Oolite Bulletins

ffutures wrote: ↑Sat Sep 11, 2021 9:12 pm

OK, let's try a nice simple one. I'm looking for FIVE SF works of any type in which characters have a form of sight which is different from our own. This might include seeing things that others can't, different forms of radiation, etc. etc. Please give a link to information about your source, especially if it's obscure!

Usual rules: no two from the same author / set in the same fictional universe / using exactly the same form of sight.

ffutures wrote: ↑Sat Sep 11, 2021 9:12 pm

OK, let's try a nice simple one. I'm looking for FIVE SF works of any type in which characters have a form of sight which is different from our own. This might include seeing things that others can't, different forms of radiation, etc. etc. Please give a link to information about your source, especially if it's obscure!

ffutures wrote: ↑Sat Sep 11, 2021 9:12 pm

OK, let's try a nice simple one. I'm looking for FIVE SF works of any type in which characters have a form of sight which is different from our own. This might include seeing things that others can't, different forms of radiation, etc. etc. Please give a link to information about your source, especially if it's obscure!

Usual rules: no two from the same author / set in the same fictional universe / using exactly the same form of sight.

ffutures wrote: ↑Sat Sep 11, 2021 9:12 pm

OK, let's try a nice simple one. I'm looking for FIVE SF works of any type in which characters have a form of sight which is different from our own. This might include seeing things that others can't, different forms of radiation, etc. etc. Please give a link to information about your source, especially if it's obscure!

Usual rules: no two from the same author / set in the same fictional universe / using exactly the same form of sight.

RockDoctor wrote: ↑Sun Sep 12, 2021 1:51 pm

I'm going to try to take another universe off the table (why do I feel like a cat on a china-filled mantlepiece?), then let someone else find something more obscure for the Chalice of Doom.
Several efforts in the Trekkiverse haven't given me anything really like a "sense".
{thinks heavily}.
In one mighty bound I go from McCaffrey's dragons to "a textbook on neutron star physics disguised as a novel" - Robert Forward's "Dragon's Egg". Here the cheela, inhabiting a neutron star (responsible indirectly for the divergence of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans from their Homo erectus stem stock) can only really see well in the far UV and soft X-ray spectra. Now, there is a part of the spectrum that organisms relying on electrons as a basis for their chemistry are going to find challenging to focus and sense without the photons ripping the sensors apart. So I suspect in the metaverse of SF universes, the cheela are going to have that band of the spectrum to themselves.

RockDoctor wrote: ↑Sun Sep 12, 2021 2:01 pm

OK, now I've got to go for automatic failures.
A significant number of species on Earth, and Wossname McKay's discredited Martian bugs in meteorite ALH-84001 seem to sense magnetic fields as part of their gamut of navigation techniques for long-distance navigation. (McKay found well-formed microscopic octahedral grains of magnetite in the meteorite, and posited that they were biogenic, since they resembled grains found in magnetotactic bacteria on Earth. Which hangs together, logically, but most people weren't convinced by it.)
Of course, that's no more alien than dolphins using echo location while squeaking at each other in a manner incomprehensible to anyone but the lab mice.

spud42 wrote: ↑Sun Sep 12, 2021 3:11 pm

going for the low hanging fruit... Jordy LaForge.... his visor lets him see a huge part of the electromagnetic spectrum way beyond mere mortal humans.. ST-TNG.....

ffutures wrote: ↑Sun Sep 12, 2021 7:46 pm

Two to go!

Disembodied wrote: ↑Sun Sep 12, 2021 1:12 pm

The mutant bounty hunter Johnny Alpha, star of the 2000AD's Strontium Dog strip, has a slightly vaguely described vision involving "alpha rays", which can let him see through walls and sometimes into people's minds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontium_Dog

RockDoctor wrote: ↑Sun Sep 12, 2021 12:54 pm

Well I'll dive straight in with an example that appeared a couple of questions ago, under "Sculpture". In Niven's "Known Space", the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kdatlyno">Kdatlyno</a> are a (former) Kzin slave-species of imposing (even to a Kzintosh!) size and strength, but without a sense of vision - at least, not one involving the electromagnetic spectrum. Instead they "see" using a form of sonic echo location ; as a consequence, their described cultural achievement of "touch sculpture" is the bane of museum curators - an artwork intended to be touched by the visitors.

So, that should be all three of Known Space, Niven and "echo location" off the table. There is at least one mention in a "Man-Kzin Wars sub-Universe" story where non-human terrestrial aliens with echo location and innate "3d-thinking" - the dolphins - are used as tactical assistants in a space battle, so that would take echo location further off the table. Do we count dolphins as "aliens". They're definitely not from another planet (unless someone has been planting fossils again), they're definitely intelligent (and a challenge for how to measure "intelligence"), and they're definitely not human - but are they alien? Now there's a question to debate with your local lobster species.

RockDoctor wrote: ↑Sun Sep 12, 2021 1:00 pm

Having just taken Niven and Know Space off the table, how can I bring in the sort of "telepathic prey-predator link" that the Kzin have, which is suggested to have became their "telepath" abilities when hypertrophied and drug-enhanced?
Answer : same sense (more or less), different universe.
McCaffrey and her Pernese dragons (and fire lizards, and I think the watchwhers too) have a strong impressionistic-to-verbalised telepathy. Would you call that a "sense", or a communication method? I think a "sense" - because it also seems involved in their navigation through between to destination coordinates in 4d space.

RockDoctor wrote: ↑Sun Sep 12, 2021 1:04 pm

And continuing to pull on the telepathy thread : Star Wars, Force. It's a sort of telepathy, but the only one I ever heard of that lets you sense inanimate computerised laser-firing balls.
Obscure enough to need references?

Disembodied wrote: ↑Sun Sep 12, 2021 1:12 pm

The mutant bounty hunter Johnny Alpha, star of the 2000AD's Strontium Dog strip, has a slightly vaguely described vision involving "alpha rays", which can let him see through walls and sometimes into people's minds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontium_Dog

ffutures wrote: ↑Sat Sep 11, 2021 9:12 pm

OK, let's try a nice simple one. I'm looking for FIVE SF works of any type in which characters have a form of sight which is different from our own. This might include seeing things that others can't, different forms of radiation, etc. etc. Please give a link to information about your source, especially if it's obscure!