I was left with the feeling this text was both too childish and too clever for me, the worst possible outcome, probably. Thanks for sharing, though!
clacke
@hypolite Have you read or watched The Expanse? It's not about playing with shiny gizmos and funny words at all.
It's speculative fiction set in the future. It introduces two fantastical elements, one to make the story possible and one to be the McGuffin that drives the story. Apart from that it's plausible future history, with a focus on colonialism, capitalism and the struggle against them. Strong character writing, political struggle and competence porn.
hypolite
Richard Hendricks
@hypolite @clacke Another great show, grandparent to The Expanse, is Babylon 5. Instead of future humans and aliens living in perfect harmony, they're a bunch of squabbling species trying to work things out. Sci-fi is a backdrop, never the focus - I cant recall a single technobabble solution the whole series. The story is about people - sure they be green skinned and red-eyed, but we can mostly understand their motivations. Has some of the best character arcs of any TV show.
clacke
Richard Hendricks
@hypolite @clacke Olde magics. This is one of the first stories written 80 years ago by a Titan of "hard" science fiction, A C Clarke. He commmented that he refuses to reread it:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_Party
While it may be jarring to read "years" instead of 'centons' or whatever, I think the story doesnt have as much technobabble as the average ST: TNG episode, and leaves the story for the chars to explore.
The best Sci-fi holds a mirror up to us, and I think this story does that well.
clacke
@hypolite Yeah, sorry, I just don't have the issue you do and I don't know how to have that issue. If someone translates a US English book or article into Swedish, I expect units to be metric approximations, unless there is something critical to the narrative that requires them to be in US units or to be precise.
In-universe some space squid might be saying "ssshshhhd zvdhdvv egeyh 144 rirjek", but we're reading it as "see you in an hour", and that's that.
hypolite
clacke
@hypolite Haha, I was equally surprised that you didn't like Earthly units after you said you didn't like gizmos and technobabble.
We all have our complex preferences that may be difficult for others to understand. 😊
hypolite
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