The best supervillains
T-1000 Terminator
Film- Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
Inventor/director: James Cameron
Inspired by Philip K. Dick and A. E. van Vogt short stories, Cameron's earlier film 'the Abyss', non-Newtonian fluids, and the shape memory alloys popularized in the 1980s. A homogenous blob of flowing metal alloy (possibly including nickel and titanium) can assume any shape, surface texture, and color, including that of a fully realized human-like assassin. It can reform parts of itself into razor-sharp tools or thin transparent layers, form embedded optical, audio, and electromagnetic sense organs (probably no sense of smell), and may change color by forming tiny holographic pits the size of the wavelengths of visible light, or pseudo-molecules made of distributed charges.
It's such a good idea that I can't even explain why. Powered by heavy isotopes or isomeres or cold fusion or cavitation bubble fusion, its memory and processing network is stored in a 3-D matrix with immense redundancy. It could also form whips, balloons, and possibly exploding splatters. It uses moving electrons to scan the precise shape, texture and surface color of nearby objects, performing in moments a task it takes a multi-ton MRI the better part of an hour to accomplish at one-millionth the resolution.
A T-1000 embodies more ideas than most physics textbooks: metallurgy, phase transitions, magneto-hydrodynamics, symmetries, pressure, waves, harmonics, gradients, emergent order, plus the evolutionary concepts of product cycles and obsolescence, all implying some immense future in which mankind is barely a memory.
Also, the film's most impressive combination of special effects was the nuclear explosion of Los Angeles (a million times better than what was shown in T3).
Hannibal Lecter
Novel- The Silence of the Lambs (1988)
Author: Thomas Harris
This book was an anomaly. We may never see its like again. Some of its sentences took years to perfect. It's great in a way no other book is even good.
Of course there are other ways in which mundane-stream literature may be great, from social realism to romance to internal monologues to noir to horror to left-wing ennui, but these are completely different, and far less alien, ways. Every attempt to imitate the supervillain style of 'Silence' has failed because they didn't even try.
With an IQ approaching 300, Hannibal Lecter is consistently evil and unpredictable. Incarcerated in a subterranean cell in a Baltimore insane asylum (in memory of Poe and Mencken), he might be able to defeat both heavyweight boxing champions of the world given time to prepare. An internal teratoid who may have twice the normal number of brain cells, his mental universe is too big to fit in ordinary reality. We can only see a fraction at a time.
Pak Protectors
Novels- Larry Niven's "Known Space" universe (1960s-70s)
The suppressed adult form of humans and genetically related humanoids from other worlds, with an IQ of about 1000. One of them could be standing outside your home right now, watching a rabbit munching on a blade of grass. One minute from now, the Pak could still be watching that rabbit while holding your head in its hand. Even a weak one could easily kill the 1000 strongest men on Earth in a few minutes of hand to hand combat, if necessary to save its descendants (The very largest ones might dispatch that number of velociraptors).
SF concepts
Ringworld
A Ringworld or Niven Ring is a rotating ring (or think of it as a very short but wide cylinder) about the diameter of Earth's orbit, installed around a star. The only way to tell it's spinning is to track the moving features on its inner surface facing the star. Resembling a circular ribbon a thousand times longer than it is wide, it has to spin at about 700 kilometers per second to recreate normal gravity on its interior. It would take the mass of a small moon converted into pure energy just to generate the momentum of the ring's rotation.
The ring would have to be under immense tension to maintain its shape. Each cross-section would support the full weight of the entire object, about as heavy as Jupiter.
A vast planetary ecosystem could be established on the inner surface, with an area of several million Earths. The atmosphere and oceans would be held in place by 1000 kilometer high walls on both sides of the curving ribbon. The epic grandeur is almost unbearable.
A Ringworld is gravitationally unstable. Effectively a rigid object that was placed around a sun, one side of the ring would inevitably drift closer to the central star, until it collided. It would not really be "pulled" closer by gravity, since the pull of the opposite side of the ring cancels out. Gravity would keep the plane of the ring intersecting the star however.
Powerful thrusters would be needed to reverse this drift, or perhaps something like dark matter orbiting inside the ring structure and keeping it in place. Since we don't know anything about dark matter, that might or might not be possible.
If it was made of any known material, even pre-stressed diamond or carbon nanotubes, a Ringworld would instantly explode into a disk of fine dust radiating from the central star like an intergalactic ripple.
