Grrl Power #1401 – Gateway to space madness
Oh, you wanted examples of gravity slasher movies?
Shear, rated Glip-Glorp 5 for overabundant teenage necking, sexual situations and violence.
Crush, rated Glip-Glorp 7 for inveterate exposure of secondary sexual organs, profanity, sexual situations, and violence.
The Spagettifier. The granddaddy of the genre, rated Glip-Glorp 9 for unrelenting nudity, shower scenes, girl aliens of one species making out with girl aliens of another species (and not the species you’d think), sexual situations, profanity, gore, sexual situations involving gore… like, two piles of gore make out, violence, blasphemy, and questionable financial advice. It’s a classic.
Event Horizon is the consummate “Hyperspace is/Wormholes lead to hell,” but of course there’s also Doom, Half-Life… which isn’t hell, but those portals still lead to a dimension full of jerks. Obviously Warhammer 40K. I don’t know how it works in Warhammer Zero K. I’m going to assume that wizards using teleport spells have a 5% chance of bringing demons along with them. I actually don’t know anything about Warhammer Fantasy. I assume they’re connected, like, the dark elves in WhF worship Slaanesh or Tzeentch instead of Lolth. I could google it, but if I don’t then it allows someone break out their esoteric Warhammer knowledge and a soapbox.
Then there’s edge cases like the Natural Selection asymmetrical multiplayer mod for Half-Life. It’s less “warpdrive is the devil” and more “deep space has mysterious fungus.” I think. Or maybe there is some sort of hyperdrive that attracts evil extra dimensional spores like a bug zapper minus the zapper. I’m not sure. I played it 2 or 3 times.
Oh, and I guess The Expanse, where defeating distance attracts evil shadow Pacmen. Spoilers. Look, if you haven’t watched The Expanse, it’s baaaasically the best Sci-Fi thing out there. I think it just edges out Stargate SG-1 and DS9, which are my other tippy-top faves.
Oh, I just thought of another one, From Beyond. One of Jeffery Combs’s earlier movies. Just after Reanimator, I think. Anyway, From Beyond is based on an H.P. Lovecraft book, and on that note, I suppose any movies with summoning circles, whether they’re drawn in lamb’s blood or are created by a bunch of janky electronics are all in the same… over-genre. Of course, the whole point of summoning pentagrams is collect calls to hell, so that doesn’t count in the whole “Who could have foreseen this outcome” category.
Ooh, look! A new vote incentive! And it’s updated with color!
Well, in progress, obviously. I have another one that’s actually a bit further along, but everyone was all, “Sydney Kobold vote incentive!” So I switched to this one. Plus the other one was a multi-character picture so it will actually take me longer to finish. I hope to have an update for this one each week, so stay tuned. There is a slightly higher res version on Patreon.
By the way, this gunmetal blue-ish background and teal pencils are how I draw the comic. I set it up this way so I don’t have to spend all day staring into a bright white blank page.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
40.000 ways to die in space
From Beyond starts out good enough, but the original was just a short story, and the padding goes places Lovecraft wouldn’t have; He liked to leave the worst of it implied.
In Lovecraft’s cosmology mankind are the bugs living in the wainscotting of the universe, happily overlooked, and it is Not Good for the bugs to invent spotlights so that they can see what’s outside the wainscotting, the homeowner might call in an exterminator.
I think the best Lovecraft movie is the original 2010 “The Color”, which is Lovecraft done right. Subtle horror, with the emphasis on subtle. Much better than the Nicolas Cage remake.
The whole “seeing it makes you lose your sanity” trope never made much sense, as no matter what’s going on outside the ship, it’s just photons by the time it’s gone through the window. If seeing it could drive you mad, so could a YouTube video.
From Babylon 5: “G’kar and the Ant” sums up cosmic horror really well. (and incidentally, B5 is better than DS9, so DaveB should watch that if he can stomache the political commentary on today from 30 years in the past)
Lovecraft had basically three major sources of horror in his stories: G’kar and the Ant/Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, racist fears about race-mixing, and “what if the crazy guy in the asylum is right?”
“racist fears about race-mixing”
I think it’s a bit more subtle than that. I think it was more on a variation on the third theme. English literature was about the technological progress and how the Industrial Age was right and Science (and the New England churches) had all the answers.
