I pulled a muscle in my neck last week. Shortly afterwards I came to the realisation that you don’t truly appreciate how many things you use your neck for until you’re suffering searing, agonising pain every time you move it, even if it’s just the tiniest fraction of a millimetre. It got so bad that I had to take a day off work, and with an afternoon of enforced sitting very, very still in front of a computer doped up on painkillers lying ahead of me I decided to try to alleviate both my pain and my crippling boredom by buying one of the many, many games I have on my Steam wishlist¹. As luck would have it Pandora: First Contact’s number came up, which I think conclusively proves that the universe is out to get me.

Pandora is an attempt to update Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri for the modern age that nevertheless feels like a cheap knockoff of both SMAC itself and Civilization V. From Civilization V it draws the resource gathering and the hex-based world; from Alpha Centauri it outright steals pretty much everything else, from setting to factions to the unit system, and yet doesn’t manage to execute them with even a fraction of the intelligence Alpha Centauri possessed.  This is partly down to Alpha Centauri being a very intelligent game – even Firaxis’s own effort, Beyond Earth, doesn’t look like it’ll come anywhere close to matching it – but mostly I feel it is down to Pandora repeating many of the mistakes Shadowgate made last week: it tries too hard to be a faithful remake and ends up slavishly replicating game features wholesale without any real thought as to whether it’s a good idea to do so, or any real understanding of what made the original game so good in the first place.

Let’s take factions as a starting point. Pandora rips its factions wholesale out of Alpha Centauri – you’ve got the faux-University, the not-Spartans, the doppelGaians – and while it’s true that coming up with original faction themes that aren’t “Good at tech” or “Good at fighting” might be quite difficult if you’re not Master of Orion, Pandora doesn’t seem to have put any thought into trying to find some different archetypes. It’s just cloned them like-for-like, sans the Peacekeepers because there’s no Planetary Council in this game, because that’s what Alpha Centauri did and we’re trying to do a remake of Alpha Centauri here, guys. Except where Alpha Centauri did everything a 4X game made in 1997 could possibly do to lend its factions a sense of identity and its faction leaders a sense of character, littering the game with spoken quotations from each faction leader that summed up their faction’s ideology and including a single wonderfully evocative leader portrait that said more about them than a thousand words ever could, Pandora chooses to do precisely sod all. The faction portraits are a bunch of interchangeably bland CGI lookalikes (all but one of whom are white, which I think is ridiculous given SMAC’s ethnically and culturally diverse cast), one faction’s cities look exactly like another’s, and while there’s the odd leader quote they have none of the wit or intelligence of Alpha Centauri’s, not to mention not being written rather than spoken in any case.

That leaves just a faction’s stat bonuses as the sole factor distinguishing it from the other factions, and despite myself I find it quite difficult to get excited about a +25% bonus to science. The absence of social engineering or any governmental system whatsoever mean that your options for playing to your faction’s theme are further limited and result in factions whose flavour is distinctly lacking. I’d have to point to this as the number one reason why playing Pandora is so dull and unengaging – you might as well be controlling a colony of robots for all the game cares. It’s astonishing how it takes one of Alpha Centauri’s greatest strengths, tries to clone it, and flips it around into a crippling structural weakness because it doesn’t sequence the genome correctly. Or at all.

Number two on my hit list is the tech tree. You might look at a publicity screenshot of Pandora, such as this one, and think “Wow, that looks like a deep and complex tech tree with a lot of interesting choices!”, but you would be tragically mistaken. I’m not going to put the boot in to Pandora for failing to match the rich plausibility of Alpha Centauri’s technologies since that vision of future history has yet to be equalled, but even so I still think Pandora is basically selling a false bill of goods  here. The way it works is that the tree is split into three eras – Colonial, Mechanised and Transcendence – that look like they’re supposed to give the tech tree a bit of extra character, like the Classical/Medieval/Renaissance/etc eras of Civilization. What they’re actually doing is giving Pandora an excuse to clone its own tech tree three times over, since the tech tree for the Colonial era is almost exactly identical to the tech tree for the Mechanised era, except the units and buildings you get out of the Mechanised era are twice as powerful. Civilization itself is no stranger to this approach – Universities are just more powerful Libraries, and so on – but the thing about Pandora is that everything in the Mechanised era is an upgrade of something from the Colonial era, meaning that after you’re about a third of the way into the game you’ve discovered nearly all of the genuinely new capabilities you’re going to get and all that’s left is incrementally improving your current buildings and units. Not only is this a transparent attempt to pad out the tech tree and provide the illusion of depth where none exists, but it results in a repeat of the faction issue: because new options are never opening up Pandora is reduced to a pure numbers game, where the only point in researching tech is to get an infantry unit that’s four base power instead of two base power or a mine that gives 50% to production instead of 25%.

