Hey Veeky Forums, I'd like some help writing a sci fi horror setting. I've got a skeleton of an idea, but feel free to make any changes you feel like. I'm mainly just fishing for ideas.
>Humanity has reached the point where we can start exploring the galaxy, but the tech is still in its infancy and we're just getting into it >No alien contact or anything spectacular like that, we've just gotten to the point where we can get to nearby star systems within a reasonable time frame >One day we discover an enormous space ship, or artificial construct in any case >This thing is huge. Like, fuck huge. Small planet sized >Obviously humanity didn't make it, no obvious signs of life, no sign of who/what did make it >Weird shit starts happening to people who try to explore, a lot of them die horrifically, some have things happen that they can't explain, some disappear completely, standard haunted house shit
How do we build on this, Veeky Forums? I was thinking something like Roadside Picnic/Alien Zones. If you're not familiar with it, the STALKER series is loosely based on them. Simply put, there is a zone where aliens visited briefly and then left. Now the area (or Zone as it's known) is full of strange artifacts and phenomenon that cannot be explained, gravity behaves erratically in some spots, time doesn't seem to pass in other areas, etc.
Read the novel "Blindsight" by Peter Watts. It's available free online and involves the kind of thing you're talking about.
Ian Powell
Mmm. It occurs to me that we can aim for eldritch horror, without even touching eldritch things.
Going for the low-hanging fruits, the ship mind-controls people to restore its civilization to life.
That's it, the very presence of the ship slowly changes the perceptions of those inside of it, they slowly begin to have ideas, dreams, all of the stuff.
As the process accelerates, they can no longer distinguish what is a dream, what is reality. It doesn't help that the very technology of the ship makes things that should not be possible.
Some start to doubt the ship even exists, a few crazy ones jam pieces of mechanism in their bodies to stop/accelerate the degradation, with varying degrees of sucess.
But that's the obvious stuff. More insidious, this ship wants to resurrect its CULTURE, not its race or itself or any of the sorts. Have certain chosen ones begin to have ideas, begin to question if humanity is in the right. In some way amidst the horror, make some of the readers WANT to see that culture back, while at the same time making parts of it as horrifically as they are inevitable.
This is by far the hardest part of the horror tale, how to design a system alien to our moralities, but at the same time inevitable. Madness is self-destructive, so it's not that. LOL-random acts for a vague ideal just don't have the same punch.
Make the gospel of the ship just as terrifying as its effects of the scenery. Make the ship bring in a future where horror, despair and fraticide are logical and sane options.
Then again, I'm rambling.
Josiah Gomez
Thanks user, I've been on a huge alien kick lately and this looks really interesting. One thing though after skimming the wikipedia article:
The vampire thing is really weird but there's a good deal of biology and neuroscience to it if you read his post-notes explaining it. Basically they're superhumans both physically and mentally, but at the cost of needing human blood to survive and they go into grand-mal seizures when they see right angles.
At first, I thought the term "vampire" was the narrator's metaphor for high-functioning sociopaths as posthumans play a major role in the book. But as the novel went on I realized he was referring to literal vampires.
Hudson Gray
The Vampires are more of a peripheral setting element. Basically their DNA was scavenged from fossils and resurrected because they were useful for solving certain math problems and critical thinking.
They're an extinct human species which were obligate predators of other humans (Having lost the ability to produce several necessary proteins) and are hella autistic and sociopathic. They also hibernate. They died out when civilisation kicked in around the world properly and they were killed because of door induced seizures and also being hunted down and killed by organised groups.
The Vampires genes are the source of several innovations that help space travel in setting. I would say that Blindsight is not *hard* scifi, but it is extremely tough scifi. There's some really wacky shit in it but nothing actually impossible or fantastical.
Andrew Foster
What is y'alls opinions of the sequel? I may go on and order the omnibus.
Jose Phillips
Haven't read the sequel. I may one day, but Watts's prose and attitude is a little fatiguing. The narrator in Blindsight is kind of a sperg.
Did you ever read the Jurassic Park novels? Remember how about thirty percent of them was Malcolm sitting on a bed pontificating on Crichton's pet theories on evolution, social structures, and paradigms? Watts does the same thing but it's closer to 80% of the book. Fascinating stuff but I can't imagine reading three straight books like that in one sitting.
Camden Wilson
You could wave the freaky things happening due to the ship itself having the ability to do mind fuckery, ala Grey Area.