Lovecraft looked at the other religions around the world and thought “These are very different from what we think are the answers. What if they also have some insights?”
But those insights are so different that the people looked crazy to him. So: what if those guys are more accurate, and the guys in the asylums also happened on some of the same insights?
Admittedly I found other authors writing in the same vein, e.g. Clark Ashton Smith, to be more interesting. So I haven’t read as much Lovecraft as “Lovecraft-adjacent” stuff. Maybe he leaned harder on explicit racism than I recall.
Yeah, there’s nothing subtle about Lovecraft’s racism.
I thought it was more like Lovecraft was holding up a dark mirror to Christianity. I mean, here’s this all-powerful being, don’t question its morality, by the way it has exterminated all humanity (almost) at some point in the past, and its most commonly recognized and universal sacrament is symbolic cannibalism (aka communion). It actively encourages people to be hostile to nonmembers (except when trying to recruit them) and actively hostile to rationality with the statement that Belief, even in the absence of evidence, is key to your existence. Finally its highest example of virtue is someone who got killed in a particularly gruesome way and the reason that’s meaningful is because of the intensity of the suffering and pain involved.
Also, this all-powerful being allows whatever to happen on Earth without intervening – because “Ineffable plan” that we can’t possibly understand don’t even try, even though a rational man would conclude that means it kind of doesn’t give a damn about us.
Oh, and speaking of damns, this entity also invented Hell, and will send you there if you don’t obey its supposed whims in spite of having no evidence of its existence. Because “Belief in the absence of Evidence,” right?
I mean, from a certain late-Edwardian New-England point of view, this all made sense. And Lovecraft looked around at it, found himself in the middle of a land populated by believers in a particularly dangerous death cult who accepted it as complete normalcy, and was proper horrified. So he just papered the whole thing over and renamed the dieties and powers involved, and started novelizing it.
And yeah, along the way his examples of evil and depravity were pretty much any mixed-race crowd where (white) people could get corrupted by the (evil) influence of Others. He made many of the Others members of different species, but his common depiction of cult members was mixed-race humans.
And by the way, if I recall correctly, female human characters had no spoken lines in his novels. To the extent that they existed at all they were plot devices that we heard about second-hand. And the Outsiders were often so “Unnatural” and “Alien” as to have no specific gender at all.
A Howling Bigot, even by the standards of his own time. Offering a critique of the dominant religion around him.
I watched B5 back when it originally aired and I haven’t since. I loved it at the time, but I’m worried a rewatch with the original video toaster NTSC resolution badly aliased VFX would do it a disservice.
When the race you’re mixing with is creepy fish-men who live underwater who doom all your descendants to morphing into Fishmen themselves after puberty, I think a certain degree of fear is somewhat warranted.
In 40k, a youtube video very much could drive you mad if it featured any symbols of the Chaos Gods.
I can imagine that looking at hyperspace where normal geometry gets distorted could be disorienting, like a mundane optical illusion but more so.
Yeah, a mundane optical illusion… while riding a roller-coaster, backwards
I don’t think you hire Nicolas Cage to do subtle anything, let alone subtle horror.
At least that’s not what he’s known for.
Imagine a video of a battle. Not the whitewashed propaganda we see of soldiers in crisp uniforms running toward some unseen foe, but a REAL battle. People are shooting, people are getting shot. Watching that would be upsetting, from the safety of your living room.
Imagine instead you were THERE. Maybe you’re relatively safe, behind solid cover, nobody’s intentionally shooting at YOU, but the danger of a stray shot is still there. Maybe you see someone get shot right next to you. That would be far worse than merely watching the video, you’d come away from that with PTSD.
Have you seen any of HR Giger’s work? Some of it can be disturbing to look at, but at the end of the day it’s just paint on canvas. Now imagine it’s real. You’re walking down a hallway and the walls are made of steel that looks like flesh. Then you see one of the figures MOVE, and it makes a very human-sounding groan. It’s not just a sculpture, somebody DID that to a real person. They might be nearby, they could do it to YOU. Much more disturbing than a mere art piece.
Imagine you look out the window of your spaceship, nothing protecting you but a sheet of steel and glass. And out there, you see impossible geometry. Solid stone shifts before your eyes, twisting into strange shapes that should simply collapse under their own weight, but do not. What if the ship gets too close to whatever’s doing that? What if the ship starts twisting? Where are you going to go? How could you even protect yourself from such an incomprehensible force?
