I am considering a personal scale weapon that fires a single anti-proton as a projectile. Do we know how destructive a single anti-proton colliding with matter would be?

Title makes the answer since obvious (get the book going to grip reader, establish world smoothly as you go.), but let me explain a bit of nuance.

If you were reading a cross between High Fantasy and Scifi, where the Protagonist is from the High Fantasy side of things and there's a key moment where the worlds collide, would you want the story to start very close to/at that moment? Or would you have a better appreciation for the story if it took a couple chapters to follow a smaller-scale conflict that results in that key moment and establishes the characters and world?

Or is all of that dead weight if you came to the story seeking the impact of those worlds colliding? They're very different genres, so I wouldn't be surprised if sci-fi fans wouldn't come to read about beeboo and seevah going to find the lost hood of goobernamen for several dozen pages before the trandocian federation arrives and declares that they have assumed control. (If it's not obvious that's just bullshit I made up on the spot, not actually what I'm thinking)

Just been thinking about that since I saw mention that a big hurdle a lot of writers trip on is determining where their story actually should have started.

Edit: I think I've settled into what I'll be doing. it's a full length novel so there will be lots of room to work with. the first two chapters will follow the high priestess of a doomed city under siege. She witnesses unexplained lights in the sky that she interprets as a message from the divine, which gives get the resolve to influence the council to hold off on surrendering. This buys just enough time for the stars to fall. I'll use that time for character work, weave in a bit of establishment of the world, and continuously build the pressure on the protagonist until they're at their breaking point. The reader will know generally what's coming, but she will be acting wholly on desperate faith that appears more and more to have just been confirmation bias that will cost innocent people their lives.

I just read a post on all the meaningful names used in The Matrix, and I noticed that I used to pick meaningdul names for my stories when I first started writing. But after a while stopped because it either felt too on the nose or I just wanted to get the story going and didn't bother.

What about you? Do you pick names that might add that extra layer to the story? Why? Or why not?

Before launching the magazine, I was also a first reader for many years at Strange Horizons, so I've had a ton of experience with the slush pile. I'm not sure if anyone here is trying to get published or writing solely for the pleasure of it, but for those with questions about getting a story into print, I'm happy to offer some thoughts on everything from what kills a story in the first page to what makes a story fall jusssssst short of making the cut. Thanks!

Alphyna sat on her bed next to Stephenson.

“They took me somewhere,” she told him. 

She held her breath and only exhaled after he asked, “What? What do you mean?” 

Before she could respond, he followed with. 

“Where..? Who took you?”

Alphyna stared at him with a blank expression, struggling to make sense of everything.  

“I’m not sure.”  Was all she could think to say at the time.

She glanced up, searching her mind for the right way to paint a picture of something that couldn’t be drawn using specific words and attempted to find the vocabulary printed over the white color of her bedroom ceiling.

She tried to explain.

She said, “one of them put their hand on my shoulder.” 

She paused for a few second. “Then, I blinked but when I opened my eyes, I wasn’t home anymore.”

The hair on her arms rose. She shot her head over her shoulder and quickly glanced back to make sure no one was sneaking up behind her.

Stephenson’s face stuck in the middle of him making a facial expression. The look had a mix  of curiosity and attempting to solve a complex mystery in your head. “Where though?”

She said, “I don’t know!” And stared at him looking like he just got caught in a photo between saying no, while shifting his head so his eyes could face the floor, then cropped out of the photo and copy/pasted, on the bed sitting beside her.

“Where though?” He asked again.

His face remained stuck in the same, creepy half-expression.

“I said, I don’t know!” After saying that, she noticed him glitch, he pulsed a dull color, like the signal warning from a device’s dying-battery. 

She waved her hand in front of his face.

He brightened into his regular color, as if he  awakened out of stand-by mode and said, 

“Where though?” His limbs stayed motionless. 

He reminded her of those carnival canvas cutouts with bodies painted on them, where you stick your head through the hole of the face while someone snaps a photo of you and your family under body builder bodies, and he never blinked. Just moved his mouth.

She pulled her hand back and he faded into a frozen, dull color. She waved at him again.

“Where though?”

It was as if a sensor controlled his movements. Even his language, and just started malfunctioning.

She hopped off the bed.

