High tech "primitive" sci-fi

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

This thread actually reminded me of a story idea i had: the concepts was there was a highly intelligent insectile race, with the intellect, drive and will to create advanced technology, but no concept of society. they are born alone, raise themselves, feed themselves, teach  themselves and whatever they create in their lifetime is ultimately lost, because it either goes unfinished or is looted by some other insect who wants their raw materials for their own project. Basically it's what a race of people would LITERALLY have to be in order to truly be everything that RUGGED INDIVIDUALISTS claim to be.

If they don't pass on their knowledge to others, they don't get past the "picking up a sharp rock" stage.

They could if they were phenomenally intelligent or phenomenally durable and long-lived

[Faust]

So I've nurtured an interest in science fiction that presents a non-western aesthetic and culture since childhood. Like any good nerd I love Star Trek, BSG, yadda yadda yadda, but watching the original Star Wars trilogy and Dune really captivated my imagination and sent me into a tizzy of ".......I want to go to there." I dug the Otherness of their worlds. A couple of nights ago I watched the new Will Smith picture "After Earth" (I know) and it was, as you may well have imagined, a Godawful double serving of abortion-cobbler (I KNOW!) but recognized that wondrous paleo-future vibe and makes my little heart as gay as springtime. Gone were the mandatory automatic doors which adorn every good, stale and sanitized spaceship in the galaxy and instead in their place were hanging palm leaves standing as barrier between the chambers. And with that an old flame within me was reignited. Does anyone else know of any novels, movies, or tv shows that don't follow the path laid out by Clark and Roddenberry and instead opted to go with a more tribalistic (primitive is a culturally biased as fuck term but it does evoke what I'm going for) interpretation of humanities future amongst the stars? I'd also adore anything Asiatic, Middle Eastern, or whatever. Any recommendations would be much appreciated. 

Lexx. It features the most powerfully destructive ship in sci-fi.

It also features sexualisation of both the male and female characters, which the semi autistic sexless genre that is sci-fi fails to do.

Bonus clip: Robot lovin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX_CluTr_qc

[Chelagoras The Boulder]

This thread actually reminded me of a story idea i had: the concepts was there was a highly intelligent insectile race, with the intellect, drive and will to create advanced technology, but no concept of society. they are born alone, raise themselves, feed themselves, teach  themselves and whatever they create in their lifetime is ultimately lost, because it either goes unfinished or is looted by some other insect who wants their raw materials for their own project. Basically it's what a race of people would LITERALLY have to be in order to truly be everything that RUGGED INDIVIDUALISTS claim to be.

If they don't pass on their knowledge to others, they don't get past the "picking up a sharp rock" stage.

They could if they were phenomenally intelligent or phenomenally durable and long-lived

Yea, in my mind i picture them looking sort of like the collectors from Mass Effect but with a shiny, obsidian, beetle like carapace. They're so durable that there's not many animals on their planet that can pierce their shells. As for life span, i hadn't decided if they should live for over a century, or just have a really stable population since they're sorta "reborn" when they die, remembering much of what their parent learned, if not the firsthand experiences.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

This thread actually reminded me of a story idea i had: the concepts was there was a highly intelligent insectile race, with the intellect, drive and will to create advanced technology, but no concept of society. they are born alone, raise themselves, feed themselves, teach  themselves and whatever they create in their lifetime is ultimately lost, because it either goes unfinished or is looted by some other insect who wants their raw materials for their own project. Basically it's what a race of people would LITERALLY have to be in order to truly be everything that RUGGED INDIVIDUALISTS claim to be.

If they don't pass on their knowledge to others, they don't get past the "picking up a sharp rock" stage.

They could if they were phenomenally intelligent or phenomenally durable and long-lived

All the combined knowledge of millions of people has taken us thousands of years to get this far. I think that one dude achieving much by way of technology all by itself, even if it lived for centuries, is pretty unbelievable. Cooperation and culture, essential components of being social animals, are largely responsible for our level of technological achievement. Furthermore, our large and complex social groups are responsible for our intelligence in the first place. There's no real reason for a solitary animal to develop a high level of intellect.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

This thread actually reminded me of a story idea i had: the concepts was there was a highly intelligent insectile race, with the intellect, drive and will to create advanced technology, but no concept of society. they are born alone, raise themselves, feed themselves, teach  themselves and whatever they create in their lifetime is ultimately lost, because it either goes unfinished or is looted by some other insect who wants their raw materials for their own project. Basically it's what a race of people would LITERALLY have to be in order to truly be everything that RUGGED INDIVIDUALISTS claim to be.

If they don't pass on their knowledge to others, they don't get past the "picking up a sharp rock" stage.

