The Book of New Sun comes to mind: Woolf never explains the technology which sped up the "dying" of the Sun, and completely mystifies the "technology" of its "renewal" (slipping through dimensions and sending a white hole into the Sun, or something like that). But as some did say, except if you are writing a thesis in astrophysics, you can always bind the 21st century scientific views to tell an interesting story... You can always have a Planet Killer/Death Star/whatever...
My take, from my script's premise: tech is a backdrop. I say the two FTL's are wormholes and CES (Alcubierre drive) and momentum is for sublight. How they manage to generate the energy required for either propulsion doesn't matter, because the story is not about the tech, but how different people use the tech. I can't afford to get bogged down with too many details on how the tech works, because I have only 120pgs, max, to work with. The tech takes a backseat to the story of the people.
I've always liked the maxim that a science fiction story is only allowed one scientific impossibility. More than that, it's fantasy.
The problem is deciding what is impossible by standards outside of today's human knowledge. Who knows what will be 1000 years from now. In my scripted story, all the real high tech comes from off world (read as aliens). Humans are still fighting over the scraps of their own world with bombs and nukes.
Yup, and any level of scientific knowledge we select will by definition be arbitrarily chosen, so I like my science fiction writers to arbitrarily select our current state of understanding. Doesn't hurt my head as much. Fantasy writers often make a similar argument: "In a distant future, wizards and warlocks and unicorns (Oh, my!) might be commonplace." Maybe, but that's probably not the way to bet, and it doesn't make most fantasy worth reading. All that is not to say that I won't enjoy reading your story.
If it's alien technology, your story could start next Thursday. I would definitely set it sooner rather than later; I would have trouble believing that human society one hundred thousand years from now would not be utterly, unrecognizably changed.
Sorry, I mean, foreign technology. It comes from another species. I don't like the term 'Alien' as if we met another species of intelligent life they're think the same. They would just have a better understanding of some forms of tech.
Unfortunate. I guess my story will qualify as science fantasy as it's going to have interstellar capability, aliens and cyborgs. Not the Ahnold type or the Borg type and the only cyborgs are the two mains (the MC and the catalyst character). I figure, once you add interstellar capability, everything else is up for grabs because if you can overcome the limitations for developing interstellar capability, you've probably developed a whole lot more fantastic stuff along the way.
Not necessarily. Suppose the key to interstellar travel came out in connection with a side effect of current research into particle physics or astrophysics. We could conceivably be only decades away from a practical star drive in that case. Or, unlikely though it is, suppose we unearthed a working jump engine on a crashed alien artifact (think Stargate, or Pohl's Heechee asteroid). There's also the possibility of a civilization crash between the first discovery of interstellar drive technology and the time of the story, with only selected technologies re-acquired.
Judging by how civilisations have risen and fallen over the past 5000 years, the chances of our current civilisation with it's associated time references and calendars surviving another 1000 years are slight. Once you go a few thousands years into the future what you see around you will be archeology. Treat it as such.