You’d be a different person after witnessing that.
It’s fun to think of how you’d rework “The Ring” for current technology, since virtually nobody has VCRs anymore. Sadako would have a TikTok channel. People would worry about “getting RingRolled”
“From Beyond” is a case of overlapping parallel dimensions being revealed by a Mad Scientist gizmo. Said dimensions full of wild alien animals with no fear of Man and willing to see if we are tasty. This probably inspired “The Mist” since Steven King is a Lovecraft fan…
See is the key word here; The scientist had invented a sort of light that enabled you to see the wider universe that was there the whole while. The problem was that light made you visible to that wider universe, too, and the things living in it.
Which were there all along, but normally didn’t NOTICE you.
I actually prefer the alternative FTL approach of travel through hyperspace, with the concept of the “blind spot”: When you look out a window into hyperspace there is nothing there that your visual system can process, so you have no vision at all, like looking out the back of your head. Larry Niven used this in his Known Space novels, but I saw it first in Lee Correy’s Starship through Space, published in the 1950s.
Sure, and it’s an amusing conceit, but the fact remains that your eyes don’t interact with whatever the heck is out there, they interact with photons hitting your retina. So, perforce, you’re either going to see some pattern of photons, or blackness.
And anything looking out that window could do to you, watching a video from a camera pointed at that window could do, too.
That is a very materialistic point of view (which I happen to share) but if one apply the concept of ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ that in WH40K exist, then things change. the problem is not how hyperspace/warp/whatev affect your eyes, it is how it affect your soul.
In our universe photons are just somewhat boring particles (or waves, whatever) that don’t do anything except travel in a ~straight line until they excite some pigment in your retina.
But in W40k hyperspace they could be more complicated. Nothing in normal physics prevents hyperspace photons from being intrinsically evil and doing complicated things to your retina, such as turning the ions in your synapses evil and chaotic.
To paraphrase Scotty; Turning the ions in your synapses evil and chaotic? Any good bottle of Scotch will do that!
I like how under our current understanding of physics this pretty much already happens.
As you get closer to the speed of light, more and more of the visible universe contracts towards a point in front of you, which gets increasingly brighter and more blue. Eventually it gets intense enough that it actually becomes a drag on your further acceleration. And of course long before that the blue shift crossed from visible into UV light and then towards increasingly hard gamma radiation, none of which we can actually see.
So, to our vision the universe in front of us would disappear into absolute blackness, while at the same time bombarding us with lethal radiation.
Meanwhile looking back, the universe gets increasingly dimmer and redder, eventually crossing into infrared, then radio and even longer waves which are also invisible to us.
So what we would see at very close to the speed of light is an almost completely black environment with in front of you only an ever shrinking ‘eye’ of blindingly bright light with a fathomless black center. It would not drive you mad (even if it is busy killing you with radiation), but it sure would not give you warm fuzzy feelings looking at it.
Physics can produce existential horror all of its own, without us needing to dig into our collective myths we used to terrify ourselves with.
I’m not sure that actually would happen. Sure, the visible light would blue-shift into UV, but the infrared and (eventually) radio waves would blue-shift into visibility.
So the visible stars would change, but I’m not sure if that dual-disk theory is accurate. If it is, we should be able to detect it at fairly low velocities.
We are still a fair bit away from being able to create noticeable redshifting through relativity effects. That requires 5000+ km/s, we are hitting 50 (with the voyager probes)
Red shifting of light that catches up from behind with you near lightspeed rocket will happen, and if it shifts far enough it becomes invisible to the human eye. Same as light from the front will blue shift, and eventually becomes invislble to the human eye as well.
I wish I could explain the narrowing effect of space time at very (very! as in 99.99%) close approximations of light speed. Sadly it is beyond my ability. There are several videos that attempt to explain the effect with differing degrees of clarity.
It won’t ever be “black”. Yes, the tiny percentage of available electromagnetic wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum visible to humans will blue/red shift out of range for our eyes to pick them up. But the electromatic wavelengths adjacent to the visible spectrum will blue/red shift into range of our eyes. Looking forward, when current red light (700nm) gets blue-shifted to ultra-violet (1m) as they get “sped up” into the visible range. Same thing looking backwards, where ultra-violet, x-rays, and gamma rays will get “stretched out” to eventually land in the visible spectrum.
