In Philip K. Dick\u2019s work The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch <\/em>the main character works for a company creating layouts. The layouts are a sort of virtual reality platform that helps people space out properly when taking the right drug. Sadly in that virtual reality a character named Perky Pat rises up and creates his own religion, making the religious references ever so thinly veiled. But yeah, basically the main characters creates VR platforms that you can trip on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You know what\u2019s going to be worse than aliens visiting Earth? Not being able to communicate with aliens visiting Earth. Ted Chiang thought the same, and that\u2019s why he decided that In his book Story of Your Life <\/em>the main character would be someone capable of communicating with aliens. And this all within the span of what I can only assume is a few weeks after the aliens first arrive on the planet!<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you were thinking this is like Jason Statham where he basically plays matador to a meg, you\u2019re not too far off. The book Auto-da-F\u00e9 <\/em>by Roger Zelazny is about a mechador, which is basically a matador that fights charging android-like cars instead of good ol\u2019 bulls or prehistoric megasharks. The reason for his weird job is that the plot of the book clearly establishes that people can be revived, so the Mechador can die a brutal death over and over again as part of their job. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Science fiction has a tendency to come up with weird stuff by just putting \u201cvoid\u201d, \u201cspace\u201d, \u201cintergalactic\u201d or what have you in front of it. In The Void Captain\u2019s Tale <\/em>by Norman Spinrad, the ship\u2019s pilot controls the ship through the sheer power of her being turned on. Not because of something that happened by accident \u2013 that\u2019s how the ships were made. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If you\u2019ve heard of the ancient astronaut theory, Hard to be a God <\/em>by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky flips that entire concept around. Humanity starts visiting alien planets that haven\u2019t evolved past the middle ages and people called observers have to, well, observe. Ironically, this book was written by Soviet writers and deals with the moral dilemma of an observer trying to actively intervene in a foreign culture because they\u2019re doing something he doesn\u2019t like. Somehow I feel like this entire book has never been more relevant than now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Joanna Russ wrote a lovely piece of feminist science fiction called The Female Man <\/em>where men and women no longer get along for some reason and women use the small boys they give birth to as a currency for trade \u2013 they keep the girls, of course. If we\u2019re being honest, as bad as that sounds on paper, the world in that book is probably better off since there\u2019s only two factions at war with each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For as long as we\u2019ve had literature, we\u2019ve had literature about the near and far future. There\u2019s a lot of things that keep developing in unexpected ways as technology moves forward, so it\u2019s safe to say that we\u2019ve reached a point where we can probably rule out some of the weird ideas that have been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":854,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/supertrendresponse.co.nz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/supertrendresponse.co.nz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/supertrendresponse.co.nz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supertrendresponse.co.nz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supertrendresponse.co.nz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=853"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/supertrendresponse.co.nz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":855,"href":"https:\/\/supertrendresponse.co.nz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853\/revisions\/855"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supertrendresponse.co.nz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/supertrendresponse.co.nz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supertrendresponse.co.nz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supertrendresponse.co.nz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/brainberries.co\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/weirdest-scifi-jobs-01.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAlien Translator<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/brainberries.co\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/weirdest-scifi-jobs-02.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nMechador<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Void Ship Pilot<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/brainberries.co\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/weirdest-scifi-jobs-04.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nObserver<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/brainberries.co\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/weirdest-scifi-jobs-05.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nChild Trader<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/brainberries.co\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/weirdest-scifi-jobs-06.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"