They could if they were phenomenally intelligent or phenomenally durable and long-lived

All the combined knowledge of millions of people has taken us thousands of years to get this far. I think that one dude achieving much by way of technology all by itself, even if it lived for centuries, is pretty unbelievable. Cooperation and culture, essential components of being social animals, are largely responsible for our level of technological achievement. Furthermore, our large and complex social groups are responsible for our intelligence in the first place. There's no real reason for a solitary animal to develop a high level of intellect.

Yep.  The trick is accumulated knowledge.  People in the middle ages were smarter than us, which should be reasonably obvious.  But without that accumulated knowledge, we remember them as hod-carriers and filthy peasants, with the occasional psychopath in mail armor.

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

This thread actually reminded me of a story idea i had: the concepts was there was a highly intelligent insectile race, with the intellect, drive and will to create advanced technology, but no concept of society. they are born alone, raise themselves, feed themselves, teach  themselves and whatever they create in their lifetime is ultimately lost, because it either goes unfinished or is looted by some other insect who wants their raw materials for their own project. Basically it's what a race of people would LITERALLY have to be in order to truly be everything that RUGGED INDIVIDUALISTS claim to be.

If they don't pass on their knowledge to others, they don't get past the "picking up a sharp rock" stage.

They could if they were phenomenally intelligent or phenomenally durable and long-lived

All the combined knowledge of millions of people has taken us thousands of years to get this far. I think that one dude achieving much by way of technology all by itself, even if it lived for centuries,

I agree with this as written. It could however achieve centuries worth of technology if it lived for centuries. (or thousands of years worth if it lived for thousands of years).

Especially if, as I said before, they were much smarter than humans.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

This thread actually reminded me of a story idea i had: the concepts was there was a highly intelligent insectile race, with the intellect, drive and will to create advanced technology, but no concept of society. they are born alone, raise themselves, feed themselves, teach  themselves and whatever they create in their lifetime is ultimately lost, because it either goes unfinished or is looted by some other insect who wants their raw materials for their own project. Basically it's what a race of people would LITERALLY have to be in order to truly be everything that RUGGED INDIVIDUALISTS claim to be.

If they don't pass on their knowledge to others, they don't get past the "picking up a sharp rock" stage.

They could if they were phenomenally intelligent or phenomenally durable and long-lived

All the combined knowledge of millions of people has taken us thousands of years to get this far. I think that one dude achieving much by way of technology all by itself, even if it lived for centuries,

I agree with this as written. It could however achieve centuries worth of technology if it lived for centuries. (or thousands of years worth if it lived for thousands of years).

Especially if, as I said before, they were much smarter than humans.

Sure.

But most high technology is also socially driven. Communication and travel technologies, for example. Medical technologies.

And again, the reason all highly intelligent species we have so far observed developed their giant brains is specifically because they are social, which requires far more complex levels of processing than solitary survival. So I would find it impossible to suspend disbelief.

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

This thread actually reminded me of a story idea i had: the concepts was there was a highly intelligent insectile race, with the intellect, drive and will to create advanced technology, but no concept of society. they are born alone, raise themselves, feed themselves, teach  themselves and whatever they create in their lifetime is ultimately lost, because it either goes unfinished or is looted by some other insect who wants their raw materials for their own project. Basically it's what a race of people would LITERALLY have to be in order to truly be everything that RUGGED INDIVIDUALISTS claim to be.

If they don't pass on their knowledge to others, they don't get past the "picking up a sharp rock" stage.

They could if they were phenomenally intelligent or phenomenally durable and long-lived

All the combined knowledge of millions of people has taken us thousands of years to get this far. I think that one dude achieving much by way of technology all by itself, even if it lived for centuries,

I agree with this as written. It could however achieve centuries worth of technology if it lived for centuries. (or thousands of years worth if it lived for thousands of years).

Especially if, as I said before, they were much smarter than humans.

Sure.

But most high technology is also socially driven. Communication and travel technologies, for example. Medical technologies.

And again, the reason all highly intelligent species we have so far observed developed their giant brains is specifically because they are social, which requires far more complex levels of processing than solitary survival. So I would find it impossible to suspend disbelief.

What if they had an intelligent social species somewhere in their evolutionary background?

[Chelagoras The Boulder]

Yea, the point of the allegory is the value of society, as well as imagining a divergent evolutionary path from our own. These creatures could achieve so much if they could work and live together, yet because of the way they evolved, their potential is squandered bickering over resources and wasting their entire lives trying to accomplish things on their own they could easily do if they had that millions of years of societal knowledge to draw from. Their planets are littered with unfinished projects: journals written in languages only one person ever spoke, machines built from scrapped parts from other machines that built from scrapped parts etc. the net result of their efforts is that their planet looks like its covered in ruins, only they move about and change because the individuals aren't done with them yet. Also consider the possibility that as insects they could have much faster metabolisms than mammals so that they can get more done per lifetime than we might.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

In the hands of a skilled enough writer, anything could work. What-ifs are the domain of science fiction, after all.