As for being wiped out by radiation, not really. Once in space we’ll already be flooded with all ranges of electromatic radiation, even “sitting still” (assume we can actually “sit still”). There isn’t a huge concentration of the spectrum sitting exactly between 400nm and 700nm. And by the time we’ve accelerated to the speed where visible light is hitting at Gamma frequencies (looking forward), the waves originally at Gamma frequencies will be hitting us at even higher frequencies. Except that faster radiation can’t penetrate into anything very deeply, so even the most bare minimum of “shielding” would be sufficient.
> So, to our vision the universe in front of us would disappear into absolute blackness, while at the same time bombarding us with lethal radiation.
The universe already has microwave, infrared, ultraviolet, X-ray, etc radiation in it. So while the visible light would shift into invisible light, formerly invisible wavelengths would start becoming visible.
In Larry Niven’s Known Space, the only problem with hyperspace is that it looks like ones blind spot, i.e. like nothing at all, not even blackness.
There’s also the issue (only revealed much later) that there’s something living in hyperspace that likes to consume spaceships – they tend to hang out in major gravity wells, which is why you don’t want to enter hyperspace too close to a star…
Sometimes basic reality is already deadly enough and terrifying without needing to add extra problems.
Wormholes don’t work like the Warp of 40K.
They just take you from A-to-B very quickly, yet need a lot to work.
Even in 40K looking into the Warp does nothing, as to everyone except Navigators it looks black, so black it could lead to feelings of Nihilism for anyone even glancing into it.
The shutters are there in 40K to stop the Daemons trying to claw their way in when the Geller Field keeping them out fluctuates, or if someone puts a shot through the window.
I’d like to note that a Wormhole doesn’t even necessarily take you there all that quickly – the journey through a Wormhole might still take years depending on the setting as the shorter distance between two wormholes compared to the long route might still be many light-hours, light-days, or even light-years apart. Especially when dealing with a full size wormhole that’s basically a black hole with the mass of a small star that is just barely kept from fully collapsing into a singularity by some means.
In Greg Egan’s “Diaspora” researchers went to enormous lengths to generate an experimental wormhole, as part of an effort to achieve FTL travel. Only to discover that the length inside the wormhole was exactly the same as the length outside it. Which substantially advanced their understanding of physics, but wasn’t any help.
Like many plot convenience features in SF, the idea that wormholes would be shortcuts doesn’t actually have any basis in physics. Actual physics suggests that they’re probably no shorter, because space time seems to be almost perfectly flat on a large scale. No “crumpled” universe with shortcuts across the points where it touches itself.
The Deadlands: Lost Colony ttrpg has a hyperspace tunnel through Hell; unfortunately – or fortunately, depending on your perspective – it collapsed and is no longer accessible.
Mmm, bubbly fizz!
Came here for the WhF nerds nerding out.
Thus far disappointed. Where are you?
They’re furiously debating each other about whether or not Warhammer Fantasy still takes place on a planet inside the WH50k universe or not.
Well, then your ship isn’t cool enough. You need more gothic architecture and slave labour operated machines and our fluffy engineer needs Mechadendrites. That somehow makes the Warp much more horrifying.
It’s somehow even worse if the mechadendrites are fluffy and organic looking.
Yeah, unless there’s specific mystical lore, there shouldn’t be anything mind rending about seeing space warping effects on the universe.
It’s just space that looks weird, at most it should make you nauseous.
Not really a WH nerd, but to chime in: Dark Elves in both Fantasy and 40K abhor Chaos, though of course a few individuals fall prey to it’s attractions. In both, they are evil for their own reasons.
“Everything you know is wrong.
Black is white, up is down, and short is long
And everything you thought was just so
Important doesn’t matter…“
An actual wormhole would behave more like Sydney’s site-to-site transport between Fracture and Earth, except theoretical wormholes need huge amounts of energy and negative-mass matter, to the point that gravity gets squished or stretched. It does not behave like a Stargate, as explained in SG-1, either.
Open wormhole; step through; close wormhole. Do not touch the edges.