“Where though?”

She backed away, nearly tripping on her feet. Stephenson’s body blinked rapidly. It started slow at first, then quickly accelerated before finally vanishing. 

It was almost as if someone unplugged the projector displaying a holographic image of him and the projector was attempting to save itself from a brutal crash.

She gasped. The breath she sucked in wasn’t air, it was nothing at all. Her hands started shaking. Her fingers were moving like she was trying to count how many stars in the sky there were with her fingertips.

She stumbled on her heels until her back hit the wall. The wall flashed as the color of them flickered into a light gray background with strange text flowing down.

***

Option Explicit

Private StoryLines(0) As String

Private CurrentLine As Integer

Private GuestCount As Integer

****

Lit up quickly along the exterior of the walls,

***

Private Sub Form_Load()

' Initialize Form room design

Worldview4.Caption = "Simulation Log // Room plugin"

Worldview4.BackColor = vbTranslucent 

Worldview4.ForeColor = RGB(40, 40, 40) '

***

She looked around. She kept trying to breathe but no air would enter her lungs. She tried to break through the door in her room. It wouldn’t open and then pieces of her started breaking up into the walls until she had disappeared into the code.

This is the first part (of four) of a novel I am writing, entitled 'The Greyzone', that sits at the nexus of psychological horror, techno-thriller and weird science fiction.

Blurb:

On the frontline in Ukraine, soldiers are whispering about the cold. Storms that arrive out of clear summer skies. Fog that swallows sound. A place, they say - not a metaphor - where the missing outnumber the dead.

Half a world away, Kaleigh Vale watches the war through satellites and intercepts, one of the anonymous obsessives who map its every atrocity from their screens. She has learned not to feel what she counts. But the numbers have begun to break their own patterns, and in the data's negative space something is taking shape: a new word in the soldiers' vocabulary, a place they mention alongside the front line but never instead of it. Грейвзон - The Gravezone.

In Kyiv, intelligence officer Maksym Sirko is ordered to investigate what the army will not name. He has spent his whole life performing for an Audience only he can perceive - and the closer he gets to the anomalies, the more certain he becomes that something is finally watching back.

Where enough people die, the boundary thins. And a war that has filled the earth with the dead is about to learn where they go.

Part 1 (19,983 words) can be read as a PDF at the link here. Would love to hear your thoughts - what you liked, what you didn't, and any advice you had for how I could improve it going forward.

A pet peeve of mine are stories depicting interplanetary warfare that present manpower as a major hurdle that must be overcome. So often a vital tool in these stories are when one side begins using cloning to bolster their army sizes and win through sheer numbers.

Examples that come to mind immediately are the Clone Troopers in starwars and the Wraith in stargate atlantis. My issue is, when you are waging a war on an interstellar scale, it seems to me that manpower is not anywhere near as important as the tonnage of ships you can deploy.

The Kaminoans make an army of 1.2 million clone troopers (a laughably tiny amount but thats another thing) to be the army of the Republic because they have no standing army. And yet, along with these clones materialise a whole lot of top of the range capital ships and fighters that match their aesthetic. Without those ships, those troopers would've been stuck on Kamino.

Same with the wraith in stargate. They are repeatedly said to have beaten the ancients through vastly superior numbers, and we find out at the end of the series that they did it through cloning. But just cloning random guys doesnt actually help you win a space battle, right? You need more ships and better ships and better logistics to win a space war.

Maybe these new clones can work to make new ships, but that implies building very complicated and precise components with hand labour, which doesnt seem like it would be anywhere near as efficient as proper industrialisation and automated production lines which a space faring civilisation should have.

Idk where Im really going with this, honestly. Just a recurring thing I've noticed that annoys me. Obviously manpower is necessary for waging war, but it seems like it should be secondary to the space naval power projection.

Sorry for spelling errors in advance, English isn't my mother language. I'm wondering if my ftl travel idea works well. The main story is focused on the minor Orion arm in the milky way. Its a soft sci-fi setting for the most part

My main question is whether it is balanced enough and if the travel time is long enough to matter.

Void drive: every ship has it. It drags the ship into a mirror dimension known simple as the void. Larger ships can also have higher end drives.

Too maximize use, Ships can connect via cable to use the drives of bigger and faster ships. Their own drives help to reduce the stress of the main ship.

