Tech Tuesday: Space Travel
Posted by childofthehive | Filed under Tech Tuesday
Space travel is a very common element of science fiction stories but the way that travel is perceived can vary enormously depending on when the story is set. Think of it a bit like crossing the Atlantic ocean. 1000 years ago, crossing the ocean was immensely slow, difficult and dangerous. If you set off, chances were that you wouldn’t make it to the other side. If you made it, you got sagas written about you.
About five hundred years later, there were trade routes being established. It wasn’t fast or comfortable and you might still die in the attempt, but the odds were considerably better that you’d make it to the far side and so it was reasonable to do so for trade and profit.
Then steamships came about in the 19th century. Travel got faster, safer and more comfortable. It could still take months on a slow ship, but might take only a couple of weeks. Luxurious liners made it attractive to cross the ocean for pleasure as well as profit. On the whole, the trips were much safer, but still things could go horribly wrong.
About half-way through the 20th century, passenger planes were becoming much more common. The journey time dropped from weeks to hours and the price has dropped to a point where crossing the Atlantic is a common thing done for business and pleasure by a huge number of people every day.
Translating the analogy to space flight, you have enormous freedom as a writer. You can choose to set your story at any point along this spectrum, from space travel being immensely dangerous to it being so common that you can walk down to your travel agent and buy a ticket to Alpha Centauri.
In some ways it depends whether you want space travel to be the point of your story or something in the background. If the space ship and the journey are the focus of the plot, it would make more sense to set your tale somewhere near the beginning of this timeline, in the same way that a difficult crossing in a sailing ship lasting weeks and full of uncertainty about survival is likely to be more interesting than a story where someone gets on a plane, watches a couple of movies and then gets off at the other side a little tipsy from the free booze. This is by no means a rule (I have read an amusing short story set on an ordinary plane flight) but it’s something to think about.
If you want to write a story about people journeying to other planets, meeting aliens and having adventures between the stars, you’re likely to want to go for the later end of the timeline, otherwise the plot will have to have long pauses while your characters travel.
A possibly interesting option would be to use the idea of relativistic flight to do a mixture. The idea, which I touched on in my post on faster than light travel, is that as you approach the speed of light, time appears to slow down so a travel time of years might feel like days. You could have newer ships being able to get closer to light speed overtaking ships that were built centuries before them.
In short, you’ve got the freedom to let your imagination run wild.
Tags: future, sci-fi, science fiction, space travel, spaceships, technology
Tech Tuesday: Nook
Posted by childofthehive | Filed under Tech Tuesday
Yesterday, I went out for a meal with a colleague who, like me, is a keen reader. He was enthusiastically showing off his new purchase, a Nook e-book reader. I’ve been after an e-book reader for a while now but have stayed away mainly due to the cost. However, after playing with his for a little while and watching him rave about the quality of illustrations and crispness of the text, I couldn’t resist.
After the meal, we went down to Barnes and Noble and I bought one. Including tax and a very smart leather case for it, the device cost less than $200. I haven’t worked out the exact conversion into pounds, but that’s better than I’ve seen. As well as the advantage of price, this device using a standard format. Other vendors lock you in to using a precise format so you have to use their systems to buy your e-books. Because I don’t live in America and don’t have an American credit card, I can’t use Barnes and Noble’s system. Fortunately, the nook uses epub and pdf formats, which are common. I can buy e-books of Amazon and other sites.
My colleague also pointed out Project Gutenberg. This is a group of people dedicated to converting out-of-copyright texts into e-books. Because these books are out of copyright, the site can offer them for free. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of e-books that you can legally download without paying a penny. I’ve had a browse of their site and found a Scarlet Pimpernel book that I’ve been wanting for ages.
I’ve owned my e-book for less than 24 hours but I can definitely recommend it. It’s easy to use. I don’t accidentally turn pages when reading. The screen quality is excellent. It’s fantastically easy to put books onto it; you just drag and drop into a folder. It’s nice and compact and not too heavy. It even comes with a games section that includes sudoku.
Most importantly, it has a flight-safe mode.
I’m a book-lover. There will always be a place in my life for physical books. That place is usually overflowing my bookshelves. But for business trips and journeys, it’s brilliant. Never again will I be sitting on a long train ride, finish a book and wonder what on earth I’m going to do for the rest of the journey.
As a tech geek and lover of reading, an e-book reader is a wonderful combination.
Tags: e-book reader, e-books, novels, reading, technology
Tech Tuesday: Power of the Sun
Posted by childofthehive | Filed under Tech Tuesday
A little while ago, I spotted an article about a solar plane. There’s even a video of the plane taking off. This is not the first time that solar planes have been in the news. In fact, in 2007, a solar plane made a 54-hour long test flight, including going through two nights.
The big difference with this recent flight is that it was manned. A person went up in a plane that was able to keep flying through the night using just solar power.
The achievement of such a flight is important but what I feel is staggering is the implication. We’re in a world suffering from environmental problems because of pollution. A massive oil spill was finally stopped a few days ago but no one’s sure that the cap won’t cause a new leak. If we, as a species, keep going as we have been, we’re going to run out of fossil fuels pretty soon.
