That’s interesting. I can’t think of a story that uses an alien generation ship to bring the aliens to Earth. I assume they must exist. Can you point me to any?
What “world” are you referring to?
Niven and Pournelle’s Footfall, for one (well, a combination of generations and coldsleep, with two corresponding rival factions among the aliens). And Greg Bear’s The Forge of God is probably another, in that the aliens are slower-than-light, but it’s unclear whether they’re going through generations, in suspended animation, or just long-lived and patient.
The problem with characters and their conflicts is that in isolation from the world, it’s just the same thing over and over again, i.e., soap opera.
Yes, we need characters, but we also need a world that forms and challenges characters.
In my head, no more than that used by fish to generate electric currents, is that wrong?
I’ve never seen the movie with the aliens in South Africa, but there were a lot of aliens. Could that be one? I can’t think of any examples in written sf.
Ours. Look how often linear extrapolation fails due to unexpected discoveries and inventions. Space travel alas is an area where this didn’t happen, but microelectronics is a place where it did. Verne would hardly be shocked by Apollo, but Beethoven would have been very shocked by an iPod.
Right. and how much would it take to broadcast a reasonably high bandwidth signal over reasonably large distances? And where’s the antenna?
I’m not denying that we might be able to build something to do pattern recognition on our neural impulses and transmit the message to a receiver which let’s someone else hear them. (Though from what I’ve read it is very difficult). But that’s not psi.
Most of the sf stories about psi I’ve read do not have the transmission being done in Morse Code to save power.
I did say " some sorts of Psi " - basically, I can envision engineering extra senses that work with electric fields. I agree that sharing actual thoughts or the kind of long-range coms is not likely while still retaining any kind of animal physiology. “Psi” encompasses more than just telepathy, though - I was thinking more ESP.
This is a good example of hardness = better: Vernor Vinge had a story about animals that telepathically share a mind. But rather than simply leave the mechanism unexplained, he uses supersonic sound to carry the telepathic information. This immediately leads to all kinds of limitations that can be used as plot points, unlike the magic kind of telepathy that works or doesn’t work between species and over distances as the plot demands.
By the way, we already have instant non-vocal communication over great distances today: text messaging. The only thing left to do is directly hooking up our cell phones to our brains.
Another aspect of telepathy is the inability to hide the truth. We also sort of have that today with truth serum. The only thing we lack is directly transferring images from mind to mind.
That’s an interesting question. stories where a ship full of aliens arrive generally don’t tell you if it’s a generation ship, and it probably isn’t – District Nine (mentioned above, but not by name), Alien Nation, and the alien ships in Harry Turtledove’s World War series I suppose could be generation ships, but things said or referred to in the respective pieces suggest to me that they are not.
Generation ship stories are usually about what happens en route. In an aliens-come-to-Earth story we generally don’t care about that. The story is about what happens now that the aliens are here, so the aliens have FTL or space warps or whatever.
The closest thing to an alien Generation Ship story that I can think of is Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, which isn’t really a classic Generation Shiop story, but you can, I’m sure, see why I think it related. (We will pass over in amiable silence the sequels to “Rama”)
Interestingly, the aliens in “Rama” don’t actually arrive at Earth - if fact, they have no interest in Earth whatsoever: they are just passing through, still “en route” to wherever they are going. So that fits with the generation ship type plot.
Telepathy in humans is pretty much fantasy, since we don’t have the appropriate hardware that would be needed for it. It’s not at all implausible to imagine some alien race that’s telepathic among themselves, though.
Cal, did you miss my mention of Footfall for an alien generation ship?
Sure, but that world can take the place of Westeros, the CoDominium, Middle Earth, WWII, Oceania, ancient Rome, present day, etc…
That’s my point- there’s ***science ***fiction, which sort of centers around the science and technology, sometimes to the detriment of the story and characters, and there’s ***science fiction ***, which is essentially speculative fiction where the speculative part is staged by technological or scientific means by the writer.
You can have speculative fiction that’s totally unscientific that does the same character formation and challenges; historical “what-if” fiction is an example. You could easily write a book that takes the “what if John Wilkes Booth missed?” or “What if Mark Antony had actually intercepted Caesar prior to the assassination?” There’s no science or technology involved, but plenty of fertile ground for a writer, and are every bit as fantastic and speculative as something like Niven’s “The Smoke Ring”.
I’m going to say, “No.”
There are many examples of excellent “hard” SF that I find very compelling, but I the fact that it is “hard” does not make it inherently more enjoyable or interesting. The hardness is mostly a matter of setting and has very little to do with whether the characters and their conflicts are well-written.
By way of example, the various “Star Trek” series often have excellent character-centric stories despite the setting being “mushy” at best. And, of course, “Star Wars” is extremely enjoyable and fun to watch despite the fact that it is a space fantasy and contains no hard science whatsoever.
Yes, I did. Sorry about that.
After I wrote that, I remembered that the mother ship in Independence Day was probably a generation ship - it was big enough, and I vaguely remember that it did not have ftl capability.
But Footfall and all the other examples mentioned besides Rama are focused on Earth, and don’t have many scenes inside the ship. None have the common trope of the passengers forgetting where they are from the aliens point of view.
As for the sequels to Rama, I’m never amiable when I think about how much time I wasted reading them.
Rama did immediately pop to mind, although the point there was that the ship itself was alien-free - the biots notwithstanding. And that probably made the book better.
Never read the sequels. Are those the start of unnecessary awful repetitions of the original just for money?
Well, sure, any science fiction story written by humans about aliens visiting us are going to be focused on Earth.
The Alien Nation novel The Day of Descent actually takes place initially on the ship holding the Tenctonese. It’s a generation ship in the sense that generations of Tenctonese are born, live, labor, and die aboard it but given that the oldest aboard still remember Tencton, implying that the trip from there to Earth took place within their lifetime (approximately twice that of a Human), also implies either some form of FTL or NAFTL with a lot of time dilation. It’s unclear because the Tenctonese’s captors don’t communicate with them and while the Tenctonese do have maintenance and repair duties (George Francisco was involved in hull maintenance and repair) it’s also clear none of them know or understand the interstellar transportation technology.
None of that appears in the TV show.
However, there is an episode where an Overseer from the still-captive Tenctonese off Earth arrives to see what happened to the ship that landed on Earth. The travel times involved seem to indicate FTL of some sort, unless Earth happens to be close to one of the overlord/owner races flight lanes.
Regardless - FTL is not a main focus of any of the Alien Nation stories.
A related situation shows up in the phenomenal hard-as-nails SF The Three-Body Problem, and its sequel The Dark Forest. I’m gonna completely spoil them in the box below, so you’ve been warned.
The alien ship is not precisely generational, since the aliens can go into a sort of hibernation; but it takes 400 years to travel the four light-years to earth. For almost all that time, humans know that the generation ship is coming, and some humans are in communication with the ship, either to help or to hinder the aliens aboard it. In the end, the alien ship never even enters our solar system, due to the clever machinations of one of the main characters.
When I think of bad SF, I think of Weber, and some terrible book I read by him that was basically ordinance porn: description after description of bore size, caliber, explosive load, missile speed, PSI of explosions, blah blah blah. The actual plot was ludicrous beyond words, as if someone thought Red Dawn were too realistic. Much of it was scientifically plausible, but it was an awful, awful read.
You’re going to have to be more specific. That description could be half of Weber’s output! 