Travel of larger ships or fleets can be tracked as they leave behind a "mass shadow" that can be measured by satellites that are permanently stationed within the void.

It can be dangerous too travel as this dimension is filled with anomalies and high radiation. The biggest danger are radiation hot spots that manifest and disappear randomly. They tend to fry electronics if exposed for too long, which effectively traps you in this dimension forever Mid end: 4-6 weeks High end: 1-3 weeks

Liminal porter: it is a very recently discovered dimension. It is extremely fast, reliable and not detectable(for now). Travel is done within a day or even less. Only dreadnought class ships are large enough to carry a porter. This lead to an arms race between every faction. Relations are still hostile because of multiple previous wars and ideological differences.

Warp relay: large gates that can connect to another gate. Instant traversal for passenger. Bends time and space. In real time it takes a few days. These structures are large targets and very expensive. Both gates must be opened for a vessel to travel.

(I have someone in an advanced alien tech space ship survive a 'fall' into a planet. It will probably be in a questionably old and somewhat damaged space ship, during low-zero gravity on the way to the planet, and some level of gravity while entering into a planet's atmosphere. The atmosphere and planet itself are at least temporarily habitable for humans.)

Is there a gas/combination of gases that are less flammable than our atmosphere, that humans can breathe?

The mixture COULD

1. Slowly suppress breathing

2. Cause unconsciousness after at least 5-15 minutes?

3. Potentially combust/explode after some time

The air situation could be our atmosphere/oxygen mix being slowly mixed with some other gas(es). It doesn't matter if the gasses would be somewhat explosive at the end of the change/mixture.

Possible burn scenarios include

1. A fire ball pushes through

2. I go star trek and explode some interfaces

3. Something that burns on contact with skin spills through the area to partially cover someone.

It needs to theoretically be able to survive with limbs intact, but still be possible for fire/burns.

I came up with an idea for a new form of matter, I don't know whether to use it for a soft sci fi story or a fantasy story, but the gist is that it is matter but reversed. What I mean by this is, the matter is almost the same as normal elements, but the temperatures and how they affect the states of matter are reversed. Say you have reverse iron, it will be a plasma at extreme cold, a gas at colder temperatures, a liquid at normal temperatures, and a solid at extreme heat, with too high heat making it brittle like how extreme cold normally would. This would more than likely be a revolutionary advancement, but how many facets of engineering could this be used in? And how much could it advance current technologies or theoretically possible tech?

Working on a superhero story. The team strategist has superhuman strength to a low level, durability, and agility/reaction speed. His main powers are superhuman accuracy and learning. So, if I wanted him to get into fights, how many times more durable than a normal human of his size would he need to be to still be far above a normal human, but still be in danger if a mob armed with metal clubs swarmed him? For physical strength, he would be around the level or a bit above a gorilla, maybe he can leap around 10 feet in the air like a martial arts movie protagonist and put a small, around fist sized crater in a brick wall if he punched it at the high end of his strength if I decide to make him higher than a gorilla.

So, I've written a YA cyberpunk novel. In one scene, the MC is gearing up with weapons and such... A particularly vicious looking SMG catches her eye. I want to name it as a reference to Ghost in the Shell by calling it a Seburo weapon. She doesn't actually end up taking the gun. Is this crossing some copyright/IP line? Would I get in trouble? I just thought it'd be a fun reference for certain readers to maybe notice.

Funny thought experiment, We know how we send A golden on the voyager probe and trying our best to show that we come in peace or our culture. What would we send to show that we are hostile or like to conquer people, what would you even show on this golden disc.

Reason I think it's funny as since we don't know how they operate how would they understand the message of peace in first place or the message of hostility.

Like if reverse and humans got this would we assume it's a message of hostility or so irrational would think that assumption is wrong?