Yet, despite the apparent danger of our fuel situation, we can build vehicles that can defy gravity by harnessing the power of the sun. This is a massive step in the right direction.
Tags: flight, solar power, technology
Tech Tuesday: Gesture Interface
Posted by childofthehive | Filed under Tech Tuesday
In my second year at university, I did a module on human computer interaction. I found the subject fascinating and some of the technologies we discussed during that module even made it into Child of the Hive.
One technology that we discussed was gesture recognition. The idea was that there could be a sensor on a computer that can recognise movement and gestures that humans take for granted. This is an incredibly natural way to interact because we use movement so much in interactions with people.
When we talked about this in university, it seemed like science fiction. In fact, we talked about the scene in Minority Report where Tom Cruise interacts with a computer by waving his hands. Only a couple of years ago, that was fiction.
Tags: gesture interface, human computer interaction, kinect, sci-fi, science fiction, technology
Tech Tuesday: Time Travel
Posted by childofthehive | Filed under Tech Tuesday
This week, I’m going to talk about time travel. This is a staple of science fiction. As a piece of science that’s still very much speculation, there’s a lot of freedom for writers. There are some common options to consider.
1. Time travellers can’t change history. In this style of time travel story, anyone who goes back in time becomes part of the timeline. They might actually cause an event they travelled in time to prevent.
2. Time travellers can change history. This is the exact opposite of the previous option, where travellers’ actions could alter the timeline. The classic example of this is Back to the Future, where Marty prevents his parents meeting and starts to fade out of existence. In these sort of stories, the slightest mistake could cause a catastrophic change in history.
3. It may seem strange that I’m coming up with a third option after having two that seem to cover both sides of the situation. This third option is that time travelling creates a new universe. This theory ties with the idea of parallel universes. The act of travelling back in time causes a parallel universe to be formed. This way, travellers can cause changes but the changes happen in this new universe, not the one they came from, so they wouldn’t be able to wipe themselves out of history.
These are three common conventions. If working time-travel into a story, it’s a good idea to stick to just one.
Tags: sci-fi, science fiction, technology, time travel
Tech Tuesday: Projection Technologies
Posted by childofthehive | Filed under Tech Tuesday
A few years ago, I went to an event in Vienna around the art of technology. Some of the supposed art displays were obscure or, to my mind, pointless, such as the one that did a search for random blank images and displayed them. But there were a few projects I found really interesting. One was an interactive panorama.
The panorama was simply a projected image being shone down on a table. This image included houses which would appear or disappear over time, trains which would move across the table and animals that would run around. The clever part was the interactivity. Along with the projector, there was a camera. This camera would pick up dark objects placed on the table. If you put a long line down, a train would treat it as a track. A large round object would have houses appear around it. If you put down a small “ball” a dog would chase after it. It got quite fun to put down random items from my pockets and around to see how the scene would respond.
This is quite fun, but may not appear to be all that useful. So a virtual dog can chase a ball? So what?
This sort of technology is already being used for a much more practical purpose. Projected keyboards. These are small, easily-portable devices that are a combination of projector and camera. They shine an image of a keyboard onto a flat surface and then the camera can pick up the movement of a user’s fingers across the projected keys.
These keyboards aren’t perfect because they don’t provide the tactile feedback most people take for granted. When you type on a normal keyboard, you feel the keys move and stop and so you know that they’ve been pressed without having to think about it. Even touch screen keyboards often have some tactile feedback built in to give you some sensation when keys are pressed.
Still, it does mean that you don’t have to carry a keyboard everywhere with you. As computers continue to get smaller, this technology will enable us to have a small device that, through projectors and sensors, can give us a full screen, keyboard and track pad without needing to carry around any large peripherals.
Tags: future, projection, technology
Tech Tuesday: Faster than Light Travel
Posted by childofthehive | Filed under Tech Tuesday
When writing fiction, there are few rules but a lot of guidelines. With science fiction, one of those guidelines is to stick within the laws of physics as known at the time of writing. So you can write about things we can’t do yet, but it’s best to make them seem at least feasible within the bounds of known science.
One exception to this guideline is faster than light (FTL) travel.
The speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant. Einstein’s special relativity theory states that this constant is the highest speed that can be achieved. The actual theory is a lot more complex than that and there are some complications around the flow of time at light-speed. Without getting into the physics in depth, it suffices to say that no matter how powerful your spaceship is, it won’t be able to move faster than the speed of light.
This can lead to problems if your story involves travel between different planets. The problem is simply one of distance. The nearest planet that’s been discovered is 10.5 light years away. So even if you can get up to light-speed, it would take more than a decade to reach it. The planet in question is more similar to Jupiter than it is to Earth, so having humans landing or living on it would be rather difficult. If you want to have human-inhabited colonies and planets spread across the galaxy, the distances are likely to be much vaster. It’s more likely that it would take a lifetime or more to get between planets where we could survive (assuming we find any).