If a closed ribbon one billion kilometers long were to stretch less than one hundred meters in one second, the ring's diameter would increase by twenty meters (even neutron matter would stretch more than that). If it had Earth-level simulated gravity, this would be equivalent to placing the entire surface in free fall for one second. To contract back at the same rate, the Ringworld's surface gravity would then have to double for one second.
Rama
Novel- Rendezvous with Rama
Author: Arthur C. Clarke
An unfathomable logic puzzle about an uninhabited asteroid-sized rotating space cylinder on an intergalactic mission that receives uninvited human explorers while flying past the sun.
The plot is as unpredictable as logic itself. Humans are so inferior to the unseen builders they're not even pests. The majestic cylinder has been described as the first true communist society, a profoundly impersonal trillion-year plan.
The novel was described as a 'prose diagram' about things the humans can barely grasp, exposing mankind as a vanishing subset of reality. Built by aliens that have advanced beyond awareness, the Rama spacecraft may have been sent to colonize a distant dwarf galaxy.
The best part is the close flyby of the sun, and drastic course change at the end. The second to fourth 'sequel' books written by a different author are entirely unrelated and not to be compared.
Niven Evolution: Breeding for luck
In the Known Space universe (after human longevity has been achieved), the alien Puppeteers manipulate humanity to set up a birth lottery on Earth. Only the winners are allowed to have children. If some unknown, genetically transmitted trait somehow makes its owner unusually 'lucky', that trait may manifest itself even before its owner has been conceived. The winners of the birth lottery are more likely to have this mysterious luck gene. After several centuries, there will be many humans with multiple copies. Their lives will be marked by inordinate good fortune, which can then be exploited by the Puppeteers. As morbid cowards, they would never tolerate such lucky individuals among their own species.
Functional selection theory
Evolution could select on the basis of function only.
Imagine different gene complexes (with entirely different DNA) that do about the same thing. 'Impersonator genes' could spread by mimicking more popular genes.
Eventually, one of the copies will be better than the original, and become dominant (this is the justification behind the posthuman Singularity).
Star Trek
An emergent phenomenon created by thousands of writers. When the same story has been told hundreds of times, they get very good at the recurring elements. Even the starship bridge has become a main character.
After seven years, the crew should have noticed that each week they survive a situation with a 50% chance of killing them. The cumulative odds are a trillion to one, so something must be looking out for them.
Slow Glass (Bob Shaw)
Somehow, it takes light many months to pass through a smooth pane of a glass-like substance that at first glance looks transparent. The crossing time is constant to a trillionth of a second regardless of the angle at which the beam hits the glass. A window made of this material would show events that happened years earlier. Ten years of light can be trapped inside, so take care not to drop the glass and release all that energy.
Niven Rod
A fine notch on a single rod (not made of ordinary matter) could represent an arbitrary amount of data. Measuring the notch's location with extreme precision could generate any number of digits, which represent the stored data. Every additional byte would require eight times more measuring precision.
Twistor Planet
A world with two north (or south) poles, with no solid surface. The northern and southern hemispheres somehow rotate in opposite directions along a shearing gradient. Only the equator stays motionless.
Suction Plates
One of several imaginary inversions of solar sails. Instead of reflecting light at a slightly longer wavelength, thereby absorbing some of the light's 'momentum', a suction plate may reflect light (perhaps at a higher frequency and/or reduced brightness) in a way that causes the plate to be dragged along in the reflected beam's wake, in the opposite direction of a solar sail.
Two suction plates facing each other will eventually be pulled together as they rapidly convert the stray radiation between them. This process may also cool them.
Hoverworld
A group of world-sized plates made of some unknown ultra-strong material hovering above the surface of a star, held aloft by light pressure. They have rim walls to maintain an ecosystem on top. The plates can be lined up like a ribbon wrapped around the star. A minuscule percentage of the sunlight is reflected sideways from the undersides of slightly higher adjacent plates to illuminate their lower neighbors. Most light is bounced back to the star.
Authors
Stephen King
The author of 'believable' fantasy that doesn't feel like fantasy. With the immediacy of urban legends, his stories succeed not because of the anomalies that follow their own logic, but because of the realistic character responses. His work is accessible to general readers, unlike advanced genre works like Clive Barker's.
Novels-
The Stand: 99% of mankind has been wiped out by an accidental plague, against a background of a deeper dread.
IT: a 1000-page battle against a cosmological mind-controlling entity infecting a whole urban area.
The Dark Tower series: a seven-book quest through parallel Earths towards the very axis of reality.
