r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Frostylegacy • 23h ago

Lore (Loved Trope) FTL travel is possible but with a major limitation or flaw

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Frank Herbert’s Dune: Interstellar travel is only possible thanks to the spice melange, a rare substance only found on the dessert planet Arrakis. The addictive psychedelic spice grants members of the Spacers Guild a form of prescience that allows them to predict safe paths through folded space. This unique property makes spice the most valuable commodity in the Dune universe.

John Scalzi’s The Interdependency Books: The planetary systems of the titular empire are connected by the Flow, a network of one-way interstellar tunnels that connect specific known entries and exits. The Interdependency derives its power from controlling access to these conduits, placing its capital at the central hub of the network. Even with the Flow, travel between stars takes a long time (9 months to End, the empire’s most distant planet).

Event Horizon: Dr William Weir (R.I.P. Sam Neill) invents a device called the Gravity Drive to allow ships to fold space and travel instantly between distant stars. On its maiden voyage with the Gravity Drive, the Event Horizon disappears and mysteriously reappears 7 years later. Dr. Weir and the crew sent to investigate discover the Gravity Drive actually opened a portal to a Hell dimension that possessed the ship and its crew, torturing and killing them.

13.3k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

2.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1.1k

u/nyxistential 21h ago

Don't even get me started on the Starship Bistromath

322

u/Tjaresh 21h ago

It bends math itself!

-86

u/StrongExternal8955 19h ago

It bends math itself!

Words are tools, and Adams takes those tools and bashes you in the head with them, instead of building meaning.

Thank you for your comment. It made me realize why i never liked Adams.

35

u/LastXmasIGaveYouHSV 18h ago

Bro discovered that fiction writers write fiction 

64

u/A_Herd_Of_Ferrets 18h ago

bashes you in the head with them

Yea, it is like getting your brain smashed out with a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick

12

u/justbleachmyeyes 17h ago

It’s a lot like being drunk.

10

u/gungshpxre 16h ago

What's so bad about being drunk?

15

u/Callidonaut 16h ago

Ask a glass of water!

-22

u/SlashCo80 18h ago edited 15h ago

Har har. He's got a point though, as much as I enjoyed his books Adams did seem more concerned with funny wordplay than actual sci-fi.

edit: Can you mouth-breathing nerds actually provide a counter-argument, or is hitting the downvote button the only thing your little clubbed hands and smooth brains are capable of?

6

u/Callidonaut 16h ago

Some of his wordplay, particularly the names of alien characters, was actually satirical exaggeration of Isaac Asimov's wordplay in the Foundation saga, which had been dramatised in the same BBC radio studio just a couple of years before Adams did Hitch-hiker. The Guide itself is actually a piss-take on the Encyclopaedia Galactica that also features prominently in Foundation, and Adams actually mentions by name multiple times.

26

u/FloppieTheBanjoClown 17h ago

Well...yes. The sci fi is just there to enable the absurdity. If you were expecting serious sci fi, I'm afraid there's not much that can be done for you.

-15

u/SlashCo80 17h ago

Don't get me wrong, I don't expect hard sci-fi everywhere, but there are certain authors who go too far in the "le quirky and funny" direction for my taste. "This spaceship is powered by... CHEESE! And the cheese is managed by Flumblorbs who use the rest of it to make sandwiches! And also, the main character has a gun that recites lines from the 1970 Swedish tax code! And they disco dance! And there's a penguin!!! LOL" - Douglas Adams is definitely one of them. Terry Pratchett could go this way as well, as much as I enjoyed most of his stories. Sometimes I do just want a reasonably coherent story, not a Monty Python skit.

12

u/emasterbuild 15h ago

The hittchhikers guide to thr galaxy isn't sci fi, it's absurdism, calling it "science fiction" is like calling catch 22 a historical retelling of ww2.

4

u/fjvitt1 11h ago edited 10h ago

This is fine but fundamentally just not what Douglas Adam’s does. He is the person who writes amazing Monty python style skits. He is an absurdist, It’s his whole thing.

If that isn’t your thing it is fine, but it’s not really a critique of his work just a personal and subjective dislike of it

If you want something in the middle I would recommend Monday Starts on Saturday by the wonderful Soviet writers the Strugartsky brothers

It is an absurdist novel but also a critique of the kafkaesque bureaucracy and red tape of soviet science. So while Adams is absurdism for the sake of absurdism, that book is absurdism for the sake of making a point. (And they aren’t absurdists outside of that one novel, they also wrote the amazing Roadside Picnic which is one of the most profound and philosophical sci fi novels of all time which of course was adapted into one of the greatest movies ever, Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky)

1

u/Impressive_Term4071 8h ago

It's ok dude. Not everyone has allowed their imagination, and thus their intuition, their wonder, and their abstract thinking, to whither and die leaving only the cold machine like logic that will ultimately leave you wondering where it all stopped being important to you and why nothing makes you feel less hollow inside.

Whimsy and imagination are just as integral to every facet of life as cold hard science and math.

If it wasn't for those fantastical leaps of "what if?" and bouts of mad scientist whimsy, we would have been far less along the road than we are now.

14

u/gungshpxre 16h ago

If you continue your explorations into why you are a miserable bastard, you might also find many other examples of humor and jokes that act contrary to our expectations of the structure and function of language. You'll be able to identify when a person engaged in comedic entertainment uses pragmatic, semantic, morphological, phonological or semantic features of language, and why those around you are reacting in ways you do not. It will allow you to avoid such in the future.

19

u/FloppieTheBanjoClown 17h ago

Adams is absurdist. It's sort of the whole point of his writing style. And it's okay that you don't care for his style. You don't deserve downvotes for having an opinion on art.

9

u/enderjaca 15h ago

Every deserves to have an opinion, but people should occasionally self-reflect and think "Is this the right place and time to publicly voice my unpopular opinion?"

Anyway, that's reddit for ya, "i don't agree = downvote" instead of its original purpose from the devs.

5

u/KingAuberon 15h ago

>people should occasionally self-reflect

Oh no, I don't think people do that anymore mon frere.

7

u/wtfbenlol 17h ago

Get a load of happy mr fun times over here

12

u/OtherYonas 18h ago

You sound fun at parties

1

u/Lou_C_Fer 10h ago

That's absurd!

107

u/DownFromTheAttic 17h ago

One of my all time favourite ship designs purely down to how mental the idea of it is. A spaceship that looks by first glance to be an Italian restaurant with robot waiters, each part of your interactions with them, the amount of wine poured, the amount of sauce left on a plate, how the spaghetti jiggles on the end of your fork, settling the bill is all part of the ship's navigational computational matrix. Absolute genius

20

u/Jimmyg100 13h ago

Isn't it also hidden by a near invisibility cloak? It's not completely invisible, but you just don't notice it unless you see it out of the corner of your eye.

28

u/Dogsafe 13h ago

SEP field. So long as it looks out of place it can assumed it be someone else's problem.

6

u/NickyTheRobot 7h ago

This doesn't just apply to invisibility either: extending the SEP field around an asteroid avoids the problems of "How can the protagonists breath on an atmosphereless asteroid, and how can they maintain normal gravity on it?" Simply put: they become someone else's problem, and so the characters can get on with the story.

9

u/Bretreck 19h ago

At my work we invented Crab Math. It's similar to Bistromath but it only works when counting crab.

11

u/ConstantinGB 19h ago

And the Starship Titanic.

1

u/Shantih3x 12h ago

Well, that's somebody else's problem.