
Titled Text: "Since the current Twitter threadfall kicked off in early 2016, we can expect it to continue until the mid 2060s when the next Interval begins."
Well, I don't quite get what this comic is about. Does that mean I'm too old?
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PracticalM wrote:It's a Dragon Riders of Pern reference. (Auto correct tried to turn that into Perl which would be interesting Dragon Riders of Perl).
Pfhorrest wrote:As someone who avoids Twitter, can someone please explain the non-Pern half of this joke?
Geminia wrote:
If anything, you may be too young...or you've missed out on a fantasy classic. The Dragons of Pern is an extensive series that weaves together fantasy and sci-fi.
Plutarch wrote:Pfhorrest wrote:As someone who avoids Twitter, can someone please explain the non-Pern half of this joke?
Twitter only lets you use 140 characters for each post. Sometimes people, not feeling this is enough, make a lot of posts, or tweets, one after another, all on the same subject. This creates their own 'thread,' which might indeed be dangerously annoying. They often number each of these successive posts, hence the 1/1 in the comic. However, I'm a little puzzled by the example '1/1' which would seem to imply a single post. if it was part of a thread, I'd think it would be 1/8 or something like that. BUT, I just realise, this might be part of the joke, with the thread numbered 1/1 being a a single post, and a rebellion against threads.
JudeMorrigan wrote:There's telepathy though. I feel like that kind of automatically disqualifies it from being hard sci-fi.
Pfhorrest wrote:JudeMorrigan wrote:There's telepathy though. I feel like that kind of automatically disqualifies it from being hard sci-fi.
With adequate explanation given, telepathy can be hard sci-fi. My computer is "telepathically" communicating this message to yours right now (look ma, no wires), and it's reasonable to expect that at some point in the future computers might be integrated with our brains in a way that there's no distinction between me and my computer, or you and your computer, and when I send a message through my computer over the wireless internet to you, that would be indistinguishable from telepathy.
rmsgrey wrote:The original stories are pretty much fantasy with some rational extrapolation - the science fiction background was no more than a framing device for a couple of decades until Dragonsdawn told the story of the initial colonisation (though it became a significant part of later events - and novels). For Dragonflight, if you remove the prologue specifying that this is an alien planet rather than a low-magic fantasy world, you would never know.
DavidSh wrote:At first, there also appears to be prescience, but it turns out to be a combination of time-travel and telepathy.
speising wrote:I haven't read it, only the Wikipedia summary today, but it's about *dragon riders*. It really looks to me like the technobabble is just a thin excuse to label a fantasy story as SF.
Except that, twice in Pern's history, there's a "Long Interval" of 400 years, where the Red Star doesn't come close enough to leave Thread and there's no "Pass"
Pfhorrest wrote:I actually haven't read the Pern stuff myself (that part of the joke had just already been explained), though from this discussion I'm thinking maybe I should some time, since my own Chronicles of Quelouva I'm slowly writing is explicitly science-fantasy or science-mythology in genre: two of the three settings begin as apparent fantasy worlds only to eventually be revealed to be within a larger science-fiction context, and the third setting begins as a straight up science-fiction story and ends up being set in a larger context of ancient mythology (which, in turn, is again wrapped in the broader science-fiction context, which).Spoiler:
This reflects my beliefs that there really is no coherent concept of "magic" beyond "something we don't yet understand", so whether something is scientific or mystical, technology or magic, depends on the level of understanding of the viewpoint characters or audience.
fluffysheap wrote:I don't think it's ever explained how dragons can teleport, or how a natural species could have evolved that ability (and it has to be natural because even fire lizards can do it). Also, if thread is so destructive, why hasn't Pern either been devastated or else evolved natural defenses during the time before the colonists arrived?
ObsessoMom wrote:fluffysheap wrote:I don't think it's ever explained how dragons can teleport, or how a natural species could have evolved that ability (and it has to be natural because even fire lizards can do it). Also, if thread is so destructive, why hasn't Pern either been devastated or else evolved natural defenses during the time before the colonists arrived?
