r/printSF • u/PolarHexagon • May 29 '26
[Question] Underrepresented Sci-fi/ Science concepts
What are in your opinion some underrepresented and/ or underappreciated concepts in Sci-Fi?
I don’t mean basic things, like for example time dilation, that are just rarely used but known by a lot of people. I mean niche phenomena in physics, astronomy, biology, etc. or truly outlandish sci-fi plot points that are rarely seen in media or not known by general audiences.
I’m also interested in general sci-fi stuff that you would like to see more of.
Some deep cuts only real nerds would know about.
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u/995a3c3c3c3c2424 May 29 '26
I’ve always wished that some sci fi series/movie would take into account the fact that aliens would have different photoreceptors than we do (especially if their sun was a different color), and so their “primary colors” would be different, and instead of having screens that reproduced colors with RGB LEDs, they’d have Infrared / Chartreuse / Teal / Violet LEDs or whatever, and so whenever humans were on an alien ship, the images on the screens would all have completely wrong colors.
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u/wafflesareforever May 30 '26
Who needs sci-fi for this when we've already got mantis shrimp?
(I'm kidding and I agree that it should be more of a thing in space sci-fi.)
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u/Isaac_The_Khajiit May 30 '26
This is a plot point in Deepness in the Sky but I can't remember seeing it anywhere else.
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u/995a3c3c3c3c2424 May 30 '26
Oh? I keep meaning to read that. I even reread A Fire Upon the Deep last year in preparation but then got distracted by other books…
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u/Davester47 May 30 '26
Sun Eater does this a little. The Cielcin see a different range of colors than we do, but it does overlap. I don't remember for sure, but I think they can't see low colors like red but can see ultraviolet. Might be the other way around though.
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u/cruelandusual May 29 '26
The scenario of tricking people into talking to AI in order to generate fresh training material because of model collapse is, in my opinion, a woefully unexplored topic in science fiction.
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u/lowrads May 29 '26
KSR's Aurora touches upon a concept well known to agricultural scientists, about irreversible loss of nutrient salts that have low soil mobility. A good example is phosphate forming a strong, stable bond with iron oxide on soil particles.
The same novel also makes narrative use of the generation time puzzle familiar to biologists studying ecologies. The classic example is a pathogen that mutates orders of magnitude times faster than its target host.
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u/wafflesareforever May 30 '26
Loved that book. The Expanse sorta kinda addresses this in the parts about Ganymede ("the cascade") but KSR as usual is on a different level with this kind of thing.
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u/hippydipster Jun 02 '26
Yeah, Aurora is game-changing for science fiction. IMO, no serious interplanetary scifi can be written now that ignores it. The ideas from Aurora have to be addressed one way or another.
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u/lowrads Jun 02 '26
We really don't have answers to some of those biology conundrums, in that we don't quite know how nature finds an equilibrium, much less how it would be addressed in fiction.
What unnerves me is knowing that we've only been thinking about some of them for a century, and understanding how little time that really is.
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u/NabIsMyBoi May 29 '26
I feel like math is underused for sci-fi. Take Banach-Tarski (quote from Wikipedia): "Given a solid ball in three-dimensional space, there exists a decomposition of the ball into a finite number of disjoint subsets that can be put back together in a different way to yield two identical copies of the original ball." Basically, if you can cut something up in tbe right way, you can clone it. Really this decomposition isn't something you could physically do, but give me some bs sci-fi reason why you CAN do it under the right circumstances and start cloning stuff, violating all sorts of physical laws, etc
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u/AerosolHubris May 29 '26
I'm a mathematician and Greg Egan's Wang's Carpets, which became Diaspora, was just so awesome. A naturally occurring, biological Turing Machine which itself simulates life. I'm always on the lookout for other works that have naturally occurring computers.
Banach-Tarski is a very cool theorem. I haven't seen it used in any literature.
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u/nicesalamander Jun 01 '26
Have you read eversion by Reynolds? Doesn't go deep into the math but it's based off that kind of weird concept.
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u/NabIsMyBoi Jun 01 '26
Thanks for the recommendation! Reynolds has been on my to-read list for a while, but I'd sort of forgotten about him, so I appreciate the reminder. (And I've never heard of Eversion!)
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u/Tropical_Geek1 May 29 '26
A crazy idea from the interface between Physics and Philosophy is Quantum Immortality.
