Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Bill Pragnell wrote:
> > Ok, I see what you mean. (I don't like warp drive personally, it's a retrofitted
> > contortion that, as you say, requires quite fine gravity control.
>
> Well, it's the one that actual scientists are actually talking about. :-)

Not the only one! Wormholes have been discussed in the journals for a couple of
decades now.

> Generally speaking, "hyperdrive" and "warp drive" tend to mean the same
> thing - going somewhere that the speed of light is faster. (Assuming it's
> explained at all.)

Perhaps we're thinking of a different warp drive - I think star trek's warp
drive ended up as a bubble of compressed spacetime, not a different realm...

> > whereas I've not heard of any engineering applications of the Higgs Boson yet!
> Well, it depends what you can do with it! Higgs provides inertial mass, as I
> understand it, so it's really likely the basis of any "generated" gravity.

That's what I mean - it looks hopeful, but we don't know enough to have any
specific ideas yet. :)

> > Hmm, the 'manipulation of gravity' that I was thinking about wasn't any cleverer
> > than piling big fat masses up in interesting ways - ever read any Stephen
> > Baxter?
>
> The few I've read have been awful. :-)

Ah well. I agree his Ideas take front seat to everything else, so it depends on
what you look for in SF. However, the Mammoth series is definitely worth reading
- no cosmology in those - and I quite enjoyed the imagery in Flux (even if it is
a rehash of Niven's The Smoke Ring).

> And piling up big fat masses isn't gravity manipulation to achieve FTL
> travel? :-)

Well, we could do that now!

> As an aside, I just got back from the bookstore and it seems they have no
> actual science fiction in their science fiction section. There was some
> heinlein and asimov and other dead authors, a whole shelf of star wars and
> star trek, another shelf of manga, and everything else was vampires and
> dragons.  Oh, except for the John Ringo type stories. (Many of which I'm not
> even sure why they're listed under Science Fiction, except the author also
> writes some science fiction.)  WTF guys? Haven't you written any actual
> science fiction in ten years? Is America so hopelessly stupid and luddite
> that nobody reads something with actual science in it?

A shame. I was looking at the SF section in a bookshop over here recently, and
it's pretty decent at the mo. There's the regular slew of dead/getting on
classics (asimov, clarke, niven etc), a couple of shelves each of star wars,
star trek, doctor who and whatnot. But I'd say at least 20-30 shelves of proper
recent (last 30 years) SF. Much of it is british authors though, we don't get so
many of the recent US stuff unless it's popular. I had a really hard time
finding Vernor Vinge over here, for example. Buying online's the best bet - but
then browsing is impossible.

(I read A Fire Upon the Deep for the first time last year - probably the best SF
I'd read for a long time!)

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