The Bacon Strip Principle of Science Fiction
A Field Guide to Sci-Fi's Blind Spots
How a piece of bacon, three play examples, and seven systematic erasures reveal what science fiction doesn't see—and why those absences shape the futures we imagine
Introduction: The Interpretive Key
A two-inch strip of bacon fell out of my burger at lunch. Instead of throwing it away, I wrapped it in a napkin, carried it home, and spent a few minutes giving it to our dog in little pieces. Delia’s tail wagged. The snack was eaten. The day continued.
This mundane act contains no advanced technology, serves no imperial purpose, optimizes no system. Yet it embodies something essential about meaning-making: significance operates at multiple scales simultaneously. Sometimes the smallest gesture carries more weight than the entire apparatus of galactic logistics—not because the apparatus doesn't matter, but because without such gestures, we forget what the apparatus is for.
We call this the bacon strip principle: the recognition that consciousness navigates between cosmic and intimate scales constantly, that the most grounded approach to impossible futures begins with embodied meaning and works outward to systematic complexity, rather than the reverse.
Who This Field Guide Is For
If you create, consume, or think critically about science fiction—whether as GM, player, writer, reader, or analyst—this guide offers diagnostic tools for recognizing patterns of systematic erasure that shape how the genre imagines possible futures. Each blind spot identified here represents not just a storytelling limitation but a missing interpretive lens that, when restored, opens new possibilities for both analysis and creation.
The goal is not to fix science fiction but to read it more richly—to develop what might be called multi-scalar literacy that can hold systematic complexity and human meaning simultaneously. The bacon strip principle serves as the interpretive key: when analysis becomes too abstract, return to what matters most at human scale. When stories become too focused on individual moments, consider the systematic conditions that make those moments possible.
The Structure Ahead
This field guide maps seven interconnected blind spots, showing both what science fiction consistently misses and why those absences are systematic rather than accidental. Each section follows the same pattern: Problem → What's Missing → Table Examples → Systemic Stakes. The final section explores why these erasures form a mutually reinforcing web that shapes not just individual stories but entire cultural approaches to imagining technological futures.
Blind Spot #1: Logistics Erasure
Where Does the Food Come From?
The Problem: Science fiction consistently makes the material foundations of impossible civilizations invisible. Coruscant gleams as a city-planet of endless towers, but who feeds its trillion inhabitants? The Enterprise explores strange new worlds, but who mines the dilithium crystals that power it? Imperial fleets patrol the galaxy, but where do their supply chains originate and terminate?
What's Missing: The fragile archipelago nature of interstellar civilization—recognition that space empires are held together by thin threads of commerce rather than inevitable expressions of technological supremacy. When material dependencies are invisible, political relationships appear natural rather than contingent. The gleaming capital seems inherently superior to the agricultural periphery rather than desperately dependent upon it.
At the Table: Captain Rivera stares at the orbital ring around Kepler Prime—a gleaming megastructure that shouldn't be possible given the system's listed resources. Her engineering mind starts calculating supply chains and structural loads. Where does the metal come from? Who maintains the mag-lev systems? The GM pauses: "You realize this ring requires the output of at least six mining worlds to maintain, and none are listed in the star charts." Suddenly the beautiful impossible city becomes a political mystery.
Why This Matters: Logistics erasure enables political backgrounding by hiding the material dependencies that would reveal power relationships. When we cannot see where resources come from, we cannot see who controls their distribution—and why. Making logistics visible transforms space opera from adventure narrative into structural analysis, from individual heroics to questions of collective coordination and systemic sustainability.
The Bacon Strip Connection: Every gleaming impossible city represents an act of collective care made so efficient it becomes invisible. The goal is not to turn space opera into supply chain management but to recognize that caring scales up through logistics—and that logistics without care becomes mere optimization.
Blind Spot #2: The Hardware Bias
Technology as Shopping Catalog
The Problem: Science fiction represents technological differences primarily through equipment lists rather than cognitive frameworks. "Tech Level 15" civilizations are defined by what they own—faster ships, more powerful weapons, sophisticated computers—while the mental habits that make such technology possible, meaningful, or even conceivable are treated as incidental details.