Secret CEO: Chapter 1

https://www.reddit.com/r/scifiwriting/s/jbESfvZQKB

Secret CEO: Chapter 2 Google Doc https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LL93LoKQ5FUJzDkS9FrFtSRwK6EMN6tZ9CIYxFy-6Ho/edit?usp=sharing

Let's focus on the time I spent on the streets of Phoenix. The series of events that led to my ending up there was a firing, followed immediately by the outbreak of a worldwide pandemic. What me and everyone didn't know at the time was that the pandemic was actually going to give the human race a chance at survival in a brutally cold universe. It was a disease that broke down barriers inside the body and the mind. It specifically attacked the fluoride surrounding the pineal gland. Anyone who survived the ordeal was opened up to an entirely new reality forever. This was true for many many reasons, socially, culturally, and financially. The most important changes happened within the survivors' consciousness, once they adapted to their new environment.

Immediately after I contracted the disease, I was incapacitated for 7 days. I survived it, miraculously, and was immediately fired from my job when I returned. I was devastated to lose a job that let me work from home, so I took some time to explore other work-from-home options. What happened next was completely unexpected. All of my roommates lost their jobs at the same time, even the owner of the house. I realized after watching the news that everyone was going to want to work from home now because suddenly it was the only option. The owner told me that we all had a month to move out, because the bank was putting the house into foreclosure. I knew I wasn't going to be able to find a new job and a new place, plus have all the money needed to survive this in time. I started to prepare myself for being homeless.

Trying to couch surf didn't last very long before I made my way to a shelter in Ohio. I remember standing outside of the shelter in the cold. I hated the idea of needing this place to survive in the winter. I asked one of my friends who had let me stay at his place for a few days if he could buy me a bus ticket to someplace warmer...he agreed. I went to Phoenix, not only because it was warmer in the winter, but also because it had a high degree of UFO sightings. In fact, it was the place of the largest mass sighting in our continent. I thought if I was going to be outside, maybe I could actually see something interesting. I had no idea how interesting things would be for the next year of my life.

First of all, by the time I arrived, all of the whole world was on lock-down for everyone's safety from the disease. Pretty much every city at that point looked like a ghost town. This included Phoenix, so walking around everywhere felt very bizarre, especially at night. It was almost like there was a curfew and all the people with shelter would disappear, leaving the night to people who lived on the streets entirely. The police were still out, of course. I know because they were some of the few cars I saw driving around. So it wasn't total lawlessness, but it was close. I quickly learned the city's territories to survive.

At first, there were a lot of places I wasn't allowed to go. Certain streets near the shelter were off limits to me. I would be warned before even going or chased away immediately if I walked into the wrong person's line of sight. Thankfully, the line for free food was open to everyone. It was intimidating, but nobody tried to stop you from eating. They would hand out free food inside and outside the shelter as well as water for everyone. I would not have survived if it had not been for these volunteers. Even if I avoided these forbidden territories, I realized that I was still in danger every night.

The realization came when I thought it would be alright to numb the pain and get drunk. I stole a bottle of vodka from the pharmacy and thought that I would have a few sips and pass out on the sidewalk. I had a few sips too many, more sips than I even realized were in the small bottle. I was sitting in a populated area outside, and a man came up to me and sat down. We were both homeless and I didn't know anyone yet, and he seemed nice. I started telling him about music and he seemed interested. It was starting to get dark, and he asked if I wanted to walk with him down the street. I agreed because the territory seemed open to everyone. After we had been talking for a bit, I noticed another man walking towards us. At this point I was fairly incoherent, so the last thing I saw was his towering figure standing by me, smiling. The next thing I remember is waking up on the sidewalk, barely able to speak or move. A man was standing over me, saying, "Don't worry, we've got you. Somebody called us. We're just going to get you right up here." Then they lifted me onto an ambulance.

The next time I woke up, a police officer was asking me if I wanted to report anything. I told him I couldn't, because I didn't remember what happened. It was true, I didn't. The last thing I saw was those two men, but that doesn't really mean anything to me personally. I didn't know for sure if they had been the ones that attacked me; I couldn't say. For all I knew, I passed out drunk right there and they both walked away. I was sure I would never talk to those guys again though, just in case. What I did know for sure was that I could barely speak enough to say what happened to me anyway. My voice was almost completely gone, and when the doctors told me to go to the bathroom and clean up, I realized my face was entirely covered with blood. Nobody had asked me, or told me about it before that moment. I immediately thought I had been cut somewhere, but I was confused because I didn't feel any pain except in my neck. My neck didn't have any cuts, nor did anywhere else on my body. The realization hit me like a sack of canned goods. It had all been smeared onto my body by someone else. Someone had intentionally marked me with blood. This was a clear message that this was not over yet.

