A while ago I had an idea drift into my head at work - HFY normally revolves around humans being the best at X because "Human" and it's normally because of our ability to wave our dicks around in galactic themed fiction.
What if the reason we where damn good at something was due to an ability or effect utterly out of our control?
I'll set out (and expand upon) the idea I had as an example.
Humanity are addicted to exploring the stars. Not because of our original abilities or drive to explore - but because of an extreme side effect that FTL travel has on the human brain.
We could never have predicted it because our drones and live animal tests never picked it up, nor did it have the same effect on Extra Terrestrial races when we eventually found them, but the activation and prolonged use of FTL drives (of seemingly any type) jams every single pleasure receptor in the human brain into overdrive and then locks them open - causing an unrelenting urge to keep moving, on a personal and galactic level.
Human beings are jittery, overenthusiastic creatures who cannot stay still - always moving, fiddling with their hands or replacement items such as trinkets. In space they keep moving ever outwards - their compulsion to "Jump" or "Boost" again means waves of scouts moving outwards in every direction, but few colonists.
All human colonies are developed using generation ships or seed AI's developing embryos on site - as to make sure any humans in the colony actually stay on the damn planet.
The fact Auriga III keeps jumping from place to place on the frontier is testament to that - an entire world with a 3 billion strong population devoted to building and then using planet sized jump drives.
Ironically they call it a "tourist world" - the "Planet with a thousand suns" but only aliens can visit it. Any humans who set foot on the planet and stay through a jump get hooked. Just like everyone else.
At this point, it's probably best not to go anywhere near HFY.
And your idea is really just the same problem most HFY has: an extremely juvenile attempt to classify humanity and ultimately just creating a new race, in your case the "ADD race", and calling them humans.
Is The Last Question an HFY story?
>>46696815
I don't even understand what you want from scifi
>>46696715
So your version of HFY is that using FLT makes humanity go crazy and become space locust?
>>46696715
A humanity where wanderlust becomes a literal addiction?
I like it.
They're like an entire species of born racers, souping up every vehicle they deign to set foot on and gleefully running infinite circuits around planets, stars, and galaxies until they eventually pass some unknown threshold in hyperspace and wink out of the known universe in a cascade of exotic emanations, or crash so hard they shatter stars. They say they love the scintillating cross spectrum joy of higher dimensions, their religion now says that the 8 Vertex drive is the gate to the embrace of the creator and the stair to Heaven, and all their spacefaring society, a giddy lot of pilgrims to the edge of the universe, has felt inclined to somewhat agree. The people of the 8V are weird and mercurial, and go too fast for most residents of galactic space to bother with, but they are valued, if unsafe, mechanics and invaluably useful couriers. Some have speculated they are a locus like problem that will infest vast swaths of space, but this has not proven to be the case. Others have theorized that they are some form of hyperspatial self-replicating cluster bomb used in a battle of higher dimensional beings, Others still that they really are being called onward to some transcendent plane. The prevailing notion is that they are a neurotic race of dopamine addicts, vibrant and vital, but soon to burn out or shatter themselves into lightyear long cones of incandescent shrapnel down to the last. Humans are likely to be a relatively short chapter in galactic history, but we will have been their witnesses, and we will know to mark that chapter "The Fastest Ever Known".
Is it considered HFY if humanity is considered nigh-invincible when at war but the story revolves around something other than war? What about a story in which war is a rare event that all sides, even humans, consider distasteful?
What if humanity was the WORST space faring race? What are some stories that people have most likely written about this to spite HFY?
>>46699713
that's the culture, and no, at least there, not really.
>>46699782
No one wants to spite HFY. They just want to ignore it and let it finally disappear before it gets any more cringe-inducing.
>>46699782
Basically any science fiction that realistically approaches a technologically advanced race encountering a less advanced one.