That could be part of your story. There are some very interesting stories written about colony ships travelling to other worlds, using either generation ships or freezing the colonists. There’s also an interesting piece of Einstein’s theory is that as you approach the speed of light, time slows down. So the ship might take years to get there, but it will feel like days or weeks to the travellers.
All of this is interesting fodder for fiction, but there is still an issue if you want your characters to be able to travel around between different worlds regularly. If you want people to be able to set out in a ship and arrive in a few days, then you hit this problem.
You can get round this issue using hyperspace, but that’s another complex theory that’s deserving of a post in its own right.
Or you can cheat. I did say that this was an exception to the guideline about obeying the laws of physics.
Just give your ships FTL engines. Travel between planets is so well-established in science fiction now that readers are willing to ignore the impossibility and enjoy the story. But if you can find a scientific way to justify it, that’s even better.
Tags: advice, faster than light, future, sci-fi, science fiction, space travel, spaceships, technology
Tech Tuesday: Voice Activated Technology
Posted by childofthehive | Filed under Tech Tuesday, Uncategorized
In today’s Tech Tuesday post, I’m going to talk about voice-activated systems. This has been a staple of science fiction for years. People giving vocal commands to computers instead of pressing buttons. They are more common in television shows and films than in books, no doubt because it makes it easier for the audience to follow what’s going on. By speaking a command to a machine, a character’s plans are revealed to the audience without having to rely on exposition.
Voice-activated systems are a wonderful idea and something that has been worked on for years. Unfortunately, the reality of current systems can be summed up in this clip from the recent Star Trek movie:
The problem is accents. The same language can sound completely different when spoken in local accents. A Yorkshireman sounds nothing like a Cockney and someone from Birmingham sounds nothing like someone from Glasgow.
Voice-activated technology has reached the level where I can phone up a computer system and, through spoken commands, get it to play my voicemail or recite my email. Unfortunately, I work for an American company so this software only works when I fake an American accent. Our company briefly turned on a feature on our messaging servers that provided a text transcript of voicemails. It worked perfectly if the person leaving the message had an American accent. The feature was turned off when it became apparent that the main purpose was to provide us amusement as we collected the hilariously misinterpreted outputs when anyone else left a message. I think my favourite was the message that ended, “Cheese pizza buy.” Needless to say, the actual voicemail had nothing to do with ordering pizzas.
You can train voice-recognition systems. Most voice recognition systems come with some sample text to read that covers a wide enough range of words for the computer to get a handle on the speaker’s accent. There are two problems with this. One is that such training will only work on an individual. The other comes when, for example, you’re dictating an email and want to include in the text the same word that is the command to send the finished email.
Voice recognition systems have come a long way but still a long way to go before they’re ready.
Tags: future, sci-fi, science fiction, Star Trek, technology, voice activiation
Tech Tuesday: Predicting the Future
Posted by childofthehive | Filed under Tech Tuesday
Predicting the future is part of the job of many science fiction writers. It’s not always easy but it can be quite fun to make guesses both at the sort of technology and gadgets that could be around in the future – and their impact on humanity.
The sci-fi genre covers a wide range of settings. There are stories written about today with a twist imagining what might happen if, for example, a meteor was about to strike the planet or aliens appeared over major cities. There are also stories about tomorrow, or ten years in the future, or a century, or so far from our own time that it’s impossible to give a date in today’s terms.
When you write a story set centuries in the future, you get a lot of leeway. You can write in spaceships and technology of such sophistication that it borders on magic. You’re bound only by the laws you write into your fictional universe. Because you’re making predictions about something so far away, people are unlikely to tell you that you’re wrong.
Writing a story set a few years in the future, you can make some accurate guesses about what’s going to come. My own novel, Child of the Hive, is set in the near future. The book took five years in draft before I found a publisher and, during that time, some of the things I wrote into the first draft to show it was the future have now happened. I predicted that the majority of people would be carrying around mini computers that could give them phone, email and web browsing in the palm of their hands. Sound familiar to any smartphone and iPhone users? I also guessed that there would be video billboards in the London Underground. Take a look at some of the major Underground stations and those billboards are there.
While some things are easy to get right, it’s also common for a story to feel very dated very quickly. I recently read a book published in 1994. It’s a science fiction book set in the very near future and includes concepts such as cyberspace. The internet is key in the story and yet bears little resemblance to the internet we are familiar with today, where millions of users are creating their own content and sharing their views with the world. Even something as simple as referring to email as electronic mail is enough to jolt the reader and make the book feel out of date.
Playing with the future is fun but, at the end of the day, all we can do is make an educated guess. The wonderful thing about sci-fi is that you can be forgiven for getting it wrong. There are so many books out there predicting household robots, colonies on the moon and flying cars to be available by 2010. The fact that the writers were a little optimistic about the rate of progress in those areas doesn’t stop the books being good stories. Of course, we do try to guess right.
To get things right, you have to think carefully about the technology that is available or will be soon. In these Tech Tuesday posts, I will be discussing technology and gadgets, some of which are far off, some of which are just round the corner. I’ll even be talking about some technology that is possible today.
Tags: future, sci-fi, science fiction, technology