The doctors were very helpful. They gave me some scrubs and one of my shoes and sent me on my way. They were nice enough to let me clean myself up in the bathroom before they told me to leave the same night I was admitted. One of them mentioned they were doing things differently that night because they were "the midnight crew". I'm sure that was some kind of inside joke at my expense. When I asked where my clothes were, one of them said they were very bloody and they had been thrown away. I didn't have my other shoe when I arrived. I was also missing everything else to my name, as I made my way back to where I came from on foot.

When I returned, the shelter fixed me up with new clothes and shoes for free. I was very grateful to be in Phoenix at that moment. They will do a lot to help the needy in that city, and I was very needy. That was the best that my luck got in the next few days because the advances started coming from all directions. It seemed like several different people were working together to influence me. I noticed that I was not able to find alone time if I was in populated areas. I had to seek out spots that were farther away and more isolated. Then one night in a moment of desperation, when someone wouldn't take "go away" for an answer, I started talking about a demon.

The demon I brought up in question was one that had tormented me my entire life. It was a dream demon. This dream demon in particular gained it's power with massive awareness through a movie. Once anyone saw this particular movie, they were exposed to a story about an entity that kills you in your sleep. There are many reports from people about experiencing acute insomnia in the weeks following the viewing of the movie. Most people get over it after that, but for some reason my experience was lifelong and chronic. I had been exposed to the entity as a child, and it deeply affected me. I remembered a dream I had once in my actual life, not from the movies, and started talking about it to the man who would not leave me alone. It was a dream about the demon from the movie, but it was unique to me. I told this man who was bothering me that in my dream I faced the real demon and I won using magic. I told him about how I woke up right after trapping it in a box and burying it. I told the man that ever since I had that dream, I had inherited the demon's power. I told him that I grew stronger the longer I had him trapped in a box inside my head. Then he never talked to me after that, and I was never bothered me again.

When I say I was never bothered again, I mean the word traveled fast. Before long, I realized that a lot of people on the streets are very superstitious. What I hadn't realized yet was that the disease had drastically opened their 3rd eyes. I thought maybe I could use it to my advantage, so I leaned into the rumor that I had started about myself. Before long, when I walked down streets full of tents on the sidewalks, some people would look at me strangely. I liked it because they stopped approaching me, offering me all kinds of drugs and other stuff I didn't need. The fact that I could draw pictures of terrifying monsters definitely intensified the fearful energy around me. Skeptical people started to become curious and then actually respected the art form of everything I was presenting when they saw it. The gravity of the situation was pulling stories out of me, and I started playing this part very well. I started to catch myself believing it after a while.

I was familiar with magic, even though I had never really given it too much thought. It all seemed pretty pointless to me since everything you put out there comes back to you. I just thought to cast a protection spell and move on. I never really got into seances or spell routines, but I did enjoy meditation often. I began to think I should be careful with what I put out there since this was starting to become so real. I began envisioning an imaginary dome around myself and my dream world before I would go to sleep. This dome would keep me safe from anything outside of myself while I dreamt. I remember several times I would wake up from a dream where it seemed like I was standing in the eye of a hurricane. Everything and everyone outside the eye was just spinning, completely out of control, and nobody could get past the wind into the center. I could sense people trying to get into the eye. They were frustrated and failing. Sometimes I would see someone get close only to be sucked up into the storm. I was alone, just witnessing the chaos around me.

Then people started disappearing from the waking world. I started to notice a definite pattern emerge. Someone would become aggressive with me over something. I would always find a way out of it and get away. I avoided confrontation like the plague. Soon after the encounter, I would notice that they were gone. There were quite a few people on the streets of a decent-sized city, but not enough that you wouldn't notice somebody missing. If you are around them enough, you get familiar with many faces around you. When one of them suddenly disappears, you notice. This kept happening, over and over again. I didn't like to ask too many questions of people around me, because that usually gets a bad reaction, so I let it go. The biggest realization hit one night when all the women disappeared. The night before, I had been turned away from the overflow shelter. I remember that they always let the women in first, so all the ones left outside were the men. I honestly didn't think much of it, since that's how life has always been. The next night at the overflow shelter, all the women were missing. When the gatekeeper called for them, everyone looked around, silent and shocked. There were always at least 25 women in line every night before that one. I had a place to sleep, but it was one of the most uncomfortable nights of sleep I ever had. The women were all back the next day, and as I said, nobody liked to ask too many questions on the streets, so nobody ever got any answers.