I give this word a little too much of a throrough workout in my reviews, but this is just dull. There’s little incentive to play around with different factions because they all look and feel the same in any case, there’s little incentive to try different paths through the tech tree because of its recursive nature, and that’s the two main reasons I play 4X games utterly sabotaged. Combine this with a hellish combat system that combines the worst features from Civilization II and Civilization IV (I don’t care what anyone says, one unit per tile was a big step forward for the series even if the AI couldn’t cope with the concept), a total lack of Wonder-equivalents,  and exciting victory conditions like “Research 75% of the technologies” or “Own 75% of the planetary population” and you have the most boring 4X game I’ve played since… well, since Legendary Heroes earlier this year.

That being said, that’s partly my pique at this being such a half-assed update of one of my favourite games ever talking. Pandora’s implementation of most other features is workmanlike rather than actively bad and it even has one or two ideas that are actually quite good, or at least halfway interesting. I liked the resource system where surplus resources go into empire-wide storage that can be accessed by any city rather than being jealously hoarded by individual colonies, since it functioned as a logical brake on population growth and colony expansion – you can only found new cities if the rest of your empire is producing enough extra food and minerals to support them, which makes a damn sight more sense that Civilization V’s arbitrary happiness mechanic. I also liked having the ability to build what were essentially suburbs as tile improvements to alleviate unhappiness from overpopulation. The targeted one-shot Operations abilities that you either build from cities or are periodically regenerated by buildings fall into the “Interesting” category rather than being outright good, since they lurch between being ineffectually worthless (Orbital Bombardment) and horribly broken (Field Training), but Pandora is hardly worse off for their inclusion. The variety of native aliens are a good concept very much underutilised, while the less said about the alien invasion halfway through the game the better, really.

 With all of that taken into account Pandora’s biggest sin, I think, is that it doesn’t even have the decency to be entertainingly bad. I had a whole load of awful jokes ready to go about how it compounded my misery by being a metaphorical pain in the neck to go with the physical one, but on the whole it really isn’t that terrible and the Legendary Heroes comparison might be a little unfair. It’s just remarkably bland and forgettable – even now I’m struggling to remember anything from the six hour game I completed just a few days ago – and doesn’t make even the tiniest iota of effort to worm its way into the player’s cerebral cortex the way Alpha Centauri did². I took this somewhat personally, both because I really like Alpha Centauri and because £23 is far too much money to waste on a game that I could transcribe into the Oxford English Dictionary as the very definition of “mediocre”. Mediocre is better than bad, but it still doesn’t get you any credit around here. Avoid this one if you can.

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The post Thoughts: Pandora – First Contact appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Ah, SMAC, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri is spoken of in hushed, reverent tones amongst a certain segment of the 4X gaming community, and for good reason: if you happen to like sci-fi, like I do, it is hands-down the best Civ-a-like game ever released. This isn’t down to how it plays, particularly, since if you suck away the sci-fi coating what you’ll find inside looks very much like Civilization 2 in terms of mechanics. Firaxis could have done much worse than base their game on Civ 2, but aside from a few bolted-on additions like the unit workshop and the social engineering interface replacing static forms of government, Alpha Centauri didn’t make any groundbreaking changes to the basic formula. What it did do was seamlessly weave that formula into a coherent sci-fi universe in a way that no other game has before or since.

