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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   3100 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 16, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What are some of the most wildly original premises you've encountered in fiction? I love Cube (1999) because damn what a cool idea, even though the filmmakers screwed up and the puzzle is confirmed impossible to solve.

Greg Egan's Dichronauts moreso for the strange non-Euclidean geometry of the setting, than the plot itself which is a relatively pedestrian Jules Verne-esque voyage into the unknown.

In Time (2011) had an awesome premise but a not amazing execution so I'm not sure I can really recommend it. From wikipedia:

In 2169, people are genetically engineered to stop aging on their 25th birthdays and are given one free year to live. Everyone has a timer on their forearm that shows their remaining time; when it reaches zero, the person "times out" and instantly dies.

Time is now the universal currency, transferred directly between people or stored in capsules. The country is divided into Time Zones; Dayton is the poorest, a ghetto where people rarely have more than 24 hours on their timer. New Greenwich is the richest, people there are effectively immortal.

Film left a lot to be desired unfortunately. The casino scene could have been thrilling as all hell but it just kinda... Wasn't.

I thought the recent first season of Severance and the associated concept was a stroke of genius.

It even managed to depict activism realistically, with lots of moral nuance and without being preachy, which in contemporary fiction has got to be a tour de force.

The sheer existential horror of the concept is fascinating though. Is it slavery? Are you still yourself? Who deserves control over one's body? It's all extremely thorny and evocative from something that's conceptually so simple. I love it.

Hope they don't fuck it up like Lost was.

I really liked the premise of Flatliners (1990) - medical students deliberately induce clinical death to touch the afterlife

My headcanon is that cube is in the same universe as Blame!, so the cube is just the result of a literally insane AI.

Blame! is a great work that strangely gets little mention.

Italo Calvino Novels. Put If on a Winter's Night a Traveler and Invisible Cities aside because they're so weird I'm only 90% sure they're not complete nonsense. Baron in the Trees and Cloven Viscount are both about the collapse of pre-industrial society, told through a 18th century baron who climbs into the trees and never comes down, and a 17th century viscount who is split on half on the battlefield between his good side and evil side, and proceeds to govern his county well and be history's greatest monster, respectively.

If you're sour against postmodernists — and who could blame you — I'm still in awe of Mother of Learning which I read last August and September. Though what's special about that premise only unfolds over the course of the first two books; it starts as just 'timeloop magic school'. (And it's a shame the prose isn't better.)

Greg Egan's Permutation City is a classic example. It starts out with your usual Matrix-like virtual world thing but then gets weirder than that, very reminsicent of Max Tegmark's mathematical universe stuff.

I am going to die in this game-like dimension has one of the most unique worlds I've seen, even if the plot is kind of generic. It was written by a physics teacher, and it has entirely new physics: gravity pulls you to the nearest surface, cold is just as real as heat, your lungs process lavi and oxygen doesn't exist, and my personal favourite: "Did you think I was speaking English all this time?".

Generally, the differences from earthly physics show up in a controlled scenario (such as training), then surprisingly they also show up in real situations working exactly the same way. Like, wall-running past a pit is fine because the nonexistent floor doesn't pull you down, but surely falling out of a huge tree wouldn't let you

(linebreak for formatting only) "fall" to the trunk instead of the ground and save yourself.

You mean 1997? What's impossible about it?

Yeah, '97. There's a great video that breaks down why, the gist is the way the cubes move makes no sense.

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