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Comment by yongjik | Hacker News Reader

Tangential as a lukewarm SF fan - I liked some cyberpunk stories, but whenever I read one I can't help thinking "Wait, but what about bandwidth?"

I mean, I can sorta buy over-intelligent AI, human-computer interface, and all that cool shit, but the bits have to flow from here to there somehow. And all cyberpunk stories I've read just assume that information magically teleports. Just like that awful Avatar (which isn't really cyberpunk, but still) - we have rogue humans running around in an undeveloped alien planet and somehow they enjoy ultra-4K instant VR experience over the air? Who's maintaining that connection?

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SF stories have to pick and choose which tech they emphasize and which they gloss over. As a rule of thumb, tech shouldn't be explained much in detail unless it helps move the story along, or helps to describe the constraints in which the characters make decisions, making for a more interesting story.

The most elegant SF stories IMO gloss over a lot of tech - Inception for example, never explains a single technical detail about the machines that power the dream world, instead focusing purely on the human interactions.

A counterexample is Seveneves by Neal Stephenson, which focuses heavily on tech and makes a good attempt at keeping it within the realm of physics while still describing interesting ideas - however much of the theme of the book is how technology develops as a product of its environment and how it builds on existing tech in a collective way, so it contributes to the story. Even so, it was criticized for being too technical (even though I enjoyed that part of it immensely).

Another example is 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson, which makes the mistake of focusing too much on the tech - in fact the whole plot is essentially a vehicle for the author to describe all the possible human habitats that could exist in space.

For me, I think the problem is that cyberpunk pretends to show a gritty, realistic glimpse of dystopian near-future. The feel of realism is part of the appeal, and it costs more when the illusion is broken.

Nobody's gonna care about bandwidth if your hero is trying to save mankind from galactic chaos by reinventing history, but let's say, if you're in a spy action thriller set in the middle of WW2, you can't just take a flight from Heathrow to Budapest: there must be at least some pseudo-plausible explanation.

I have the same concerns about power. In the expanse they spend pretty much a whole book griping about how little sunlight there is to grow plants on a moon of Jupiter, and yet they have fusion powered star ships that can maintain 1g+ indefinitely without running out of fuel for a trip basically anywhere in the solar system.

I can't speak to that discrepancy, but I like the expanse as an example of hard sci-fi primarily because it makes very few tech jumps to build its universe. Ignoring the alien tech, the only real innovation that appears outlandish to us now that they gloss over in the series are those fusion starships.

But as with any sci-fi, you have to have some amount of suspension of disbelief when talking about new tech. If the author knew everything about the tech they talk about, they wouldn't be writing science fiction because they would have invented it, and we'd be reading nonfiction instead.

True, but nobody says how expensive the fuel-pellets are. It may be that hooking up a fusion bottle for agricultural lighting just isn't cost-effective.

Bandwidth is relatively believable, just look how much it's changed over the last 100 years.

The real spoiler is always going to be latency.

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