The premise of the game is that a near-future humanity, locked in its final death throes, has built and launched a massive colonisation spaceship towards the Alpha Centauri trinary star system in the hopes of preserving something of the human race. Just as the ship – the ironically-named Unity — comes to the end of its decades long journey and approaches the Alpha Centauri system, factional infighting amongst the ship’s crew comes to a head and the Unity is sabotaged. Each faction escapes the ship in a landing craft and heads on down to the surface of the only inhabitable planet in the system. Displaying even less imagination than I do when it comes to naming things, the colonists dub their new home “Planet” and start scrabbling together the basic niceties required to start rebuilding human civilisation.

But not human civilisation as we know it. The different factions that formed on the Unity did not do so along national or organisational lines; instead they sprang up around charismatic leaders with their own personal ideologies about how future society should be run. This gives each of the seven factions a distinct thematic flavour in the way they play. Ironically for a big lefty like myself I’ve always been partial to Nwabudike Morgan’s ultra-capitalist settlements, where the enormous production outputs come at a cost of massive ecological damage and an increased upkeep cost due to pampered Morganite workers demanding the most opulent and wasteful settlements possible. The antithesis of the Morganites is Chairman Yang’s Human Hive, a totalitarian nightmare that combines the most extreme aspects of communism and fascism to great effect, where the population lives and works crammed into gigantic underground settlements that are basically massively upscaled versions of ant colonies. Then there’s Deidre Skye’s Gaian society, who aren’t your typical treehuggers because they have absolutely no qualms about siccing tame brain-devouring mindworms on you if you piss them off. Prokhor Zakharov’s University, Miriam Godwinson’s Believers, even Commissioner Pravin Lal’s wishy-washy remnant of the UN Peacekeeping forces – they all serve to give the opposing factions a level of personality above and beyond “Montuzema is a dick”.

The different factions are just one part of the rich background tapestry woven with loving care by Firaxis. They provide a political pretext for all the plotting and wars that take place before and after Planetfall, but the terraforming of Planet itself is also one of the key features of the game. Civilization games have always let you improve the areas around your cities, and the early ones hit you with nasty pollution penalties if you overexploited the land, but Alpha Centauri is the only one that I’m aware of that took it from being a major element of the gameplay to possibly the central tenet of the game. It’s to be expected given that the colonisation of an alien world would require a level of adaptation of the surrounding environment far above and beyond irrigating a few fields with water from a nearby river and calling it a day, but what strikes me about the terraforming in Alpha Centauri is the lengths Firaxis went to to create the illusion of an actual functioning ecology that you were disrupting with your “improvements”. Unless you take social engineering traits that reduce your ecological impact on Planet, screwing with it in a big way can have very unpleasant consequences because it is a living system and it will try to defend itself by zerging your bases with huge mindworm boils or reclaiming developed land by force-growing impenetrable fungus forests (thus incidentally providing a plausible rationale for the game’s barbarian units).

And of course because this is the future, and because you have magic future technology, the scale of the changes you can make dwarfs anything else seen in a 4X. The one thing that has always stuck with me are the Mohole mines; enormous holes bored all the way down to the bottom of Planet’s crust to extract valuable minerals that incidentally also happen to release vast amounts of heat from the planetary interior. Not only is this going to piss off the indigenous flora and fauna, but if you don’t want the sea levels to start rising you’ll have to counterbalance this extra heat with an artificial cooling mechanism like an enormous solar shade launched into space. It’s still all very simplified – mostly so that the player actually has a chance of understanding it – but it is nevertheless a system. It has domino effects that can lead to unintended consequences. Your ability to tamper with this system grows as you discover increasingly exotic future technology, as does the scale of the risk and the rewards.

Technology! I could genuinely write a short thesis just on how amazing Alpha Centauri’s technology tree is. Humanity starts out on Planet with only the most basic of resources, barely subsisting until you complete the first couple of tiers of the tech tree which focus on adapting to the new environment and recreating a functioning society out of nothing, as well as perfecting a few avenues of science that are works in progress today (string theory, anyone)? Researching these techs gives you the social engineering options, terraforming methods and base facilities to go beyond simple survival; improvement promotes growth and growth permits a larger industrial and scientific base, allowing you to tackle the near-future stuff like fusion power, mastering the quantum states problem inherent in photons and waves, and also the small matter of growing the industrial base to the point where you can start launching stuff back up into space again. And then after this intermediary stage comes the far-future stuff: stasis fields, unified field theory, controlled singularities and so on.