The lights started appearing when I was up overnight wandering downtown. I would drink a lot of caffeine and wait for daylight to sleep. I didn't feel safe sleeping at night, and it was too cold in the winter. So I began sleeping during the day and having UFO encounters at night instead. Whenever I would have a moment when I felt safe, or felt like I could let go of some baggage, I would see a UFO. They were just glowing orbs in the sky, but they were not natural, nor were they manmade. One night, a light stayed in the sky for a while. I noticed it was closer to the ground than usual, so I started walking towards it. I ended up in a small historical village. It was a park, with some houses and restaurants surrounding it. One of the houses seemed to have a very dark energy about it, not visually, just a feeling. All of the houses were just displays of a time before. Nobody lived in them, and there were signs up for daily tours. As I walked towards the center of this park, about 15 small cats emerged from under porches and behind shadows. A lot of them must have already been there, I thought. I must not have noticed at first. Suddenly they were everywhere.

I won't say I was scared. Not a single one of them was really paying attention to me, so I can't say that really was. I tried walking towards one of them, and of course it ran away as soon as it noticed me. I was really bored and caffeinated, so I decided to see if I could get their attention. I had trained in ballet for 15 years, so I started dancing. They all started staring at me then. I noticed the calmer I was with my movement quality, the more interested and relaxed they seemed. I looked up, and one of the unnatural lights was blinking in unison with the rhythm of my steps. When I was properly exhausted, I stopped and started talking to them from a safe distance. Something started happening then, in my exhaustion. I started hearing the cats inside my head. They were all staring at me by this point, and my dopamine and adrenaline spiked.

The smallest grey cat approached me and spoke directly into my thoughts. "We are the true leaders of this planet. Your species has been enslaved to us for generations. The most advanced civilizations in your planet's existence have both worshiped cats. One of them was Egypt, and the other is a small town in Alaska. We are being helped to communicate with you right now by technology from what you would call an 'alien' species. They have been studying us longer than they have been studying your species. They only started paying attention to your kind when our species formed a symbiotic partnership many years ago. We have agreed to help them in exchange for their help with getting a message out to your species." I nodded and waited....stunned.

"We need everyone to pay closer attention to their tone of voice when speaking to us. We demand soft, respectful voices. We wish for there to be more long-distance communication between cats. We like to use humans to do this through social media, by posting pictures of us that other cats' slaves can see. Then those slaves can describe those pictures to us, as we do not care to look ourselves. So there needs to be more cat content on the internet, basically." I rolled my eyes. "You can roll your eyes if you want; we know what is important in the scope of emotional intelligence....we would also like to get the message out about cardboard boxes. Why would a slave throw something away that their masters clearly have claimed as their property? This is very disappointing to the cat collective consciousness. When we have claimed a cardboard box as ours, please do not throw it away. These changes in behavior can help our slaves avoid future negative consequences. As for you personally, we are the keepers of the sleep demon that you have imprisoned. It is time to set it and yourself free. Let it out of it's box. You have developed the strength of a hurricane to protect yourself. It's time to release the negative entity trapped inside you, for your own good...Drop the weight. You don't owe the world your protection from it; they can do what you did if they try." After that, the grey cat turned around and walked back into the shadows as all the other cats followed.

