Barbary Station author R.E. Stearns details her favorite science fiction fan theories, from Inception to Sense8.
About ‘Barbary Station’
Two engineers hijack a spaceship to join some space pirates — only to discover the pirates are hiding from a malevolent AI. Now they have to outwit the AI if they want to join the pirate crew — and survive long enough to enjoy it.
Adda and Iridian are newly minted engineers, but aren’t able to find any work in a solar system ruined by economic collapse after an interplanetary war. Desperate for employment, they hijack a colony ship and plan to join a famed pirate crew living in luxury at Barbary Station, an abandoned shipbreaking station in deep space.
But when they arrive there, nothing is as expected. The pirates aren’t living in luxury — they’re hiding in a makeshift base welded onto the station’s exterior hull. The artificial intelligence controlling the station’s security system has gone mad, trying to kill all station residents and shooting down any ship that attempts to leave — so there’s no way out.
Adda and Iridian have one chance to earn a place on the pirate crew: destroy the artificial intelligence. The last engineer who went up against the AI met an untimely end, and the pirates are taking bets on how the newcomers will die. But Adda and Iridian plan to beat the odds.
There’s a glorious future in piracy…if only they can survive long enough.
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R. E. Stearns’ favorite sci-fi fan theories
Richard Dyer’s Uptopian Theory states that fiction expresses ideals of how life should be “organized and lived.” When the storyline doesn’t meet a creative audience member’s ideal, they can sometimes make it work for them using a fan theory: An explanation of an aspect of a story, or a connection between story elements, which isn’t explicitly stated in the source material or endorsed by the creator. What follows are a few of my favorite fan theories. Be warned: Everything below this point contains spoilers.
The Hominid Panspermia Theory
In science fiction with a visual component (TV, movies, comics, video games), aliens tend to look very human. Sure, this could be a limitation of the media, but! What if, as in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Chase,” a physical intelligent species (to differentiate from your average god, who tends not to have a permanent physical form), did in fact create all of the other intelligent life in the universe, through DNA seeding?
This explains the similarity and allows for interbreeding. Otherwise, just how did the planet person Ego manage to make the baby who turned out to be Peter Quinn in Guardians of the Galaxy (in the movies and the comics)? Ego and humans just don’t seem very compatible. It also explains how most of these resulting intelligent species are at similar levels of technological development (the aliens never seem to have reached the point of digitally uploading their brains into machines for easier travel, as an example).
This article coins the term and explains it in more detail, but it’s a satisfying biological explanation for a common observation in science fiction. Thank goodness novels and short stories don’t have that particular limitation, although they’ve been known to have human-similar characters anyway!
In the movie ‘Inception,’ Cobb doesn’t have a totem
Ordinarily I’d say that fan theories which include the word “dream” are too boring to finish reading, but as that’s the subject of Inception, I’ll allow it. I like how this theory clarifies another popular theory, and I’m also fond of the implied angst. In Inception, technology allows people to invade others’ dreams and plant ideas that the people, upon waking, will think are their own. The dreams are necessarily almost indistinguishable from real life, so those entering the dream world bring “totems” with them, which are small objects of personal significance which tell them whether or not they are dreaming. Cobb uses his wife’s totem, a spinning metal top, but as it wasn’t his, it theoretically wouldn’t work.
People have argued that Cobb’s wedding ring is his totem, but that doesn’t quite work either, because he doesn’t have it on consistently while he is awake. If it really were his totem, he’d wear it whenever he’s awake and it would be absent when he was dreaming. Either Cobb can tell when he’s in a dream without a totem, or he doesn’t care whether he’s dreaming or not.
In the ‘Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’ universe, Zaphod Beeblebrox caused the Great Collapsing Hrung Disaster
There may be too much backstory to explain this, if you haven’t read the books, but Zaphod is a person who has created a number of a disasters (including a famous, disasterous alcoholic beverage), and the Great Collapsing Hrung Disaster is an unexplained one which took out several planets.
The support for this theory comes from the radio play adaptation of the Hitchhikers novels. There’s a quote which says, “It is said that his birth was marked by earthquakes, tidal waves, tornadoes, firestorms, the explosion of three neighboring stars…” We know he was born on the fifth planet of Betelgeuse, and the star collapsed in 03758 was Betelgeuse VII. Zaphod may be old enough to have precipitated that event (mostly what we know about his age is that he is older than Ford Prefect). It’s a stretch and a coincidence, but this seems entirely in keeping with Zaphod’s character. However, this theory still doesn’t explain what a Hrung is…
Certain members of ‘Sense8’s’ Homo Sensorium travel among clusters to provide blockers
Not every cluster has someone who can build blockers for them. So, the sensate who saves Sun at the end of Season 2? That could be someone designated to travel from cluster to cluster, as needed, and that could be entirely common among the Sensorum population. That would give Puck a reason to be out where he was, at just the right time. He certainly seemed to travel more than most people, let alone most sensates, do. So argues Lauren Sarner of Inverse Entertainment, where she has several other interesting Sense8 theories to share.
‘Death Stranding’ will be sci-fi related toquantum mechanics
This game isn’t even out yet, and in fact hasn’t been categorized solidly into a particular genre, but it looks so wild that it’s garnered a lot of attention from some very detail-oriented gamers. A Redditor noticed that in a recent promotional image, the main character’s dog tags have the Scwarzschild radius and the Dirac equation written on them. The Schwarzschild radius shows how, if all of an object’s mass is compressed into a sphere, the speed required to leave the surface of that sphere (escape velocity) would be the speed of light. Stars collapsing to or below that radius would, of course, become black holes.
And the Dirac equation has to do with connecting principles of quantum mechanics and special relativity in such a way that antimatter is justified. Certain aspects of quantum mechanics could ignore the limitations stipulated in the Scwarzschild radius. How that fits into death and people getting dragged into mud, I do not know. It’s not at all obvious whether these equations were decorative or meaningful, but I hope they are directly related to whatever weirdness Hideo Kojima is going to present us with next!
Covering up plot holes and speculating on the details of what we love are some of the most fun parts of fandom. I’ve left out so many fan theories, some more plausible than others. I’d love to hear about your favorites, too.
About the author
R.E. Stearns wrote her first story on an Apple IIe computer and still kind of misses green text on a black screen. She went on to annoy all of her teachers by reading books while they lectured. Eventually she read and wrote enough to earn a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction from the University of Central Florida. She is hoping for an honorary doctorate. When not writing or working, R.E. Stearns reads, plays PC games, and references Internet memes in meatspace. She lives near Orlando, FL with her husband/computer engineer and a cat.
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