>>46699782
mainly it goes something like
"and then the golden tripods shot the earth with RKVs because they could, and because humans had the gall not to defer to them, and the nerve to think they could contribute anything to the already utopian harmonious galactic society, which they would only get dirty."
or
"and then the polite blue people subjugated and lobotomized the entirety of humanity because humans are obviously a threat that needs nipping in the bud, and all the enlightened peoples of the galaxy rejoiced at their own moral but decisive action"
>>46699925
though this one is pretty fun
>>46699782
Saturn's Children by Stross. It's about robots carrying on after the humans are all dead. One point the story stresses is that space travel is a pain in the ass even for robots, and humans were completely unsuited to it.
>>46699782
The Last Angel was kind of like that. Humans WERE great enough to bloody the bad guy's nose but now they're just as subjugated as the rest of the lot and it's the AI ship that is the real hero
>>46696715
I have something similar rattling around about a fantasy setting where humans are neat because they weren't created whole. While the other races had their gifts, humans were left without or had theirs taken away, and it left them hungry. Their ambition, their drive, their wanderlust, all of it is because they're incomplete and they're subconsciously searching for that missing piece
>>46696815
people like you help everyone else develop a greater love for scifi and a joy of knowing you will die sad alone and angry that you missed out on the fun in life.
>>46702919
HFY is like anti-scifi because it encourages a pigeon-holed mindset though.
Scifi writing threads would be great, but HFY is hardly anything more than a bad meme that became terrible.
>>46697785
Good question. Ultimately it is about humanity creating the seed for tgeir own god, and giving their own god the task to create them. Thus humanity would (unknow to them) become the maker of their own god, and reach a status greater than that.
So yes, the last question may be considered HFY.
On the other hand, there are no aliens in the last question, and thus comparison between humans and aliens falls flat, which would usually be the basis of all HFY stories.
This leaves the last question in between. Half the criteria are fulfilled, but the other half is not.
>>46703032
> pigeon holed mindset
What? A theme is a mindset now?
Do you really think that it is bad to have a genre about praising the good in humanity, especially since it opens to door to cirticise the worst in humanity too?
Do you not understand that literally every sci-fi story out there, that involves humans, is roughly the same?
Look at Battlestar Galactica, tgey ciriticize the fact that humans don't stop to think if they should, and only wonder if they could, while it sings songs of praise for the human will to survive, and at the same time points out how mistrusting we are.
Star Wars: the good in humans is extremely strong, but can be corrupted
The Martian: the human will to survive is strong, but oftentimes the higherups don't give a shit about a single guy
Frankenstein: humans can engineer great things, but they never stop and think if they should
>>46701562
You too?
Seriously, I use this for humans as well. This means that dwarfs and other races have a basic core, a dwarf won't question his own nature. Now, humans, they are the only race which questions "what is a human?", "what is our purpose?". Being the only ones with an existencial void to fill, they advance in all directions, try out everything, and so their problem also became a quality.
You know, like humans already do.
Why do so many people hate on hfy?
I mean yeah it can get cringey sometimes but not any more than 40k or the million made up bullshit stories in that guy threads.
Hfy adds a little more variety to /tg/ and sometimes produces gold. If you don't like it they're ate panty of other threads on /tg/ and shit posting about how much you hate hfy is still shit posting.
>>46706245
its because they project a political agenda onto it, and insist that its actually white supremacy or something similar, no matter what the people who write it actually try to convey
>>46706705
Or because the VAST majority of it is poorly written dogshit, and we dislike all the rest of the stuff he mentioned too?
>>46704798
>What? A theme is a mindset now?
It's far too narrow to call it a theme.
Unless, you perform the mistake of calling any story with human protagonists HFY, where it becomes uselessly broad.
>Do you really think that it is bad to have a genre about praising the good in humanity, especially since it opens to door to cirticise the worst in humanity too?
It's not a "genre." It is a wrting prompt. And a major issue with HFY is that the criticism door is locked shut. You can't really try to say that HFY is used as an exploration of humanity, when it largely just ends up being a single-faceted adoration of some half-baked race that the author decides to call humanity.
>>46706245
Because it doesn't produce gold. Even the better stories still fall into the same failings that come from a rather limited prompt that was milked dry years ago and now only exists as an awkward template for a rotation of mediocre stories.