Except for the open wormhole/close wormhole part. If a wormhole exists, it’s open. It’s a topological feature of space-time. It would take a tremendous amount of energy to create a macroscopic wormhole, and if it collapsed, all that energy would be released, which would be bad.
Astronomer: Ooh, that is bright. Let’s see; is a Nova? Nope. A supernova? Not that either. A neutron star merger? I don’t think so; wrong spectrum. Wormhole collapse? Hmm, that could do it.
It would be interesting if instead of Hell, you warped through generic fantasyland.
You’d have a scene of elves doting on trees and having happy picnics – and then suddenly in the sky, 10 000 tons of military hardware appears from a portal at mach 3, only to enter a new portal 100 m ahead, in the fraction of a second…
It works because it’s already been established that the Isekai dimensions have the metaphysics for summoning things and sending them back…
In the Dresden books, one can shorten one’s travel distances by taking short cuts through the Nevernever – basically a fairy land of the “you don’t want to attract their attention” type of fairies.
It’s all full of hammers
Yeah, not really all that common a trope in the larger body of SF. Really kind of rare, in truth, but it can occasionally make for an interesting plot device.
It’s one of these ‘more common than you’d think’ things, especially if you broaden it to ‘the human mind can’t handle hyperspace’. Technically it’s true in Asimov’s Foundation universe for instance – they just managed to find a way to deal with it a few millennia ago.
I’d say it needed one where the forces were just minding their own business when tourists kept dying in weirdly gory ways. but Tucker And Dale vs Evil made fun of two good ol rednecks dealing with that
There’s also Schlock Mercenary. The creation of temporary wormholes to basically teleport across the vast distances of the galaxy upsets dark matter entities. The only interactions one can have with them is through the gravitic field, but they are perfectly capable of crushing the ship you’re in, or even turn a nearby star into a black hole.
Wow. Most of the FTL travel I have encountered in fiction, Warp, Hyperspace, Wormholes, Slipstream, etc., were all relatively safe. Babylon 5 could be dangerous, as you could get lost in Hyperspace and perish if you lost the signal to your travel beacon and could not get back out. In a lot of the cases, the most dangerous part was that you were blind to your travel path ahead and your destination until you dropped out of FTL travel, which means if you miss your exit target or the map was innacurate, or something changed at your destination, you could find yourself flying into something at very high speed.
FTL travel is a device so the plot can happen.
Science fiction used to take place on Earth or the Moon.
Then we found out more about what they really look like, so they ended up on Mars, or a moon of Jupiter etc.
Then we found out a) what Mars looks like and b) how long it takes us to get there.
So the stories moved to other stars. But those are a really long way away, so you need some way to get there fast enough for the audience not to get bored.
Part 1, on Earth
300 years pass.
Part 2, on Proxima Centauri 3.
3000 years pass.
Part 3 on a moon of a planet circling a star a hundred light years away.
5000 years pass.
Part 4, back on Earth. No one from Part 1 is still living, it’s a new civilization, and the protagonist spends a year learning a new language.
As my favourite futurists like to say
We can expect to achieve 10% of light speed without requiring clark-tech, and without running into problems like dust particles that at relative speed hit like a small moon. With that speed we can travel from one end of our galaxy to the other in 2 million years. Even if we need a century to build up enough infrastructure to build a new colony shop, that leads to a colonisation of the entire galaxy in a couple of million years.
However, given the distances involved, any trip will be effectively one way. It’s a human life time to reach the next star over (4 lightyears, 40 years in transit at 10% plus the time to accelerate and brake). Even if we solve the problem of aging and its short, medium, long and very long term effects that will kill us (like the radioactive decay of certain atoms in our bodies), if we return after a century the culture and technology will be radically different. If we return after, say, a couple millennia there would be enough genetic changes in either us or the people we left behind to cause problems.
Assuming that there ever is an economic case for shipping goods between two solar systems, it will be either with moon sized generation ships, or fully automated ones capable of shipping a measurable portion of the resources of a solar system :)
*The Forever War by Joe Haldeman has entered the chat*
What if the outside portals were closed to block ads? like highway scenes on tekwars
“This universe brought to you by…”
Love the leg freckles. Great detail.
thinking of Star Wars, Star Trek, SG-1, Interstellar…I don’t recall wormholes equal driving people insane.
