You say lie-ken, I say lit-chen, let’s call the whole thing moss.I expect lots of lichen.
You say lie-ken, I say lit-chen, let’s call the whole thing moss.I expect lots of lichen.
Harlan Ellison
PKD
Phil Farmer
AE Van Vogt
Issac Asimov
Frank Herbert
William Gibson
Spider Robinson
Larry Niven
Keith Laumer
Rudy Rucker
Dan Simmons
Neal Stephenson
True enough.Interesting list. But I can't help but think that YOU at least would have included Alfred Bester, CMDR Foyle.
Seeing as we are all playing the most realistic syfy game out there. What is a Elite earth like world going to look like? whats going to look to fake. Thats the hard part for me when it comes to syfy are any of these worlds going to look passable I mean I have no frame of thought as to what another planet in another solar system we have never seen before is going to look like. should it look like Star Wars, Star Trek, No Mans sky. what will pass the it looks real test with this group. o7
I totally recommend Frank Herbert's The Jesus IncidentI'm loving this thread, loads of authors for me to look up.
Without the pressures of over-population and scarcity it should look fairly utopian.
I think earth-like worlds will look like earth. Earth is so much 'bigger' and more diverse than many people know. There are places right here on real Earth that look downright alien, so other ELWs need not be 'extreme' to be alien. I don't think other earths are going to have purple grass and orange trees unless there is some scientific reason (different wavelengths of sunlight or atmospheric composition) to justify it.Seeing as we are all playing the most realistic syfy game out there. What is a Elite earth like world going to look like?
I agree with 90% of what you wrote.Science fiction, even hard science fiction in its main stream, got pretty uniform over the decades.
If we're talking authors and founding fathers angle, Elite has obviously a very rational, hard sci-fi tone to it, meaning its centred around technology, economy and loosely-agreed 'realism', echoing by it notes of such voices as Arthur Clarke or Stanislaw Lem, with just a touch of Frank Herbert/Issac Asimov's background space-opera politics added to the mix as a flavour (very rightly so on FD's part). The wild-west ruthlessness of the world also brings to mind William Gibson's dystopian cyber-punk tones.
Still, overall it seems to me that although the general tone is closest to Clarke's and Asimov's visions of the future, rationality prevailing over all else.
The Earth-like would be closer to a utopia than a dystopia, given how much space mankind was suddenly granted to combat overpopulation. With cheap fuel and widespread FSD technology, we are generally doing very well as a race and the Blade Runnery type of vibe would not make a lot of sense. Not that I wouldn't want to see it in Elite.
Perhaps a nice, procedural variation could be in place - on one hand a sprawling, overpopulated and overcrowded blade runner-like city in certain places (Federation?), and more utopian, clean and garden-like in others (Empire?).
Judging by Frontier's art direction, there's not much to worry about in that department, it's the gameplay mechanics and loops that are mostly troublesome.
Babylon Five, or maybe The Expanse.
However Elite with its cross the galaxy in about 30 hours real time flat out jumping has probably pushed beyond even the most absurd postulations of any sci-fi movie, TV show or book. If the technology levels in the game were reflected planetside, things would look and work far different to what we might think or expect.