I think you've answered your own question. Teleportation, fire-breathing, and telepathic links between every dragon on the planet were natural defenses developed before the colonists arrived.
Hmmmm. Ordinary speech works that way too. "Look ma, no wires!" Which does raise the question... just what is telepathy?Pfhorrest wrote:My computer is "telepathically" communicating this message to yours right now (look ma, no wires)
You mean... like Quantum Mechanics? If anything is magic, it's that.StClair wrote:Others, however, have magic, supernatural phenomena, etc etc that are explicitly non-mechanistic and do not follow rules of logic (at least not human ones).
I think I agree. Over-exposited becomes a thing like technobabble for its own sake, rather than for the story's sake in that the babble itself serves the reader rather than the story.commodorejohn wrote:I'd go with less-exposited every time, because as long as the author keeps things reasonably coherent the reader can always imagine...
Something on the OSI Layer 8, or even 9 (mind-to-mind, perhaps "conceptual layer"?) scope of things, with insufficient understanding of the infrastructure of what layers 1…7 are, just that it's there!ucim wrote:Hmmmm. Ordinary speech works that way too. "Look ma, no wires!" Which does raise the question... just what is telepathy?Pfhorrest wrote:My computer is "telepathically" communicating this message to yours right now (look ma, no wires)
Brian-M wrote:ObsessoMom wrote:fluffysheap wrote:I don't think it's ever explained how dragons can teleport, or how a natural species could have evolved that ability (and it has to be natural because even fire lizards can do it). Also, if thread is so destructive, why hasn't Pern either been devastated or else evolved natural defenses during the time before the colonists arrived?
I think you've answered your own question. Teleportation, fire-breathing, and telepathic links between every dragon on the planet were natural defenses developed before the colonists arrived.
No, there weren't any telepathic links between every dragon on the planet before the colonists arrived. The dragons didn't even exist until the colonists created them, by genetically engineering the dragons from fire lizards.
This is actually a question that comes up within the books, why doesn't the thread get out of control on the southern continent since there aren't any dragons protecting it from threadfall?
Turns out there are grubs living in the soil which will attack or eat the thread. The grubs won't protect the crops, houses or people that exist above the ground, but can prevent it from getting out of control. The original colonists knew this but due to loss of records and knowledge over time (and from the migration from the southern continent to the northern) the only information their descendants had about this was to "watch the grub" (or something to that effect, it's been too many years since I read any of this to remember exactly), which was mistakenly thought to be a warning against having grubs in the soil, and so for centuries the farmers have been methodologically ensuring that their fields are grub-free.
fluffysheap wrote:Except that, twice in Pern's history, there's a "Long Interval" of 400 years, where the Red Star doesn't come close enough to leave Thread and there's no "Pass"
The long intervals aren't, butSpoiler:Spoiler:
Reka wrote:Pern is actually one of my favorite examples of why it's a total waste of time to try to categorize speculative fiction into these exclusive categories. The first six books or so, there's very little science - if you want to read it as a fantasy with teleporting telepathic dragons, you totally can. The science fictional framework is there throughout, but it's mostly in the prologue, and the characters don't know about it. But the later books (in publication order, which is definitely the only way McCaffrey should ever be read) are unquestionably science fiction. (Some of the science itself is questionable, but that's par for the course for the genre.) So what's a poor bookstore employee to do? Put one copy of Dragonsong on the Fantasy shelf and another copy on the Science Fiction shelf? It's a ridiculous distinction, and has only gotten more ridiculous with the years.
cephalopod9 wrote:Only on Xkcd can you start a topic involving Hitler and people spend the better part of half a dozen pages arguing about the quality of Operating Systems.
rmsgrey wrote:Brian-M wrote:ObsessoMom wrote:fluffysheap wrote:I don't think it's ever explained how dragons can teleport, or how a natural species could have evolved that ability (and it has to be natural because even fire lizards can do it). Also, if thread is so destructive, why hasn't Pern either been devastated or else evolved natural defenses during the time before the colonists arrived?