What I like about the Alpha Centauri tech tree isn’t just the way it flows smoothly from survival to prosperity to becoming a Kardashev Type I civilization, which is basically sci-fi catnip as far as I’m concerned. No, it’s the plausibility of the whole thing. Rather than somebody going “Right, we need a technology that will confer game ability X, let’s make something up,” this thing has instead been written by people who have at least a basic understanding of where science is likely to be going over the next few centuries. It gets rather speculative towards the end, and the timescale is rather compressed (if you ask me) in order to fit with the game’s one year per turn mechanic, but the underlying structure of it is perfectly sound. It first tackles the problems confronting scientists now, moves on to the things we think we might be able to do if we ever did solve those problems, and wisely leaves the hand-wavy space magic stuff towards the very end of the tree where it can’t concretely be ruled out because of all this other more believable tech that’s been researched. If you asked me for a roadmap of scientific progress over the next two centuries I’d probably just hand you Alpha Centauri’s tech tree. It’s like somebody managed to recreate the Civilization tech tree without the benefit of having actually had it happen so they know how it all turned out. Incredible.

Finally there’s the little atmosphere-building touches. The Secret Project (read World Wonder) movies have yet to be bettered, as far as I’m concerned. They’re not bombastic CGI experiences meant to reward the player for finishing the wonder; instead they’re far subtler pieces of work that, a lot of the time, actually give you second thoughts about whether or not the all-seeing AI policeman you just built was really a good idea. They rely on a lot of real-life camera footage that can occasionally make for genuinely uncomfortable viewing, and many of them focus on technological advance as a double-edged sword as we grow further apart from our squishy biological origins, in particular this one which is the only work of fiction I’m aware of to mention the probable downside of a “teleportation” device. The various quotes from faction leaders and other sources are scattered throughout the game, playing whenever you discover a technology or build a base facility for the first time, and these too tend towards being thought-provoking rather than the current trend of a cool/ironic one-liner about how awesome the thing you just researched is. As you play the game you’re getting this constant commentary that tells you about the world and also hints at the deeper sociological and ideological struggles that are going on behind the scenes as humanity struggles to adapt to an uncertain future on an alien planet.

I think limiting myself to just talking about Alpha Centauri’s world-building and atmosphere was a wise move, otherwise I could probably go on for ever. It’s a sci-fi 4X so it has to pay more attention to that side of things in order to get you invested in its universe, but what I really like about Alpha Centauri – and the thing that makes it unique, as far as I know – is how utterly the developers embraced the idea and wove it into the fundamental DNA of the gameplay. Galactic Civilizations 2 failed at building any sort of believable world whatsoever. Master of Orion 2 succeeded, which one of the reasons it’s so good, but it always treated it in a rather space opera-ish fashion as rather incidental to the actual process of playing the game. Alpha Centauri on the other hand doesn’t use a sci-fi universe to serve gameplay goals; rather, it is a sci-fi universe from top to bottom, and if you know nothing about planetary science and ecology you could do a hell of a lot worse for an education than playing a couple of games of SMAC on a medium difficulty setting. The base game is even on GoG now, look. Go and play it.

(Also you can occasionally throw out quotes from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathrustra thanks to having heard them so many times in the datalinks. Your friends will be impressed to bits, I promise you.)

The post In Praise Of: Alpha Centauri. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Say at some point the human race gets its act together and actually decides to send a spaceship to another star. We’ll say it’s unmanned because that makes everything so much easier; it’s just  a robot probe that’s intended to sate our curiosity about what Alpha Centauri actually bloody looks like, and so we don’t need any life support systems or generation ship malarkey going on. We’ll also say that getting the probe out of the Earth’s gravity well – aka the trickiest part of spaceflight – is similarly not an issue because we’re building it in orbit or something. This leaves us just one, fairly major problem: how do we make it go?