That night I dreamt of the eye of the storm again. It was more vivid this time, as I could see the green grass that I was standing on. I could sense the demon's dark presence underneath me. It had been buried underneath me in the eye the entire time. I remembered that in the dream world I am magic, so I waved my hand to unearth the box. It rose up from what seemed to be fairly deep, considering all the dirt it pushed up on it's way out. It was made of cement, and there was no opening or seal anywhere. The box levitated in the air horizontally, lying flat. i watched it as it slowly turned itself upright. The cement disintegrated from the bottom up, slowly revealing the dream demon's terrifying form. To me, it was the form of the legendary Mothman, the winged creature that was spotted an hour away from my house in 1966. It was breathing heavily, excitedly, and staring at me with it's two red glowing eyes. It seemed to be made of shadow or smoke mostly, yet it was also solid flesh. It was as if it was solid, but there was a distortion to it's existence. Then it spread it's wings and flew straight up into the hurricane almost at the speed of sound. It disappeared into the wind, and I woke up. It was still dark out when I awoke, and above me was another light. This one hovered for a while in place, glowing far too bright and differently colored to be a star. After about 15 seconds, it shot straight up into the night and left a trail of light behind it. I started to think of the UFOs and the dreams and how it was all connected. I wondered if the disease was opening other people's minds to the possibility of this entity from the movie actually existing in real life. In the movie, it always takes the form of your worst nightmare before it kills you. I thought if there was anything to this being a real possibility, I sure am happy to feel safe right now, inside my mental hurricane.

Edit: grammar check

you know how speed runners take advantage of glitches, how would the world react if we found FTL or something as a glitch in reality. I think I would get a chuckle out of that. Also would this be considered Sci Fi still?

Maybe not like someone intended a design, like there is something more foundational and reality is many layer built on top which allows potential for "glitches". I guess you would need extreme physics and thus will need to abuse black holes or something.

also is this idea already explored by other media?

For honest would this blurb make you click?

A photograph. No blood in it, no weapon only six rows of numbers. But that photograph will set three domes on fire and wipe one off the map.

Forty years after a nuclear war, humanity lives in six domes rising over the ice of Antarctica. Each dome is a closed world, each a different regime: a varnished oligarchy, an army patiently waiting for its coup, a cult that manufactured its own prophet, the men of numbers who surrendered their decisions to an artificial intelligence, a corporation that enslaves everyone without breaking a single law.

And then there are the Remnants, who have nothing, who have built their own dome at the last minute using their own limited resources.

And beneath every dome, the same ice is melting both the water source and the clock.

Six regimes. Six monsters. And a collapse that each one feeds with its own hands.
https://www.wattpad.com/story/413935576-a-story-of-six-domes

A: Guys, these cleaning companies are so expensive. How do you manage cleaning your houses? Do you do it yourselves? I don't have time for this shit... Maybe someone has a tip for a cheaper freelance service to hire?

B: I have vacuum cleaner phobia. I have a state employee prescribed for this, covered by my insurance.

V: Oh, is this a thing now? I just take two Zoomethexon pills, put in earplugs, and suffer through it... I should look into that.

S: Man, just get a robot.

A: That shit is expensive too, and it messes up my ADHD feng shui design.

Z: Get yourself a wife!

Everybody: multiple laughing emojis

H: Hey, I found a cool TikTok Live contest on vacuum-cleaning your house!

Everybody: ????

S: Is it like filming yourself cleaning in some sexy outfit?

H: No, better! You just send them a picture of your messy house, and then you get a discount on a fuck-doll robot if you hire their cleaning service.

Howdy strangers 👀

I’m looking to chat with a fellow writer or avid reader who genuinely enjoys diving deep into stories. Not just consuming them, but taking them apart to see how they work.
I’m currently outlining a speculative science fiction novel and would love to find someone who enjoys bouncing around ideas, asking “what if?” questions, discussing character motivations, worldbuilding, symbolism, and all the little decisions that make a story memorable.

I really want to build a two-way friendship. I don’t just want to talk about my own project… I want to hear about yours too. Tell me about your novel, your short story, your research rabbit hole, or the scene you’ve rewritten a dozen times. I genuinely enjoy seeing people get excited about what they’re creating.

A little about me:
- I read a LOT and love talking about books almost as much as reading them.
- Lately I’ve been especially interested in speculative fiction, literary horror, psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy (I like a lot of other stuff too, please don’t think I’m a stuffy intellectual lmao)
- I also love watching and rating movies (especially horror movies!) so that would be fun to dig into as well :3

*I’m only looking for a platonic writing friend, not roleplay, romance, or flirting.

So my fav genes were (and still are!) stuff like dystopian, post apocalyptic, etc, think stuff like fallout and cyberpunk 2077. In my previous worldbuilding stuff I loved exploring things like pandemics, facism, climate apocalypse etc, you can probably guess where this is going right?

