In transformative fandom, the song of my people is a lonely tune

[extrapenguin]

So, after a very hectic week of work featuring lots of overtime, I daydreamed about what sorts of things I'd write for my letter for the 520 Guardian Reverse Exchange (I will totally write a letter of prompts for my author to choose from, because how else am I supposed to do an exchange???), and basically the answer is "porn prompts, cute scenes, plotty plot ideas, all the worldbuilding, and all the worldbuilding, except this time as if it were for a science fiction novel". The latter category includes stuff like relativity.

Assuming Shen Wei were slapped on a relativistic space ship that accelerated at 1 G for 5 000 years, then did some funky gravity assist swing stuff and decelerated at 1 G for 5 000 years more, he'd have from his POV spent 18 years on a relativistic space ship while the rest of the Universe ticked along by 10k years. This is obviously the best solution for reconciling Shen Wei saying he's sought Zhao Yunlan for 10k years yet have him not be an immortal!

(But seriously, someone sing me the song of my people. I would love to have someone take the chance to explain how the Hallows time travel is totally somehow due to the fact that they are e.g. a FTL drive left behind by a more advanced civilization that turned Zhao Yunlan into a tachyonic construct with imaginary mass who could thus break the speed limit and time travel! The pains of wanting science fiction/space AUs that aren't Star Wars or Star Trek based...)

(Guardian rewatch post ep 5 will take another few hours.)

Comments

[firestar]

*sighs* Oh dear. One of the ~old school~ then? Are said views along the same lines as Orson Scott Card and Robert Heinlein, perchance?

Ah, yes, that would be a bit awkward indeed. XD I'm the opposite on that, I think. I love worlds where I can sink my teeth into the worldbuilding of people and societies and focusing on things like cosmology and events tends to fly right over my head and not hold my interest. *laughs* I guess that's why I majored in history and not science. XD

[extrapenguin]

David Weber is pretty recent IIRC, but while the Honor Harrington series has a setting where sexism and racism don't exist (the Queen is black, half the military are women, etc), he completely forgets the existence of queer people and also the planet of the sexist Space Christians got narratively redeemed much before the planet of the socialists. His economic views are very right wing, and that on occasion shines through. I haven't read anything by Orson Scott Card or Robert Heinlein, so can't compare.

Ah, the pains of being in physics and wanting queer physicists to exist in media like the default-het ones do. (A lot of especially early, especially Hard SF was actually decent autism representation, even if accidentally. No Very Special Episodes, everyone agrees that the Science Thingy Of The Book is the most interesting thing ever and it's natural to be obsessed by it, and there's no judgement about being terrible at being a regular human.)

[firestar]

I shall keep that in mind, then. FWIW, I haven't read Card or Heinlein either but I've heard things about their sexism and homophobia that mean I don't really want to, either.

*squishes* Yeah, I get that. It'd be nice if more content creators outside of fannish spaces remembered that queer people exist and are right here, thanks. And huh, that sounds really cool, even though, yeah, I doubt it was intentional. Though maybe some of those early HSF writers were somewhere on the spectrum themselves, even if the terminology wasn't there.