“But Hentzau,” I hear you say, “the laws of Newtonian mechanics say that making it go should be the easiest thing of all! After all, if something is floating in space and you give it a push it’ll just keep going forever and ever, according to Newton’s third law. Surely the hard part isn’t making it go, but in getting it to stop?” Or at least I think I hear you say that; I’m pretty sleep deprived right now so it could also be the crazed squawking of an itinerant bluebird¹. Anyway, assuming a really simple case where the probe is stationary with respect to its destination you could indeed just give it a little nudge and it would start wending its merry way to Alpha Centauri without braking for anybody. The only problem is it would take a while. In fact it would take so long that I’m not entirely sure it would get there before Alpha Centauri went nova, and we don’t even have that kind of time. The human race has a notoriously short attention span and we’re going to want results soon – within the next couple of centuries, say. This means that we are going to have to mount some form of interstellar propulsion engine on our probe, and interstellar propulsion engines are, via this rather convoluted introduction, the thing I wanted to talk about today.

Making something go in interstellar space is a completely different matter to getting out of a gravity well or travelling between planets. For the former the key is a shitload of thrust delivered over a very short period of time so that you don’t fall back to Earth, which is why rocket engines are currently  the best we’ve got for that. For the latter, the distances are (relatively) small enough that we have the luxury of just being able to coax something onto a transfer orbit using a very small amount of propellant and then leaving it until it eventually arrives anywhere from a few months to a decade later. These are both impractical approaches to interstellar travel for obvious reasons: rocket engines require a lot of propellant which is quickly exhausted, rendering the engine useless, while interplanetary probes might sound nippy but they are, in fact, achingly slow. For an example, the Voyager probes  are the fastest man-made objects in existence, taking advantage of a once-every-175-years alignment of the planets to do some crazy gravitational slingshotting that accelerated them up to a rather bracing 15 km s^-1. Let’s say we could do that again for our interstellar probe, and that we could do it in such a way that it would end up pointed at Alpha Centauri. At 15 km s^-1 the probe would cover the four light years separating the Sun and Alpha Centauri in just under 80,000 years.

Clearly this isn’t practical if we want human civilisation to still exist when our probe reaches its destination, so if we intend to try interstellar travel in a serious way then we need to experiment with something a little different. Where achieving orbit is a matter of delivering a lot of acceleration quickly, and interplanetary travel relies on a small amount of acceleration delivered early, practical interstellar travel requires that we instead subject our probe to a small amount of acceleration over a very long timespan. The thing with velocity in space is that it’s cumulative. There’s no air resistance dragging you back; once you add 5 km s^-1 to a spacecraft’s relative velocity that 5 km s^-1 will stay there forever until you remove it by making a burn in the opposite direction and manually decelerating the spacecraft. An engine that provides an acceleration of 2 cm s^-2 might not sound very good, but if it can provide that rate of acceleration for a full year the spacecraft it’s attached to will end up travelling at a whopping 630 km s^-1, covering the distance to Alpha Centauri in a nippy 452 years. And that’s if it stops accelerating after a year, remember. If it keeps going there’s no reason it couldn’t reach a significant fraction of light speed.

There’s only one problem with this approach. Well, two problems, with the second, smaller one being that you can only accelerate like this for the first half of the trip. Then you have to turn the spacecraft around and burn the engine in the opposite direction to slow it down and make sure it doesn’t whip by its target at this unholy velocity you’ve accelerated it to. However, the big problem is that providing sustained low-grade acceleration for a prolonged period of time is impossible using conventional rocket engines. They’re built for rapid acceleration over small time scales and spend their propellant profligately in achieving this end, and even if you burn it as efficiently as possible a rocket engine would still run out of fuel long before it ever achieved any significant velocity. You can’t stuff a half-century’s worth of rocket fuel onto a spaceship, after all.

In order to do interstellar travel, then, we’re going to need a whole new type of spaceship engine. The thrust it provides does not need to be large, but it does need to be constant and very long-lasting. This gives us two options:

1)      Use a very efficient fuel source that will somehow last the duration of the trip. This basically means nuclear rockets, a concept that’s been on the drawing board for years but which has never gone anywhere because people are a bit nervous about having nuclear reactors hurtling through the sky at several hundred miles per hour. There are high-efficiency thrust systems currently in development – see ion thrusters and the SMART-1 probe – that nevertheless require a powerful source of electricity to run. Nuclear reactors fit the bill and would last a half-century or more to boot, but they require several quantum leaps on the technology side of things (like the LFTR reactors I was talking about the other day) before they’re viable as a propulsion system.

