Showing posts with label China. Show all posts
Showing posts with label China. Show all posts

Monday, 26 March 2012

Read any good sly-fi?

More inspiration for gaming and wider fiction, like the space plasma and symbiogenesis posts, but more like those on geoengineering and warming, and maybe even comment forms teaching an AI.

This time it's about helium, a gas with a range of applications, some arguably critical.

But there's not much on Earth, and even less because the market price has collapsed thanks to a timed sell-off of stores. The good news is the moon seems to have a lot...

The fiction? What if a sell-off was designed to cause a shortage and create an economic incentive, in this case for private spaceflight? Providing transport to the moon for helium extraction could be highly lucrative, and a decade or so is good lead-time; a consulting role in exchange for support might seem a smart career move. For bonus plot strands, some of those involved might want to cut funds to projects for ideology or appropriation.

More? From the blogs, how about this suggestion of western self-deception re Chinese military development, or this challenge to a buttress of modern physics, Mr Einstein's special relativity, or this look at the failings of reason itself in contemporary culture?

I need a label for these posts, so I'll propose a possible new genre. Here's a definition:

sly-fi (n., pl. -s)  a fictional genre consisting in the interpolation of feasible secret histories from reported facts and their elaboration in other settings

That's the label I'll use from now on, so you can find all the posts, including this, here.
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