The last Dark Tower novel was enjoyable enough (and more readable than 99.999% of all books published that year), but the scale wasn't as fantastically immense as it should have been. At the start of the series it seemed there would be a deep revelation about the secret of existence itself.
King might have explained that the battle between Flagg and Mordred lasted a billion eons in other dimensions, and that sneetches, lightsabers, and green goblin robots, etc. would be difficult to use by ordinary mortals (they're unstable, blind the person wielding them, release toxic fumes, and are very noisy) for added verisimilitude. He even brought back the monster from IT as a stand-up comic. King has created some compelling SF villains, like Blaine the Mono and Andy the robot.
He is our most readable author. What makes a few authors readable, while most aren't? He doesn't care much about plot (even though he does it better than almost anyone). According to his book 'On Writing', it's all about visualizing a single, emotionally irresistible situation that assumes a life of its own and can be extended indefinitely.
The Colorado Kid: Inscrutable aliens implanted a boy with a compulsion to observe humanity. When the time came to make his report, they drained his brain, and he was useless after that.
Ralph Peters
Novel- Red Army: A brilliant alternate history where the Soviet Union invades West Germany, and wins by plodding forward until the main opponent loses his nerve.
Michael Crichton
The true successor to Jules Verne and John Wyndham, writing about neutral yet accessible characters encountering some wonder of science. From dinos to time travel to nanoclouds to shrink rays, this was not true SF, but written as if it could really happen in the present time.
Arthur C. Clarke
Bizarre and surreal stories are OK if they could actually happen. His works were about extreme locations just beyond human comprehension. They're about obsessive curiosity, the rarest theme in our low-minded, deeply ordinary but not quite degraded age. The reason to keep reading is to find out what happens next.
Film and novelization- 2001: A Space Odyssey. Full of extreme science extrapolation from the first sentence of the introduction: 'Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.' The first popularization of something like the Singularity, set exactly 2000 years after the supposed birth of Jesus.
Space is a major character. Even at monstrous speeds, it takes ages for a spaceship to fall past and beyond Jupiter.
The onboard AI 'Hal' is a bodiless voice hard to argue with. The Stargate 'ultimate trip' was supposed to last a thousand hours. Inconceivably powerful and aloof aliens have transcended all mortal concerns.
Short story- Playback. After an all-obliterating explosion, a space traveler wakes up as an unstable alien simulation. Stream-of-consciousness magic-realism about all the things that eventually must go wrong.
Clarke's work provided glimpses of higher realities not found anywhere else (though there are billions of mundane works by lesser authors), the next best thing to having a truth machine. Completely different from mainstream and genre SF, though Larry Niven came close in the old days (the 1970s). That kind of creativity has moved to rare online articles and comments now.
Larry Niven
If it was actually possible to visit the future, there would be hundreds of unpredictable explanations behind every shiny surface. Niven stories imply many levels of advanced technology in the background. The prose is less dramatic than Clarke's, but even more compressed. It only hints at all the potential horrors.
Niven's best work involves ultrafast flybys of neutron stars, semi-divine space objects, implacable protagonists scheming for centuries, and aliens that act utterly inhuman in logical ways. Humanity remains resolutely mired in its base nature, but can sense that higher states do exist.
Greg Egan
Some writers are too far ahead of their time, a worse problem than being slightly behind the times. Maybe around 2030 future readers will be able to appreciate the stories from Egan's prime as literature. Major social dumbing-down trends will have to be reversed first.
Fredric Brown
The undisputed master of the ultra short story. He hated to write, a trait that is one of the best predictors of readable fiction.
R. Bretnor
Ultra short story- "The man on top". Ancient religions are less authentic than western civilization, even if they are true. The first mountaineers to reach the world's most inaccessible peak run into an oriental guru who apparently teleported to the top. 'You mean you walked?'
Roald Dahl
The master of the readable short story. His stories always end when something shocking has happened, leaving the reader to wonder what happens next.
Science writers
Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, Daniel Dennet, Richard Dawkins, Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Humorists
Dave Barry, P.J. O'Rourke, Joe Queenan
Space exploration
Tranjet
A magneto-hydrodynamic jet engine could work at speeds approaching Mach 20, by accelerating fuel to hypersonic speed before mixing with the incoming air, giving it more time to be burned.
The released combustion energy would be captured, and used to eject more fuel. This ejection, not the combustion itself, would be the main source of thrust.
This could be accomplished by heating the fuel around a combustion chamber, and then sending it through at high speed. 99% of the thrust would still come from the exhaust pressure, not the fuel injection.