2)      Don’t carry your fuel with you. Get it from somewhere else, while you’re travelling. This is not as dumb as it sounds, with the two major ideas in this category being light sails and the Bussard ramjet.

Light sails are fairly easy to understand. All light exerts an infinitesimal force whenever it strikes an object, kind of like a really crappy version of the wind on Earth, so you just put a really big solar sail on your probe and focus an incredibly powerful laser on it from the Earth which “pushes” the spacecraft along. This sounds like fun, but in reality the power of the laser would attenuate massively as the spacecraft got further away from Earth necessitating a planet-sized sail in order to focus the light properly. This is slightly impractical for obvious reasons, and while there are designs which use microwaves which should be more efficient it’s going to be some time before we’re capable of building the size of spacecraft an interstellar-capable solar sail would demand.

Then there’s the Bussard ramjet, a concept which is quite popular in “hard” sci-fi novels. Remember the atmospheric ramjets I talked about in the Skylon post? This is like that, except instead of using the Earth’s atmosphere as reaction mass the Bussard ramjet instead has two huge electromagnetic field generators which it uses to scoop up material from the interstellar medium and compress it until it achieves fusion, generating energy which is used to propel the spacecraft. This relies on the fact that interstellar space isn’t quite empty. It actually has quite a lot of stuff in it, it’s just that that stuff is spread out so much that there’s maybe an atom’s worth of it per cubic centimetre. While it’s certainly theoretically possible, though, the Bussard ramjet has even more question marks hanging over it than the light sail, including some potential problems which are similar to the ones atmospheric ramjets have to deal with (i.e. drag forces). Finally, at the end of the day the Bussard ramjet is just a fancy version of a fusion rocket, and if we can do that we might as well just concentrate on option one.

For our short range trip out to Alpha Centauri I think nuclear rockets are probably the most feasible propulsion system available to us. The journey duration could well be short enough that a nuclear reactor would remain viable for the entire length of the trip, as well as providing power for the spacecraft once it finally got there. For longer distances, though, we’d have to start looking at the radical departures from regular spacecraft design seen in approach 2). It’s simply not possible to propel and power a spacecraft that far while carrying your fuel source with you, so it needs to come from some external source. So while they may sound kind of ludicrous, if interstellar spaceflight has a future it probably lies in concepts like the Bussard and light sails. Of course they look kind of silly, but then spaceflight isn’t particularly big on dignity anyway.

1. Fun fact: bluebirds don’t actually nest anywhere in Dover because they’re an American species, thus proving that the people who write lyrics to songs are imbeciles who are more fond of metaphor than they are scientific accuracy. I hate songwriters.

The post Bussard? Bustard? Buzzard? appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

After my pathetic begging last week I got asked several questions; thanks if you did so! I’ll be answering them at the rate of about one per week, so I should have them all done by the end of the month.

Adam Benton asks

I know this is a rather difficult question, and one you’ve probably answered before, but what game/tv/film depiction to you think is one of the most accurate glimpses of the future?

For example, on the one hand we have Mass Effect, which postulates some crazy advanced technology but seems to keep it within the laws of physics (as much as I know). On the other hand we have BSG, which has less crazy technology but does have dogfights in space ships which – as your most recent post suggested – is unlikely to happen.

We have to work with a given value of “accurate” here, since nearly every single fictional depiction of the future has taken certain liberties with present-day physics in order to make their universe easier to portray/easier for us to understand. Your examples are a good illustration of this. Mass Effect does no more than pay lip service to real-life physics with things like mass drivers and the Normandy’s stealth technology. It gets worse as the series progresses and the writers change and Bioware is less concerned with a coherent universe and more concerned with THRILLING PLOT TWISTS, but even in the first title the mass effect fields, kinetic barriers, even the gun tech which is dressed up with a fair amount of technobabble handwaving – all that stuff is pretty much space magic. As for BSG, which is a gritty, grimy, “realistic” take on sci-fi, even the humans have got things like artificial gravity and FTL travel, which are acceptable concessions to narrative necessity, but they’re also running the Galactica on what appears to be the futuristic equivalent of a 486 processor, which isn’t.