If it’s safe, then it’s not worth worrying about. If it isn’t safe, then it’s worth asking what not to do.
She probably woke up in a cold sweat when she got back home. “OMG, I went through a wormhole! But sometimes those are bad!
…I guess my version has a shield. Or, I really didn’t see anything when I went through, so maybe it didn’t apply.”
OTOH maybe she closed her eyes?
I think Sydney would have asked about this earlier, considering she’s got warping capability from the orbs. But then, I think the method was different?
Wouldn’t surprise me if she could end up with an ‘unsafe’ option, given that the flight log got corrupted. Which yeah, that could be ‘because of the crash’, but there’s also unknown amount of linkages. Like maybe to unlock more speed, she needs to get the path between shields and flight. Maybe more. And then also purchase what’s unlocked.
So longer term problem. Until Sydney figures out a good grinding method. Or whatever the ‘pre-spend’ thing is, since that seemed to be related to what she was doing at the time. Of course, after figuring that out, would be right before she unlocks whatever spot that upgrades the UI enough to just tell her. Or just finding the settings menu.
soo hyperspace here is SW not 40k, good to know,
“I don’t know how it works in Warhammer Zero K. I’m going to assume that wizards using teleport spells have a 5% chance of bringing demons along with them. I actually don’t know anything about Warhammer Fantasy.”
It plays entirely on one planet and there are no “teleport spells”.
There are the elven waystones. Barely anyone knows how to use them, but are about as safe as the webway.
But without the Ulthuan Vortex, demons could kinda just…manifest freely. With it, they are mostly limited to the chaos wastes at the poles.
So yeah ‘Don’t touch the sides’ is the operation of choice here as well.
Which streaming services carry “Shear,” “Crush,” or “The Spaghettifier?” You made them sound entirely too entertaining.
For dangerous hyperspace, I still have a fondness for “The Game of Rat and Dragon” by Cordwainer Smith, because the answer to the terrifying invisible hyperspace threat that could cause madness or instant death was…cats. The only way to detect the dangerous entities in that version of hyperspace was with a team of a human and a cat wearing telepathic amplifiers. Between them, they could sense the creatures just in time for the cat’s reflexes to “swat” them with a photon bomb. The cats had their own little kitty-ships that rode along outside the primary vessel like a sidecar. But with nukes.
I like the hyperspace from Star Wars. Space whales and space demons live there. Not very realistic but it looks cool. Yeah I guess I’m more to the romantic side on the romantic vs enlightment scale.
Much as I would love for Warhammer Fantasy (now Age of Sigmar) to exist somewhere in the Warhammer 40’000 Universe, even in its history, Games Workshop has stated bluntly that they do not. The fact that there are similarities between the two is just a coincidence.
(re: cheaper to create with easier swap outs. Daemons in Fantasy are identical to 40K but for the shape of their base? confusing, but hey! We save a few hundred hours of design time & payroll, so bonus!)
There’s an argument to be made that since the Warp is a transdimensional, semi-atemporal existence, The Fated Place not existing in the 40k galaxy doesn’t preclude the Warp being the same in both settings. The Chaos Gods, and possibly the Old Ones just have sufficient ability to travel through the Warp to reach more than one material universe.
She is not sitting on his legs.
So are Digit and Harem just basically doing the rounds with Cora’s crew or would Max not allow them to hook up while technically “on duty”?
Draping yourself across someone’s lap like that usually implies at least some interest in “doing the rounds”. If Max is sparring for fun on some space station it would be tough to justify a no fooling around rule in the security of Cora’s ship. Cora would be the one to say yea or nay on ship board shennanigans. Given what we have seen of her, I would bet her rule is “not while actively doing something critical to the ship.” Other than her willingness to show cleavage, I don’t recall that we have seem anything of Digit’s sexuality. She has the beautiful nerd girl who is oblivious to her hotness vibe but for all we know she could be ace.
I think there’s also subspace tunneling, basically tearing a rupture into subspace and traveling through it. I think it was said to be faster than hyperspace but far more dangerous.
Fan theories abound that Event Horizon is a precursor to the Warhammer 40k universe. IE, traveling through the Warp without proper protection
someone’s getting misplaced soon, huh?
The phone call is coming from inside the unimaginable gravitational forces!