If the burning fuel could somehow release its energy electromagnetically, like in a fuel cell, it could power the fuel accelerator system directly. The fuel would have to be electrically charged.
HOTOL engine
Rocket thrust can be temporarily increased by adding a heat exchanger, such as water injection during takeoff, which heats the exhaust by cooling the engine.
A HOTOL engine would use over-cooled liquid hydrogen from the fuel tank to cool outside air as it enters the intake. Some of the oxygen in the air would be liquefied, and stored in a separate tank.
The nitrogen in the air would liquify sooner, but bypass the engine. Perhaps it could be used to help cool more incoming air.
A HOTOL-powered shuttle could launch with more hydrogen fuel and less liquid oxygen than current rockets. More fuel means more payload.
nuclear lightbulb
A gas-core nuclear reactor could drive a powerful aerospace engine. A critical mass of enriched uranium is sealed inside a silica or quartz tube, where it undergoes nuclear fission, and vaporizes into a hot gas. The glass tube confines the dangerous isotopes and radiation.
Approaching the surface temperature of a star, in some versions the hottest part could be an electrically controlled plasma tube.
The lightbulb heats a surrounding stream of hydrogen gas, which also cools it. Exhaust speeds exceed that of any current engine.
The nuclear reaction can be throttled by injecting a moderator.
Ascent Beam
A powerful microwave beam aimed from a ground station could accelerate a spaceship to sub-orbital speeds by interacting with the air around the craft.
The beam would 'bounce' of the bottom of the vehicle, where it would be focused, heating the passing air to extreme temperatures. The rapidly expanding air would provide the thrust.
In other versions, the microwave energy would be used to ionize the air ahead of the launcher by generating a current, creating a charged flow around and through the vehicle, pulling it higher.
Cold Exhaust: Maxwell Engine
Ideally, exhaust gas should leave a jet or rocket engine at the highest speed, the particles moving in a parallel stream. The stream's internal temperature would then be as low as possible.
Thrust can be increased by shrinking the engine exhaust. A pinhole would be best, but the diameter is limited by the strength of the materials.
An electromagnetic field might be able to harmonize the exhaust, or sound waves could create a 'gas laser'.
Direct fission
By precisely concentrating a flow of highly enriched uranium or plutonium isotopes, a powerful fission reaction could be maintained in a small area. The ultra-hot reaction products could heat a surrounding medium, or provide direct thrust in space, perhaps controlled by magnetic fields.
Superfuels
In the novel 'Saturn Rukh' by Robert Forward, helium atoms are bound together in unstable 'fulleroid' molecules that release immense energy when disintegrating.
The fictional meta-chemical 'red mercury' might be potent enough to directly trigger nuclear fusion.
Other superfuels include nuclear isomers: atomic nuclei such as Hafnium that can suddenly shift to less energetic states without undergoing fission. They would release no radioactive particles, but plenty of gamma rays.
Further Earth-to-orbit propulsion options include:
Ramjets, skyhooks, space elevators, rail launch tracks, air-towed rockets accelerated by long slingshot tethers, and rockets lifted to high altitude by large balloons. (Could the hydrogen in the balloon envelopes fuel a few seconds of flight?)
Spacedrive Beams
The problem of interplanetary propulsion is rarely discussed in science fiction. It's the main reason why humans will never inhabit other worlds.
To accelerate to high velocities, a spaceship has to burn a lot of fuel. It has to drag most of its fuel in the wrong direction before burning it.
This means most of the exhaust will end up moving in the opposite direction (but much slower) than the accelerating spaceship, as seen from the starting point. The system's total center of mass doesn't change at all.
To travel twice as fast, a spaceship must burn more than twice as much fuel, a ratio that worsens with speed. Often the fuel is over 95% of rocket mass. To decelerate again, the amount of fuel must be multiplied by a crazy further factor. It doesn't take long for diminishing returns to set in.
This problem could be solved if the ship didn't have to drag its fuel along. If propulsion thrust could somehow be 'beamed' from Earth with high efficiency, a small spaceship could accelerate to nearly the speed of light in about a year, at a cost of a few million dollars in energy.
This would require a new type of quantum beam, linking the transmitter and the receiver. It might involve an exchange of exotic particles and wavelengths.
Spacedrives
If a spaceship could somehow 'push' against empty space itself, the ship's stored energy could be transformed directly into thrust.
This would be a reactionless drive, as efficient as an antimatter rocket - or more so if its energy was beamed from elsewhere. It wouldn't have to eject a stream of matter with the same momentum to accelerate in the opposite direction. Instead it might change the geometry of space itself.