Grey Area is an AI of a massive ship from the Culture series, nicknamed Meatfucker by its unapproving peers, that have the unusual hobby of entering someone's mind and altering their perception of reality. Being a member of a Type 3 civilization, having your mind contacting it usually has the equivalent effect of saying Hastur three times or entering one of Nyarly's performances. It sometimes visit random people from random civilizations that it deemed have performed comical amounts of cruelty, and subject them into an endless cycle of experiencing those on the receiving end until they get a heart attack and die.
Not exactly fitting to what you had in mind, probably, but I can see it being altered to suit the setting.
Jaxson Powell
Echopraxia, I've read. It is a VERY different book to Blindsight. Like, chronologically it is a near direct sequel following the final sentence of Blindsight, and there are heaps of things that directly tie into the events of Blindsight. But fundamentally it is about just how fucked up Earth is in the setting. And Earth is really, really, REALLY fucked up in the setting. Like, Blindsight very much portrayed the idea that the crew were weirdos and edge cases, but you don't have to have very many people like them in society before shit gets really weird.
I liked Echopraxia, it was really good. Half the fun is reading the references section in the back and realising that the obviously bullshit stuff that is everywhere is completely viable stuff that could happen. Very bleak though, but if you were fine with Blindsight it's nothing new.
Andrew Martinez
>Help me flesh this out?
My only good idea is that 'your' galaxy isn't actually naturally occurring, but something of a greenhouse-esque project or experiment started and then simply forgotten about a few billion years ago or so and allowed to become overgrown and feral: what people now are basically discovering are the remnants and abandoned infrastructure drone-piloted tools and equipment meant to directly interact and groom your reality.
Elaborating or working off of that; I'd make a point to explain somewhere a long the line (ideally casually) that FTL isn't physically 'possible', so how the engine ACTUALLY works is that it's a hadron collider that makes a small, temporary, alternate universe around the ship where FTL is possible: simultaneously allowing it to move to wherever AND fueling the process in the first place (beyond it's ignition). This can then be used as a kind of subtle introduction or beeline into the notion that 'other' realities or universes can be created and or possibly traveled to.
So, then, I dunno, I guess humans set foot into these ships and they're all automated, so they detect "life" and they think, logically, "Only my owner would be intelligent enough to access this site" and automatically turn on the life support system and it's just WRONG. Wrong in the sense that these beings are from another dimension/universe and so different laws or rules of physics or even existence apply to them and it just fucks with humans in exceptionally weird ways.
OP here, some really good stuff so far. Bumping. Thanks fellas.
Ethan Russell
This reminds me a lot of SCP-962 The tower of babble. A mechanical metal-spire that remakes nature around it to serve it's purpose, it goes as far as to augment animals and even uses crude cosmetically surgery to make them appear more human, such as forcing them into an upright position and removing trunks and snouts etc. The spire sends out messages in hot air-balloons made from the animals it incorporates, the messages seems to describe humanity as deity's that are worthy of worships and it is somehow trying to please mankind by remaking the ground into metal and killing anything that isn't man made including plants and animals.
An excerpt from one of SCP-962's "rants" >"Cleanse the WORLD for the Great Ones Cleanse the WORLD for the Great Ones who greater than you your majesty your sublime nature Great Ones do I do right? The flesh and wood serve you unite with the steel you love do you love me too I am what you love. Great Ones see as I do my duty my passion forgive the slowpace the steel takes TIME. Did you like the servants they were the BEST of the cleansed only the BEST for you Great Ones made like you form you assume here on a WORLD to clean to honor you do appreciate please please I will complete the cleansing soon and you can take me away in your ships of FIRE and I can love you and you will love me."
Kayden Sullivan
It's honestly amazing how much in-universe material the author made for his books.
That's a great idea. Scifi magazines kill for stories with plot hooks that good.
My favourite SCP. I always like ones that aren't generic impeding dooms, and you never see a monster that actually likes humans.
Henry Brooks
How bout it being an Ark ship for a race that uploaded their consciousness into the ship and after countless eons their minds became corrupted and insane. Or the ark ships life preservation systems sees the humans as to be treated but the difference in physiology produces horrifically gory results.
Brody Thompson
Insanity as motivation is quite overdone though. Why can't the aliens (or the ship, or whatever) be sane, but just alien?
In fact, what if the ship is "benevolent"? What if it gives what the visitors want, in the most convulted, alien-lenses way possible? Like, imagine the NGE angels trying to give Shinji a gift, only they need to read Asuka's mind before understanding what is "giving", and "gift", and "shinji".
