So what are some good plot hooks for a high tech space opera type setting ala the Culture?

They have hacked the backup copy of your brain.

But Wesley wasn't in TOS

He transcended space and time. He can sure as hell be.

With quadrillions of souls living in a Dyson Sphere (Swarm), you can go wild with the plot. That's more than an entire Star Wars type of galactic empire compacted in a single star system. It is much more efficient than terraforming and colonizing planets.

They are so big, that even if you dedicated a single page summary to each continent-sized area, it would still take millions of books, and several thousands years to read them all. If the Dyson Sphere had the same population as today's Earth, each person would have an entire continent for himself. They can hold so many people, that you could have multiple descendents of the same species + aliens and cybernetic civilizations living in star system.

Go nuts.

>Wesley got raped by bored Sublimes again

Alternatively
>there’s a civilization somewhere out there that’s considering being mildly discriminatory or limiting to AI at some future point
>send in our squad of pet posthuman war criminals to do things we find distasteful

Kinda wish the guy does actually update more often. Shit, he's slower than the guy making Romantically Apocalyptic.

TIME TO BRING SOME LIBER-TEA

It's a shame because he seems to be in a perpetual loop of demotivating himself. He feels bad about not updating which probably makes him not want to do it. Everyone else is stoked every time he posts a page and he just seems to feel bad about not posting it sooner.

This sort of affliction is common among many artists.

A competing empire has managed to halt entropy within their borders, and you are to investigate why.

The reason is that they are mining demons from the cores of populated planets for use in maxwell boxes.

I get that feel. You submit, people expect you to submit more and you feel like you delayed it to the point where it's just to annoy the folks who want to read it, if you don't you're doing the same.

At least with Romantically Apocalyptic, they're going back to add a shit ton more backstory now. Now instead of just a picture book, I got an entire fucking novel. It's kinda like a Codex in that sense, but without the gameplay or stats.

I see you too enjoy Rick and Morty.

>liberal schlock that proves the author and his perfect plan for the human race correct
>no laws for anything but it just so happens that EVERYBODY behaves EXACTLY how the author would like them to behave
>problems that already exist in our world like bestiality and other dark shit never happen
>not because of laws or traditions...they just dont...DONT ASK QUESTIONS

ah yes, the massive multiracial society of one

is this why lefties make such great and frequent tyrants?
>there are not laws against anything just be free maaaaaaan
>but oh by the way if you do anything i dont like im going to have you and your family executed because youre problematic

That seems a lot like a political rant, and very little like trying to come up with good plot hooks.

Are you confused?

>problems that already exist in our world like bestiality and other dark shit never happen
>not because of laws or traditions...they just dont...DONT ASK QUESTIONS
looks like someone has never read the books, the culture is massively fucked up.

A good general hook is to show how the distance between Earth and colonies has effected their culture.

>That seems a lot like a political rant, and very little like trying to come up with good plot hooks.

you also see the problem with the setting but linked to my post for some reason

the culture is a multicultural paradise where everything "just werks"

This seems like continued political and opinion rants that should go on a blog somewhere, and not like attempts at coming up with good plot hooks.

Are you confused?

Not the user's you're replying to, but you're essentially stating that authors have a tendency to shoehorn these cultures that somehow are extremely diverse yet somehow homogeneous with no problems and try to avoid how this is possible?

just imagine a less liberal one if you can't see through your /pol/ glasses, the OP said like the culture, not THE CULTURE.

I think he's more generally complaining of author's using science fiction to obnoxiously push political views. I kind of disagree - good science fiction is inherently political - but obnoxious politics can ruin even a good story.

I don't think a good horror sci-fi needs to be political.

STAR WHALES

THE culture is a specific sci-fi series that yes is very bad at that and is a very lefty political setting

i guess some other sci-fi settings do it but the culture is one of the worst

the hook is that the main character doesnt have a cybernetic taytay to stomp on his balls with her peg feet but hes heard tails of a City out in space where they are a diamond dozen

That's actually more of the description of the equipment of a character than a plot hook. And a bunch of strange memes.

The culture is a machine dictatorship in which all the people genetically or socially indoctrinated into complacency. It also happens to be a pretty nice place due to the machines being benevolent. The point is just how fucking weird and alien you have to get in order to approach an anarchic utopia. The series also features other humanoid civilizations that get on just fine and operate according to somewhat different principals. The entire first book is from the point of view of someone who is at war with the culture, spends plenty of time opining on why he hates it, is never really proved wrong, and even gets some amount of agreement from the culture agent he encounters. Player of games is all about SC being manipulative bastards, Use of Weapons is about a mercenary the culture hires to ends up being a crazed killer, sort of. Exsesion is about how the culture ultimately fails to prove worthy in the eyes of higher dimensional beings and how the minds fall apart in the presence of something real to compete over. Look to windward is about commemorating the cultures fuck ups.