Perhaps a spacedrive could 'push' against quantum fluctuations in empty space, which always look the same no matter how fast an observer is moving.
Spaghetti Cylinders
O'Neill space stations are envisioned as long cylinders a few hundred meters to a few kilometers wide, spinning to generate artificial gravity, orbiting the earth or the sun. Illuminated by sunlight mirrors, people can live their entire lives on the curving interiors.
A spaghetti cylinder is simply an O'Neill space station that doesn't end. Made of extreme carbon polymers, the tube would recede forever into the black distance. The inherent flexibility of even the strongest materials would allow the cylinder to curve slightly sideways without affecting its rotation. After a few hundred kilometers, it could twist back upon itself, forming a closed loop. The torus would look motionless from a distance, but it would basically be turning 'inside out' every few minutes, compressing and contracting a tiny amount each rotation around its long axis.
Robert Forward suggested such cylinders could eventually be billions or even trillions of kilometers long.
Planetary Conversion
Planets are absurdly wasteful. Quadrillions of tons of valuable minerals and building materials are locked inside, thousands of kilometers out of reach. The only thing these buried resources are good for is generating gravity and earthquakes.
In the unlikely event society continues to develop in its present manner, every square centimeter of Solar System real estate will be fully inhabited in less than a thousand years. (This growth rate would of course generate additional technological progress.)
Then it will be time to become a three dimensional species. In another thousand years, all the planets and asteroids in the solar system could be broken up into rubble, molten down, and converted into an immense swarm of space stations circling the sun.
The main problem would be finding the energy to rearrange that much matter in such a short time. It would require the sun's entire energy output for the duration. From a distance, the Solar System would then appear as a dim oval cloud, glowing in the infrared.
Matroshka Brains
A series of concentric shells made of swarms of small supercomputers orbiting a star. Together, they would manage to absorb all the star's emitted energy, and use it for advanced computation.
It would be the ultimate supermind, inconceivably wise and powerful. Any entity able to manipulate a nonillion nonillion nonillion nonillion bits would have the most grandiose thoughts and emotions, omni-dimensional senses, and inscrutable epiphanies and perceptions. Its sense of smell alone would be more meaningful than all human thoughts ever. However, it would still be unable to solve some deceptively simple mathematical puzzles, like the traveling salesman problem.
Godel time machine
A hollow cylinder wider than a planet, spinning at close to the speed of light, made of incredibly dense neutron matter held in place by strong nuclear forces.
According to general relativity, such an object could distort space/time enough that any object that passed through the tube would emerge before it entered. It would only be possible to travel back to a time when the cylinder had already been constructed. Or something else would happen that requires new physics to understand.
Computronium Universe
If technological progress continues indefinitely, the entire universe will eventually be reorganized to the maximum extent possible. Every particle will become part of a giant computing device. The universe might appear as a smooth fog with no discernible structure, except there will be no external observers to witness it.
Artificial Universe
By focusing unimaginable energies in a point, a new Big Bang could be triggered. This might require thousands of linear particle accelerators radiating from the focus, each as long as a galaxy. Such a delicate construction could only be built in a great void between galaxy clusters. The nearest star would be millions of lightyears away.
According to mainstream physics, the newly created universe would promptly split from this one, and expand into self-created space. Only a black hole would remain where it had formed.
Universes can have many different physical properties. Starting from a single manifold (the smallest possible region obeying all its laws), they can become infinite in size, duration, and complexity. The local laws of physics could be fine-tuned to stimulate the emergence of intelligent life in the new universe, or even to create exact copies of its creators. Life that formed there by accident would have to be eliminated to make room for the true 'owners'.
That may someday happen to us.
Egan Universe
If reality is fundamentally mathematical, our universe may be nothing more than the solution to an equation. Reality itself would be imaginary. Simply by writing down a sufficiently complex equation, we would automatically create an implied-yet-real universe. By beginning to solve this equation in a powerful supercomputer, we could increase its 'reality' even further.
Other places:
Hot Jupiters, asteroids, neutron stars, quark stars, supernovas, black holes, quasars, galaxies, hyperclusters, hypervoids.
Other concepts:
Post-Singularity Paradise, Utility Fog, Cyberpunk.
Your comments here
Feedback Zone
Be the first to read Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
The book that took a quarter century to plan and write.
With more original scientific, sociological, and technical ideas than any science fiction novel ever published.
Mysterious source of the Anonymous meme.
Buy the book
Read chapters for free
|