For curiosities sake: lets say a grand writer makes a masterpiece of scifi that revolves around the machinations and going ons of a species who's sole purpose is to uplift other species and then move on. The whole book or series is well done and thought out but never actually describes the uplifters merely they're "day to day" type activities, lives they live, and the general ideologies they represent which may or may not be wholly alien to our current set.
After all this is said and done and decades have passed. Its become synonymous with lord of the rings as it did to scifi what tolkien did to fantasy.
You finally get to ask a question of the elusive author and he's promised to answer truthfully.
"What do the uplifters look like? You've never actually explained their looks or biology just their interactions."
"why they're humans. They're us. Just many many generations from now."
Would the fact that its technically become a HFY story make you butt beffudled?
>>46707235
Your hypothetical masterpiece contradicts its own existence. Even in the span of a minute, the idea of a species who's SOLE purpose is to uplift other species and move on ends up being a poorly conceived idea that lacks any real depth, and ultimately doesn't even satisfy your transparent hope of presenting an "ideal" example of what HFY could be. It even contradicts the simplest litmus test of what HFY is, since at no point during the series is there ever the temptation for the casual exclamation of "Humanity, fuck yeah", and the concept of the Death of the Author leaves his attempt at a post-definition of his imaginary race a debatable curiosity. With his books alone as the sole testament, he could call his fictional race humans as much as he'd like, but ultimately have no more weight than the casual reader who chose to not call them humans since they only represent a philosophically shallow and single-minded exaggerated caricature of them, while never having that fictional race ever be called humans within the text.
Basically, what you just did is what most HFY ends up being. A really awkward attempt to use sentimentality to convey some point that is clearly beyond you, and ultimately just tripping over yourself. The "It was humans all along" reveal is one of the lamer endings used in HFY, and I think you really hurt any point you were trying to make by relying on it.
If you really want to test the idea of your hypothetical, go on, and start trying to write your masterpiece. At some point, you would realize that the professed purpose behind your writing is a shackle that limits what aspects of humanity you can actually explore, and ultimately you would have to cast aside "HFY" and simply write about "humans" if you were to ever hope of creating a masterpiece.
And at the point where you try to define "HFY" as simply "writing about humans" is the point where you dissolve HFY.
Interstellar was all about HFY, one of the main reasons the story sucked so much
>>46705881
There's a series called the Fourth Wave where humans were basically genetically lobotomized not to have telepathy, so a lot of our quirks come from trying to connect in a way we no longer can. Body language was the largest one, where we're constantly, desperately looking for clues to the inner thoughts of those around us and projecting our own in the way we stand or move
>that meant that that very human condition, that maddening need to connect with someone and not feel so alone inside our own skulls – to actually know someone and to have them know you – wasn’t just insanity stemming from a newly minted sapient brain in an ape’s skull. It was a racial memory of something we almost had and lost.
>>46709853
Interesting. This notion of lost language reminds me of Snow Crash> It relates back to the mythology of ancient Sumer, which Stephenson describes as speaking a very powerful ur-language. Sumerian is to modern "acquired languages" as assembly language is to high level programming languages: it affects the entity (be it human or computer) at a far lower and more basic level than does acquired/programming language. Sumerian is rooted in the brain stem and related to glossolalia, or "speaking in tongues"—a trait displayed by most of L. Bob Rife's convertees. Furthermore, Sumerian culture was ruled and controlled via "me", the human-readable equivalent of software which contains the rules and procedures for various activity (harvests, the baking of bread, etc.). The keepers of these important documents were priests referred to as en; some of them, like the god/semi-historical-figure Enki, could write new me, making them the equivalent of programmers or hackers.
>As Stephenson describes it, one goddess/semi-historical figure, Asherah, took it upon herself to create a dangerous biolinguistic virus and infect humanity with it; this virus was stopped by Enki, who used his skills as a "neurolinguistic hacker" to create an inoculating "nam-shub" that would protect humanity by making it impossible to use and respond to the Sumerian tongue. This forced the creation of "acquired languages" and gave rise to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. Unfortunately, Asherah's meta-virus did not disappear entirely, as the "Cult of Asherah" continued to spread it by means of cult prostitutes and infected women breastfeeding orphaned infants