Most accurate, therefore, is only going to be a relative title. Every sci-fi story that’s been shown on a screen of some form has taken liberties with the science, and for good reason; nobody wants to watch a show where it takes a minimum of four years to travel to the nearest star and you get repeatedly fried by solar radiation on the way out of the solar system. You’re more likely to find accurate sci-fi in written form, where it is known as “hard” science fiction; a good example is the Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy, where the first book (at least) is a decent jab at how we might believably go about colonising Mars, but which is nonetheless an absolute nightmare to read because the characters are all crap. There seems to be a tradeoff: you can focus on the characters and character conflicts and use the science as an enabling device and tell an interesting story, or you can focus on getting your science as right as you possibly can, but you can’t do both, which is why the people who make films and tv shows tend to focus on the former.

As a result the most scientifically accurate depiction of the future is going to end up being something which mentions the science as little as possible. The less it talks about it, the less likely it is to be caught out in an outright contradiction of what we currently know to be possible. Something like Blade Runner would be a good contender; there is only one scientific concept stated overtly in the film (that it is possible to make androids that look, sound and act just like humans) and even that doesn’t outright break science. Everything else is shown to the viewer or mentioned in the background; we are never told explicitly how the flying cars work or why there are wars going on in the offworld colonies. We just know that they exist, and that, at least, is something that falls within the bounds of the scientifically possible.

Therefore the question is more a literary one about how sci-fi narratives are constructed than it is about scientific verisimilitude. If I absolutely had to pick, though, then it would come down to a choice between two titles, and both of them are video games.

Alpha Centauri.

Otherwise known as The Game That Got Me Into Astrophysics. Alpha Centauri’s tech tree is a thing of wonder: exhaustively researched, initially grounded in “real” science and advances we suppose to be just around the corner, like fusion and superstring theory, and then as the game progresses branching out into truly fantastical technologies like teleportation and singularity engines. You can probably quibble about the timescale – I doubt humanity is going to have working anti-gravity devices by 2300, for example – but while it is somewhat suppository it is at least based on the probable direction we think science might be headed in over the next couple of centuries. The stuff you actually do in-game is also pretty damn convincing; the terraforming mechanics in particular are a work of art, scientifically speaking. Of course, Alpha Centauri is working with the advantage that as a 4X it doesn’t really have to bother itself with telling a story (although unusually for the genre there is the skeleton of one in there). If you want a viable future world that does work with that constriction then you should look no further than…

Deus Ex

Not Human Revolution or Invisible War, which both ventured into what would have been space opera had any of it actually been set in space, but the original dystopian world of tomorrow. Like the best sci-fi stories, it takes just one big scientific concept – the incipience of nanotechnology as a viable… uh, technology – and bases its entire structure around examining the social and personal effects that this advance might have on people. There’s some of the other near-future tropes in there as well – sentient AI, robotics, cybernetic augmentations – but this is all stuff that genuinely is going to happen within the next century (Deus Ex is set in 2052). Nanotech is the big pill that the audience is asked to swallow, but once they have, every other fantastical device in the game – think the Dragon’s Tooth sword, Denton’s augmentations, the Universal Constructor – follows on naturally and logically from that one scientific leap. In other words, if we had functioning nanotech we really could do all this stuff, and that’s why I think the world of Deus Ex is the one that’s most connected to the world of today: it takes only one liberty with science, and even that is not completely out of the question. Nanotech is possible, if perhaps not feasible. It’s not even in the same league as some of the things we routinely swallow like anti-gravity, which outright break the established laws of physics.

You’ll notice that both these games have a lot of roots in what is going on in the research laboratories of today. That’s because it’s easier for me to say something is believable when I can draw a straight line between now and the future. If you have something set in the mid-to-far future, like Star Trek, the whole thing becomes far murkier. I can’t make predictions about what 24^th century science is going to be like any more than Isaac Newton could have predicted the microchip. So who knows? It’s possible that some of the things depicted in Mass Effect may actually come to pass given the development of magic 22^nd century technologies. That’s the nice thing about the future: anything could be possible. It’s a heartening thought.

(Battlestar Galactica is still balls any way you look at it, though.)

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