I think you've answered your own question. Teleportation, fire-breathing, and telepathic links between every dragon on the planet were natural defenses developed before the colonists arrived.
No, there weren't any telepathic links between every dragon on the planet before the colonists arrived. The dragons didn't even exist until the colonists created them, by genetically engineering the dragons from fire lizards.
This is actually a question that comes up within the books, why doesn't the thread get out of control on the southern continent since there aren't any dragons protecting it from threadfall?
Turns out there are grubs living in the soil which will attack or eat the thread. The grubs won't protect the crops, houses or people that exist above the ground, but can prevent it from getting out of control. The original colonists knew this but due to loss of records and knowledge over time (and from the migration from the southern continent to the northern) the only information their descendants had about this was to "watch the grub" (or something to that effect, it's been too many years since I read any of this to remember exactly), which was mistakenly thought to be a warning against having grubs in the soil, and so for centuries the farmers have been methodologically ensuring that their fields are grub-free.
The fire lizards are telepathic though, so there has been a telepathic flying, teleporting, fire-breathing defense force native to the planet even before humans arrived.
On the other hand, the grubs are not native - they were genetically engineered, much like the dragons. The last Pass before colonisation left the planet dotted with circular areas of recent regrowth, presumably from individual thread-strikes (rather than the swept paths that unchecked thread-fall would leave if all thread was viable), while if the planet was protected by grubs, there wouldn't have been any visible damage...fluffysheap wrote:Except that, twice in Pern's history, there's a "Long Interval" of 400 years, where the Red Star doesn't come close enough to leave Thread and there's no "Pass"
The long intervals aren't, butSpoiler:Spoiler:
The issue is not the existence of Long Intervals, but their lengths - for some reason, if the Red Star doesn't come close enough to drop Thread, it returns 50 years early next time...
KevinRS wrote:From what I remember, the telepathy was also enhanced when the dragons were engineered from there fire lizards. The southern continent was initially the main colony site due to more fertile ground, but then had to be abandoned because of higher thread fall, and there were volcanic caves to shelter in on the northern continent.
Looking up the long intervals, not sure what the 50 years early you mention is. I'm reading that normally it's 200 years of no thread, followed by 50 years of thread, for a 250 year cycle. A long internal is 450 years, that's the 2 normal intervals, plus the pass that would have happened between them. I don't see how that means it's 50 years early
Reka wrote:You say that as if fantasy is somehow inferior to science fiction.
xtifr wrote:Reka wrote:You say that as if fantasy is somehow inferior to science fiction.
At the time, there was a definite stigma to fantasy in fandom. This is the reason that (for example), the World Fantasy Awards were created: even though the rules for the Hugos and Nebulas and other genre awards allowed fantasy, nobody would ever nominate, let alone vote for, a fantasy work. And science fiction consistently outsold fantasy at the time (with a few exceptions, like Tolkien). I wouldn't swear to it, but this may very well be the reason that McCaffrey went with "well, it may look like fantasy on the surface, but dig deeper and you'll find it's science fiction."
As for psychic powers being SF or fantasy, I think you have to judge that based on the age of the work. At the time, psychic powers were still considered plausible by a lot of people--even scientists. It wasn't until the public debunking of Uri Geller by James Randi, the debunking of the Rhine Institute's research, and the creation of the Randi Prize that psychic powers got moved, more or less for good, into the realms of pure fantasy.
At the time, even fairly "hard" SF writers (e.g. Heinlein or Niven) rarely hesitated to include psychic powers in their works. Today, it's a lot more iffy, but still probably second only to faster-than-light as an "acceptable break from reality".
If you're going throw out older works based on what we know now, as opposed to what we thought we knew at the time, then you also have to reclassify older works which had Mercury with one side always facing the sun (an important plot element in some stories) as fantasy.
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