The soul has been scientifically discovered. It turns out that teleporters and body transfers don't preserve it.

that's an interesting plot point, which could lead to a lot of neat scientific speculation on how to preserve the original body, how much you need to preserve, and the like, but what is the adventure hook to go with it?

Always found it weird when space-dwelling fauna have a defined 'top' and 'bottom' when they've evolved to live in an environment where those sorts of directions have no meaning.

It makes me question who designed it.
WHO MADE YOU, SPACE WHALE? WHAT CIVILIZATION DO YOU HAIL FROM?

A flock of angels has descended upon the discoverers and told them to keep this secret while they think up a patch and fix the accounts because not having teleportation work would break too much now.

wait, are the angels the one fixing the accounts?
Are they putting in new celestial beurocracy to properly transfer souls? Will teleporters need holy soul-adapters on their power dongles? Will each teleportee get a new soul?

GALACTIC SIMULATION PATCH NOTES v1.4.69
-Added support for soul transfer after teleportation
-Added option for existing soulless players to reclaim soul
-fixed crashes
-fixed minor bugs
Added lootboxes with new weapons and gear

Fucking finally.

ok so someone give me the best reads for the culture. Are the stories standalone? In a series? Any that are just crap and skip over with a tl;dr summary?

Each story is standalone and you can read them in any order you like. The first book isn't really a good introduction to the series though, while Player of Games is the most Veeky Forums (given that it's about actual games).

>everything you just described
>+400 energy credits
Fuck stellaris

All the planets in the civilized galaxy are starting to rotate slower and slower, not by enough that it's noticeable in day-to-day life, but days are getting longer which obviously is disrupting clocks and dating systems, and will within a matter of years, if not months, will start having serious ecological issues. No scientists can currently explain this phenomenon. Find out why!

>With quadrillions of souls living in a Dyson Sphere
I kinda dislike the idea that a super advanced race would have huge populations. I prefer it when the population declines and individuals grow more solitary as technology advances. This makes more sense to me because a technologically advanced individual could have automated a lot of the basic needs like fabrication, food, energy production, etc, and technologies like fast transport, various forms of communication and eventually telepresence would make it unnecessary to live near other people to get the required social contact.

So, for super advanced races (or humans very far into the future), when it comes to technologies like Dyson spheres, I much prefer it when there's only one dude using the whole sphere for his own means, and he doesn't even live there full time, only occasionally visits.

A million or so individuals, each living in their corner of the galaxy, focusing on their personal projects and only interacting occasionally with whoever they consider their friends, maybe coming together once every 1000 years for a council, strikes me as a more compelling picture of an advanced civilization as opposed to populations of quadrillions of people packed into a Dyson sphere.

I think in one of Asimov's works (I forgot which one), one of the characters meets a guy who lived alone in a giant complex run mostly by robot servants, but my memory might be playing tricks on me.

>a guy who lived alone in a giant complex run mostly by robot servants
That could be the population: the god-like super AIs that humanity has become, and the lesser lifeforms that they created to be pets.

That sounds like AT-43 Onis

The Rick and Morty fandom and the Culture fandom are both thoroughly the same, user. The Culture as a piece of work is worse than Rick and Morty though.

The Culture is a society of drug addicts thoroughly decadent baby-coddled humans who are morally superior than all their neighbours by virtue of their inherent moral superiority. It reads like a 14 years old first fanfiction.

Picture very much related. It's (metaphorically of course) like Banks saw the humans in Wall-e and decided that the human whales had a morally superior culture. It's very difficult to take seriously.

Given the descriptions of the previous books and how they all seem to be about how batshit or immoral the culture is, I cannot actually parse what your arguments or point could be besides trying to start arguments over nothing.

>how they all seem to be about how batshit or immoral the culture is
Pretty much. Even the author is aware that the Culture is completely impossible in real life, and they could only exist because of technologies that allow them to generate energy and matter out of effectively nothing, and that they've pretty much handed over their lives to supreme AIs. The Culture only looks good by comparison because their conflicts are against excessively awful civilizations; from the perspective of not-totally-fucked-up civilizations, the Culture consists of manipulative bastards running an empire of supreme hedonists.