Sci-Fi: Every Idea in One CSV
gist.github.com
gist.github.com
Do you care how the file is used? Personal / Professional? Sales like a printed nerd dictionary with public domain images? Is there a license or something similar?
Reaching out per: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61026720/the-default-lic...
Because apparently Gists do not have default licenses.
Other: Its cool, and while having read a bunch of sci-fi over the years, there's still a huge amount I haven't seen or interacted with. However, it almost begs that "Why would you do that?" image meme from online.
Story about why you compiled a ~4000 line CSV of sci-fi ideas?
As an example, the data for the first row can be found on the following archived website (the real website seems to be unreachable).
https://web.archive.org/web/20120509005738/https://www.techn...
Guess since it's already in violation of the website terms anyways, not like anybody seems to care online.
See my tweet crediting the author. https://x.com/fleetwood___/status/1836858127821721749
Take the "cap" from John Christopher's Tripods books. The aliens used it to keep adult humans docile. It is placed on them during puberty.
That is not in here as "cap".
But is it some other thing? Perhaps "Remote-Control Slavery Mental control (possibly mediated by radio waves) of individuals of other species."?
And it uses terms as synecdoche, like how 'Bergenholm Drive' is 'A device that renders a spaceship free of inertia', rather than the more general category of 'inertialess drives', which is also used in Warhammer 4k (https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Inertialess_Drive ), Theodore Sturgeon's "Sturgeon" (https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine-1956-08/page/n131...), and others (https://dbpedia.org/page/Inertialess_drive).
Those interested in this list may like the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction at https://sfdictionary.com/ and The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction (https://archive.org/details/bravenewwordsoxf00pruc/).
From Drug glands to The Sublimed. Gridfire to Gelsuits to GSVs.
Special Circumstances itself seems like an innovation.
> Bill selected a more subtle, more frightening bodmod: He had one of his lungs removed and replaced with a large, artificial gland that dripped a perpetual, measured quantity of some fourth-generation psychedelic drug into his bloodstream.
At some point you need to wonder what "idea" means, like, what is the idea of a GSV? A giant FTL vessel? The Death Star is one of those. In the Dr. Who episode 'The Pirate Planet' we find the planet they are on is actually a spaceship made of a hollowed-out planet.
Add enough qualifiers and eventually you get something unique.
This is called Gateway by Frederick Pohl
Sky Bikes, Arthur C. Clarke (w/Pohl) (2008) should be 1973 for Rendezvous with Rama, which was not written written with pohl.
I just collated them together as a fun dataset!