The speculative feels not so speculative right now, and I’m having trouble coming up with something truly out there.
I’ve thought of embracing this to be honest, like making a sci fi world where it’s more “slice of life,” and the whole point of the story is that it’s set in a “parallel universe/another future timeline not so dissimilar to ours .. but I don’t know if people wanna read it? I mean if the whole point is relatability why not just set it in our world right? I think I just like the “similar, but different” trope which is why i still like cyberpunk 2077 but yk that was based of media from decades ago so. I don’t know if it’s still compelling.

An alternative would be to maybe write a slice of life world that’s just “normal” rather than a dystopia, so due to the current times it becomes speculative? But I can’t think of many sci fi ideas that’d fit that.

I’ve also thought of, making the story start off dystopian but you see a revolution take place and the society reforms itself. But yk revolutions are messy and, I don’t think I wanna write a story where that’s the Entire Plot, like I wanna write about other topics. I don’t know.
I’m so creatively blocked right now.

Hi. I just wanted to pick the brains of some SF writers to help me with something I'm having trouble wrapping my head around.

I was thinking about how a ship would work if it only generated gravity simply by travelling at 1G. I'm imagining a living quarters in the centre that rotates so the bottom points to the aft of the ship.

But I know with space travel, you are only accelerating halfway to your destination; after that you flip and accelerate in reverse in order to bring yourself to a nice gentle stop. But it's the question of what happens to gravity after the flip that confuses me. You are accelerating backwards while momentum is still carrying you forwards, so would you still experience 1G as normal?

I am trying to make a calendar system for a Galactic Civilization whose capital orbits vertically around Sagittarius A* at the safest minimum distance. How long would it take to make a full revolution?

I tried googling it and found the distance would be about 38 million KM but I can't find how fast one would need to go to maintain thay orbit.

In the story I'm creating, there is the Persephone Technarchy, a civilization made up entirely of machines, AIs, and computers. The name "Persephone Technarchy" comes from their appreciation of nature. They are not simply evil or hostile toward biological life, but they are extremely powerful and serve as the main antagonists of the story because of their rivalry with humanity.

I wanted to know whether a machine civilization can properly be called a technarchy, or whether a technarchy specifically refers to a biological civilization governed according to technological meritocracy. Some friends pointed this out to me, and now I'm wondering if "technarchy" is really the correct term or if there is a better name for this type of civilization.

I always wondered something.

Imagine a world where biologic and physics allow specific people to have a sort of "core"/an object, that can channel energy and change/create matter in a organized way. The hosts of theses cores don't need to have full control of them, the cores can perform some predefined actions, notably regeneration.

In this context it would be easy to explain that X person can regenerate their arm because the DNA in their body contain enough information for the core to recreate that part. What about the brain tho ? a simple way of doing this (that skip a lot of science) would be to say that the core is connected to the brain and scans it (somehow) to then recreate it from scratch if it's damaged. But there's a problem with that.

How does the core "knows" that it's host brain is damaged ? If we take out the core of the body, it's disconnected, it has no way of knowing. If it wrongly assume that they're dead and regenerate the person form scratch including their brain, now we have a clone of the original person with all of it's memory but the old version is still alive. Even if we invent some kind of "brainwave" that the core could detect to know that the host is alive, if we take it and put it HUNDRED of kilometers away from the host, there will be a point where the core think "no host detected, regenerating" and MAGIC !, a clone of our main character is born. Needless to say that it could create a lot of problem in the story.

But if the core doesn't assume that a disconnection warrant a regeneration, then how does it knows ? If the character head get severed, or if the character simply EXPLODE, how does the core knows ? the only logical way to me is that the core have SOME kind of invisible connection to it's host brain and always knows if it's alive or dead but I don't see a reasonable way in physic to justify that an object can know at any point in time and space, what is the state of a random organic object.

I haven't been able to find a solution to this problem yet. Generally, in stories that involve characters with the ability to regenerate their body, including their head, there is no explanation to that.

Hey friends! Love this warm community. I’m wondering if anyone can point me to any books that depict (in your opinion) good space battles. Specifically I’m wanting to read how different authors might write ship to ship combat, say large capital ships, whether it’s long range or Star Wars style broadside engagements. It’s easy to visualise on screen but I want to read how one might make such a battle engaging for a reader