Creeepy!! Thanks!
I’m not sure, to tell the truth. it’s been a long time since I read the book, just that central idea stuck with me.
Well, the Singers are exactly the sort of nifty idea I was thinking about. A writer takes a twist on an idea and creates something surprising that has a logic all its own, based on the central theme. So … win! A vaguely group mind kind of thing with the Singers manifesting some sort of zeitgeist through their singing that is instinctively recognized by others who share the zeitgeist. Has a kind of authentic feel of its own.
So, what was the Bloater Drive? What made it a Nifty Idea? I don’t remember seeing any explanation of it.
Furniture that sheds on itself? I think not! 
Another one I thought of was an aspect of Larry Niven’s kzinti who show up in several of his novels. The kzin themselves, large aggressive catlike alients, are a Big Idea I think, I’ve noticed a lot of copies of them in SF. But the nifty touch is that among the kzinti, those who serve as ambassadors to other intelligent races are not important, respected kzin, but low status, bedraggled, dare I say, mangy individuals. Their title among the kzinti explains it all: “Speaker to Animals.” The kzinti regard all other races as lesser beings (even humans who have kicked their asses thoroughly in several wars … especially humans, actually). But to the kzinti the low status of aliens is attached to those who deal with them, hence, “Speaker to Animals.” Nifty touch!
When I was like 12 or something, I used to get my hands on old copies of that magazine by Isaac Asimov. In those magazines (Sci-Fi and Fantasy? Something like that) he would write articles about his conjectures about various sci-fi topics. The one that blew me away was his idea of hyperspace. For us, it takes a lot of energy to get to light speed. The closer we get, the more energy we use. However, if we could ever achieve it, we would enter another dimension where the laws of physics were reversed. In this other dimension, it takes a lot of energy to slow down to light speed, and traveling long distances takes less energy. Therefore, with a powerful enough energy source, we could enter hyperspace, speed to our destination, and re-emerge a very far distance from where we started.
In Redshift Rendezvous, they have a cool FTL drive. The spherical ship exists in several layers of hyperspace which have a much lower speed of light than normal space, but at the same time hyperspace is much “smaller” than normal space; a meter traveled there is a great distance traveled here. So they travel faster than light between stars by traveling extremely slowly in hyperspace. As a bonus, relativistic effects are easily noticeable onboard the ship, increasing as you go farther inside it (and deeper into hyperspace). So, for example, far enough towards the center of the ship throwing a punch will cause your fist to flatten as it approaches lightspeed, and if you run no one can see you coming because you arrive just behind the light of your image. Plus of course there’s all sorts of visual effects like redshift and blueshift.
Timoty Zahn’s Cascade Point had an interesting FTL drive that involved travel into “cascade points” where you would see lines of of images of yourself extending out into the distance in different directions. Each slightly different, the differences increasing the farther they get from you - they are actually images of you as you are in alternate universes. So you can see other versions of yourself where you made different choices - or gaps in the array of images where you died.
I recall that one; specifically, the scene where the protagonist found that the cats were “playing with mice” like normal cats, except that they’d built a miniature set of medieval-style torture equipment to do so.
<twitch> STEEL General!
But yeah, that’s a great scene. And in the meantime, the “horse” Bronze is striking the ground with its hooves, each blow doubling in strength…until the blows are laying waste to the planet.
Everyone should read his short story Light of Other Days. Beautiful story, and the slow glass makes it work.
I hosted a short story party back in the 70s, where friends would sip wine and take turns reading a favorite story in front of the fire. While some people felt they had to read a literary work, I usually read a quirky story. This was the favorite (esp. with non-Sci Fi fans) from that winter.
Sorry. I haven’t read the whole thread yet-- so pardon the repeat (if this one).
I thought we *did *communicate by radio communication. We encode signals in our brains, then with our voice box generate modulated vibrations–which are signals on the EM spectrum–those signals travel through the air, and then are picked up by any properly tuned receivers (ears) that are in range of the signal. And then it’s decoded in a human brain.
Isn’t that radio communication? (I admit I don’t know if ‘radio’ only refers to a certain band of frequencies on the EM spectrum–so I could be totally off.)
No, sound is not a signal on the EM spectrum, it is a completely distinct phenomenon. Sound is an example of a Mechanical wave. Though EM phenomena are also described as waves, that doesn’t mean that they’re the same thing as mechanical waves either - you could think of sound as being waves of matter, specifically air, while radio or other EM signals are waves of energy. Radio waves can move through the air, but they’re not waves of air as they can also be broadcast where there is no air.
Does that make sense? Of course, we do have organs that can send and receive EM signals. The receiving organs are very sophisticated, known as eyes, while the sending organs such as the skin are relatively much cruder. They’re not as high-bandwidth a method of communication between people as sound is, but some people think very highly of this ‘body language’ stuff. But the eyes do work on a very different EM frequency from radio, which is a vague term referring to reasonably long-wavelength signals.
Does that clear anything up?
My eyes bugged out when I saw it too. I read it in elementary school, and other than the central premise I don’t remember a thing about it. I think it’s a sort of romance?
Me five, please.
Incidentally, about that “smell-vision” idea, there’s a satellite called IBEX that uses basically that principle to map out the composition and magnetic fields at the edge of the Solar System.
The spoiler was posted back on page 1.
We’ve had the ability to set the default page length to 200 posts for about five years. Why are people still stuck at 50?
Because some folks prefer it that way? I’d rather not look through hundreds of posts to try to figure out where I left off in a thread.
As I recall, the Bloater Drive made the spaceship and it’s contents and occupants enormously larger.
Once the ship was how ever many light years across it needed to be to encompass the destination planet, it shrunk again, only this time it shrunk down to the spot the crew wanted to land on the destination planet.
Neat idea if someone could get it to work.
(no offense to the Dune fans, but I think this is more plausible than Spice)
In Larry Niven’s World out of Time, the hero encounters some rather sophisticated teleportation technology.
It has the obvious applications for transportation, of course.
It has less-obvious applications for medicine. (Removing poisons from the inside of your body’s cells.)
And on a completely mundane level, it provides for a waterless toilet, with a self-cleaning backside-wiper.
I’ve always liked the concept of baby-magic from Robin McKinley’s Spindle’s End. Baby-magic is the wild, uncontrollable magic that very small children (I believe under the age of five) might have if they’re going to be powerful when they’re older. So, since most people have no idea what to do when their toddler-to-preschooler starts doing magic, they send the child off to a witch who can help them learn how to control themselves. Despite there being a lot of stories about people who have had magic since birth, it’s the first story I’ve read that actually touches on the difficulties that would exist if tiny children could do magic.
I recall a short sci-fi story named The Forest of Time. In it, it turns out that alternate universes are not only real, not only is it possible to travel to them. but that everyone and everything does drift between alternate universes, constantly. Paradoxes, contradictions are not allowed, so you never actually see any provable differences; but that limit only goes as far as the precision of whatever is making the observation. So if you film or photograph something you won’t notice any changes or contradictions no matter how closely you examine the picture; but human perception and memory isn’t nearly that precise. Can’t find your car keys? Maybe you forgot where they were; or maybe you or they or both are no longer in the same universe anymore, and they are where an alternate version of you left them. Misremembered what your wife asked you to buy at the store? Maybe you didn’t remember right, or maybe that isn’t exactly the same woman you kissed goodbye this morning. And maybe your high school buddy whom you’ve just met again at the reunion really did have green eyes like you remember and not blue ones like the guy in front of you…
There’s It’s a Good Life. Which could be considered an example of why you really, really want to have those people who can teach them to control themselves…