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?”
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.