AdeleneDawner comments on Mundane Magic - Less Wrong

102 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 31 October 2008 04:00PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (94)
Tags: humor naturalism

Comments (94)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Steven_Bukal 30 April 2011 03:44:59PM 16 points [-]

There is a small genre of sci-fi short stories in which humans turn out to be the scariest species in the galaxy due to our possession of apparently mundane abilities. For example:

  • Human muscles have the terrifying ability to become increasingly more massive and powerful when placed under a routine of extreme stress. Many humans systematically overload their muscles in this way. For fun.

  • Humans breathe oxygen, a component of starship fuel!

  • The brain of a human is protected by an armored skull so powerful that a human fighter is impervious to any simple attack to the brain and can even use its braincase as a weapon to bludgeon enemies.

  • Humans naturally produce dangerous hormones and stimulants such as epinephrine. In desperate situations these boost a human's abilities, allowing it to continue functioning even when severely wounded.

Comment author: AdeleneDawner 30 April 2011 09:36:45PM 2 points [-]

Does this genre have a name, or other googleable traits?

Comment author: Owen_Richardson 30 April 2011 10:34:11PM 0 points [-]

The only example that comes to my mind is the short story "Sshhh..." by David Brin. And that's not really the same thing, since the entire point of the story is that it's ambiguous whether humans really do have anything special about them.

Comment author: brianm 30 April 2011 10:38:21PM 4 points [-]

The Humans are Special trope here gives a lot of examples of this. Reputedly, it was a premise that John Campbell, editor of Amazing Stories, was very fond of, accounting for its prevalence.

Comment author: Steven_Bukal 30 April 2011 11:48:11PM 8 points [-]

The concept is popular on 4chan's /tg/ board where they're called "humanity" stories or "humanity, fuck yeah" stories. Here's one archive of such threads:

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?tags=humanity

Comment author: AdeleneDawner 01 May 2011 05:32:40AM 6 points [-]

Most of these have me going "argh, physics/game theory/evolution doesn't work that way!", but there's a few good ones in there. I liked this one and this one in particular, though the former has a fair bit of evolution fail in it.

Comment author: Steven_Bukal 01 May 2011 11:56:29AM 3 points [-]

Agreed, they can definitely get a bit absurd. This one is one of my favourites:

http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/13-TheBalticWarCD/TheBalticWarCD/The%20World%20Turned%20Upside%20Down/0743498747__24.htm

The short story "The Road Not Taken" by Harry Turtledove is also a good one if you can find it.

Comment author: [deleted] 02 June 2011 04:32:33AM *  8 points [-]

I like the "Humans are insane" series of threads.

Humans are pretty close to immune to memetic viral attacks. In other cultures, memetic attacks are devastating weapons of war, that are carefully researched in hidden facilities where the researchers go through daily psychological analysis to keep the attack from escaping- and occasionally it does anyway, and they have to vaporize the sector. Humans use them to sell hamburgers. Human memetics is the flat-out most advanced in the universe, and they don't even have clinical immortality yet. Individual humans can make memetic attacks untrained.

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?tags=Humans

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit