zlacker

>>anarba+(OP)
Fair warning, this story is about 9,000 words. But it's so rich and weird and dazzling. It's among my favorite Lem stories — although i admit i hadn't read anything of his until we (MIT Press, where i work) started reissuing his books last year, so i'm by no means an expert on him. Anyway, there was a lot of interest in an excerpt from Lem's memoir I submitted here a few months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25533405), so thought i'd share this as well.

>>anarba+Z
Really glad to hear there is an effort forward to bring out more of Lem's work. One of the most interesting SF authors, with what would seem to be a deeper understanding of actual science than most of the others I've read. I especially love His Master's Voice, and am happy to see that on the list of MIT reissues!

>>eigenh+YN
Lem's criticism of much mainstream US SF at the time likewise takes the view that there's too little Science behind any of this Science Fiction. I'm not sure how much of his literary criticism is in print, "Microworlds" is the volume I read.

I like my SF very hard ("Incandescence" by Greg Egan is roughly where I'd say I'm comfortable, a plausible mechanism by which a pre-industrial civilisation might discover general relativity, that novel made me cry at the end) but even when he's being totally whimsical I really enjoyed Lem.

>>tialar+Vc1
Lately on Amazon the term "hard" has been misused or redefined for "military scifi" / "violent scifi".

That aside,

I just have a regular understanding of most fields in science. I know a bit here and there. More astronomy.

My field is computer science, so I have some knowledge there.

What I wonder about is if the average scifi reader expects or even could tell if something is "science" and not fantasy. Huge absurd things of course.

I have read so many different descriptions on how FTL works. I dont think (ignorance on my part) that we have a solid theory for how it can be done.

- Warping of space/time (or higher dimension),

- "portals" left by "an ancient civilization"(that sort of evades the issue)

- wormholes

- "Taming a god"

- through special cracks in space/time that only a special navigator (species) can feel.

- improbability drive (I do love Douglas Adams).

and many more.

When you read can you take the existence of FTL on just being there, do you reject the ideas fully, or do you judge it on its merits if the description extrapolates current knowledge into a future where we can FTL? (if ever)

>>ThinkB+7c2
You are absolutely correct there is no "solid theory" for FTL. Rather, there is "solid theory" FTL truly is impossible in the universe as we know it, because it would allow effects to happen before the events that caused them. It would allow messages to be sent back in time. The speed of light is much more than the speed of light: it is the speed of causality itself. If the sun were to suddenly disappear, the earth would continue to orbit the disappeared sun for the roughly 8 minutes that lightspeed (or causality-speed) requires for covering the earth-sun distance. Anytime any event happens anywhere in the universe, you can imagine an invisible sphere exploding outward from that event in all directions at lightspeed (causality-speed). The event cannot cause an effect anywhere in the universe until this expanding sphere hits that part of the universe. So picture one of these spheres expanding outward from you at the moment you were born. At age 80 your birth-sphere now has a radius of 80 light-years. There is a 160 light-year diameter ball in the Milky Way all the effects of your birth are limited to. It will be millions of years before anything you ever could have done could have any effect whatsoever in the Andromeda galaxy. There is a "glass half full" optimistic view of this limitation: intergalactic Thanos/Hitler types cannot exist in the universe as we know it. We are well quarantined from the evil in other galaxies (if any exists), and other galaxies are well-quarantined from our evil here (where it definitely exists).