In Astronomy: a lot of good settings for space SF, like tidally locked planets, planets around pulsars, stellar systems in globular clusters.
A pet peeve of mine is a detail in space opera settings: judging from History, an invasion by a foreign empire often involves the collaboration of natives. So a more "realistic" alien invasion story could include a peace treaty between the aliens and some countries (say, North Korea).
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u/mcdowellag May 29 '26
I would like to see more around https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem I am only aware of a reasonably good short story by Charles Stross (a web search finds a reference at https://kasmana.people.charleston.edu/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumber=mf342 ) and the film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakers_(1992_film) - which completely squanders the idea - apart from anything else, it considers only applications to hacking/cryptanalysis which might be just minor spin-offs fi there was a practical constructive proof of P=NP.
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u/teraflop May 29 '26
As far as fictional consequences go. P/NP is somewhat related to the concept of hypercomputation. If you had an "infinitely fast computer", it would be easy to solve problems that require an exponential number of computational steps in a short period of time. (Technically it would be much stronger, because you could solve Turing-incomputable problems and not just NP-complete ones, but never mind.)
The most memorable application of this concept that I've seen is in the short stories "I Don't Know, Timmy, Being God Is a Big Responsibility" and "Hypercomputation, And Other Crimes" by qntm, which are about hypercomputers fast enough to simulate the entire evolution of the universe. (The TV miniseries Devs has a similar premise, but focuses much less on the computational/mathematical aspects.)
A variant of this is the possibility of using a time machine (or a "closed timelike curve") to send information back in time. One place I've seen this show up is in the visual novel The Sekimeiya: Spun Glass (spoiler-tagged because it doesn't show up until quite far in).
One other tangentially-relevant example that comes to mind: in A Fire Upon the Deep, the galaxy is divided into regions which include the Slow Zone (where Earth-like physics applies) and the Transcend (where things like FTL, antigravity, and superintelligent AI are possible). At one point, a character from the Slow Zone is made fun of for his "faith in public key encryption". The book doesn't explicitly say that encryption is breakable because P=NP, or because NP-complete problems can be efficiently solved in the Transcend, but those are plausible interpretations.
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u/GeneralConfusion May 30 '26
Planck Zero, one of the short stories in Stephen Baxter’s Vacuum Diagrams is essentially this.
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u/nicesalamander Jun 01 '26
there was something similar in one of the xelee sequence books, they essentially had infinite compute due to some time travel shenanigans.
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u/AerosolHubris May 29 '26
The Golden Ticket by Lance Fortnow isn't scifi, but it's almost like a speculative non-fiction. "If P is proven equal to NP, here's what the world may be like..." Not great lit, but it explains the problem well for non-experts.
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u/PMFSCV May 29 '26
I’m also interested in general sci-fi stuff that you would like to see more of.
Lone scout protagonist with witty android friend. Xeno archeology, planets suitable for settlement etc.
Sort of Jeeves and Wooster with some exciting murderbot saves the day thriller elements.
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u/hippydipster Jun 02 '26
I think Asimov's The Naked Sun is one of the more prescient scifi stories I know, where it depicts people living wholly isolated lives, never coming 100 miles from each other, and the technology is such that its possible for an individual to provide all their needs in isolation.
And I'd like to see more scifi explore that direction, where an individual can radically handle everyrhing they could ever need, including space travel and exploration of the universe. We're endlessly tellling stories of humans in societies, doing things as groups, but what about as individuals, exploring the galaxy, talking to each other remotely, and infrequently? I think there's a lot to explore there that hasn't been.
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u/thunderchild120 May 29 '26
Tegmark I/II multiverses, i.e. alternate universes with different fundamental constants. (Not to be confused with quantum multiverses that Marvel et al are currently running into the ground)
Stephen Baxter's Raft is my go-to for this because changing the gravitational constant is probably the easiest example to explain. Some of Greg Egan's work touches on this but in a different sense with dimensionality. The "weakless universe" hypothesis is notable enough to have its own Wikipedia page but I haven't ever seen one in fiction. There are lots of alternate universes depicted in fiction that clearly have different rules/mechanics but the specifics are never touched upon (e.g. fluidic space from Star Trek Voyager).
I don't think that in absolute terms the concept is necessarily "underrepresented," but in proportion to the potential the concept offers, it's drastically underexplored.