Brody Martin
>only they need to read Asuka's mind before understanding what is "giving", and "gift", and "shinji". I'm fairly sure that'd just result in an Asuka clone that enthusiastically rides Shinji's crotch
Ryder Morales
I've got a slightly different version which may be as interesting as the AI ship, with its mysterious intentions (which is good but typical I feel like because we can grasp it).
If I was an advanced alien race who valued immortality above all else, including a physical body, why would I choose to implant my mind and destroy my body?
Maybe the ship is simply the relic of what the aliens ultimately chose to abandon in real space, but they cling to it as an energy source and habitat. Say these aliens can create and manipulate gravity, and therefore can manipulate time. They exist in the ship in gravity generators which slow their time infinently down, but they still have the means to interact with the ship. Therefore, they are in the ship but the humans can't see or hear them since they are doing an infinite number of things (walking around, fixing things, planning attacks in real-space).
You could show the story from both perspectives, and have both the aliens and the humans be protagonists. They don't know what the humans are doing because it's happening so slowly, and they are moving near speed of light (except the ship) and are running circles around the humans without the humans knowing it.
Both races are benevolent and are not outright killing each other (which you have already presumed since the humans didn't nuke the ship already), and vice versa since the aliens have not either.
This to me has infinite possibilities- two species who don't want to destroy the other but due to their differing "clock speeds", it seems like they are. You could right it as a horror story/setting from both perspectives separately, or simultaneously.
Does anyone object to creating a Sci-fi general technology thread where we flesh out sci-fi through futurist tech outlook? It's a common tg theme and we seem to like it as educated anons who love sci-fi?
Connor Jackson
Because people will steal the content and trash it while making money on it.
If you think GW isn't on sites like this for free marketing data you need to wake up.
I like the hard science fiction futurist general thread idea. Also who killed the futurist USB thread for these other stupid threads... that was getting interesting...
Gabriel Myers
Didn't interstellar sort of do this?
Nicholas Hughes
OP here and still liking this. I don't have time right now to respond to everything so I'm just gonna toss this out here:
While focusing on what the ship is and what its whole deal is is great and even necessary from a writing standpoint, the overall point of the setting is our own humanity in its fledgling state of space exploration discovering this derelict and trying to study and comprehend it while dealing with the horrors that go on.
Jonathan Kelly
That sounds like Prometheus, so start there and make it better
Wyatt Anderson
Obviously the human explorers wouldn't know this, but perhaps whatever civilization constructed the vessel had reached the technological singularity and had to shut everything down and get out quick before it actually fired up?
When writing something like this, I do think it might be better for the writer to determine exactly what is going on and what the vessel is and everything, but then keep it to themselves and just drop vague hints and clues for the reader.
Jack Garcia
abump
Tyler Watson
Should one even bother getting into the how of FTL travel? Getting into that seems like it could detract from the actual setting. We're humans, not a whole lot different than we are now. We've found a way to travel faster than light, but not a whole lot. Leave it at that.
If you start explaining things like that then people are gonna start poking holes and being shitty. Obviously that excuse isn't gonna fly everywhere, but the how we travel is not important to the setting, the fact that we can and we are there is.
Joseph Roberts
The start is simple then, a group of humans on a ship discover the structure, set base on a station around it and start expeditions.
Maybe because of the ship's shape, the station is technically inside and they don't know it. What better way to take away safety that to violate base.
You could even focus on different groups, not just one. Say that after the first explorers (fate: whatever), several task groups were send to different places to do science and stuff.
By the dimensions of the alien ship, they have to travel on ships and cannot communicate with each other. Every group could face distinct peculiarities, some of them even becoming monsters themselves.
Basically, instead of focusing on one simple group, focus on several with distinct experiences. That way you can even do a party kill without a downer ending.
Matthew Morris
Modified alcubierre drives and call it a day. It is not the focus of the story.
Joshua Wood
The ship is the SIDESHOW, created by some bored aliens who value nothing but entertainment anymore. It flies around until it attracts some interstellar redneck grabage. Then it runs them ragged for fabulous prices.
The ship identifies the core values and beliefs as well as the desires of contestants and then systematically dismantles them. You're a proud warrior? The ship will motivate you to degrade yourself and be dishonorable. You're an enlightened humanitarian? The ship will try to make you savage and nihilistic. The core conflict between individual belief/moral foundation and FABULOUS PRIZES (cure for all sickness, FTL drive, or other scraps from the table) is the main attraction of the show. Broken participants aren't allowed to play anymore. If a race doesn't really hurt, the ship moves on.