Author's note: We're flipping between TL (Tech Level) and TG (Tech Gradient) seemingly randomly here, and I apologize for the confusion. The former is from the Traveller RPG's system of measuring the technology standards of a particular society, ranging from 1 to 15 for the game's typical setting; the latter is our truncated scale from 1-6 for the game Low Tech ↔ High Tech.
What's Missing: Technology as embodied cognition—recognition that different technological environments literally shape consciousness and problem-solving approaches. A fusion reactor is not just a power source but the crystallization of particular assumptions about planning horizons, acceptable risk, and the relationship between theory and practice. The society that builds fusion reactors thinks differently than one that harnesses wind and water.
At the Table: Engineer Torres (TG 3 background) encounters a TG 6 reality-warping artifact. She rolls a 1—normally a success using her systematic diagnostic approach. But the artifact responds to her logical methodology by phase-shifting the entire engineering bay. Her competence has become the problem. Now she must abandon systematic analysis and trust pure intuition to interact safely with technology that operates beyond her cognitive framework.
Why This Matters: The hardware bias reinforces competence mythology—the assumption that expertise, preparation, and systematic thinking always improve outcomes. But real competence is highly context-dependent. The cognitive frameworks that make you expert in one domain can blind you to solutions that lie outside that domain's assumptions. Expertise creates mental habits that are exquisitely adapted to particular environments and can become liabilities when environments change.
The Bacon Strip Connection: The most robust forms of competence might be multi-scalar: fluent with both systematic analysis and intuitive response, comfortable with optimization and satisficing. The engineer who can both calculate structural loads and notice when something "feels wrong" has cognitive flexibility that pure optimization cannot provide.
Blind Spot #3: Boredom Erasure
The Abundance Void
The Problem: Science fiction consistently avoids existential drift and purposelessness as natural consequences of post-scarcity abundance. Star Trek's Federation eliminates material want through replicators but sidesteps the question of what people do with themselves when all material problems have been solved. Characters avoid this issue by being explorers and diplomats—but what about the billions who don't get to boldly go anywhere?
What's Missing: The psychology of solved problems—recognition that abundance creates its own forms of scarcity. When material needs are satisfied automatically, other needs become more urgent: the need for agency, meaningful choice, genuine risk, irreplaceable relationships. These cannot be replicated or optimized like food and shelter. They require what might be called artificial scarcity—deliberately created constraints that make choice consequential.
At the Table: Dr. Ashworth (TG 5 background, systematic thinking) reclines in a post-scarcity leisure world where replicators provide everything instantly. He rolls a 2—normally his sweet spot for methodical problem-solving. But in this abundance, success triggers existential stress: his careful intelligence has nothing left to solve. "If everything is provided, what am I for?" The GM adds Stress to his sheet. The ennui of post-scarcity has become part of the story.
Why This Matters: Boredom erasure reflects cultural indulgence—the projection of contemporary abundance assumptions onto imagined futures. From societies where logistics are invisible and material security allows for speculation about transcendent possibilities, it becomes natural to imagine that better technology eliminates psychological as well as material problems. But consciousness requires resistance to generate meaning.
The Bacon Strip Connection: Meaning operates according to different economics than matter. You cannot replicate the satisfaction of remembering someone's birthday or automate the joy of caring for something fragile. A sophisticated post-scarcity society might preserve scarcity in meaning while eliminating scarcity in matter.
Blind Spot #4: Political Economy Backgrounding
The Power Behind the Gleaming Towers
The Problem: Science fiction treats power relationships as natural features rather than contingent arrangements requiring ongoing energy to maintain. Imperial capitals appear inherently superior to agricultural peripheries, technological advancement seems to naturally produce social advancement, and inequality is rarely examined as a structural feature of the imagined systems.
What's Missing: Asymmetric dependencies and their political consequences—recognition that every TL 15 capital depends on TL 5 farm worlds, creating colonial relationships at interstellar scales. When high-tech civilizations cannot replicate the agricultural knowledge embedded in "primitive" societies, dependency flows both directions. Neither side can simply eliminate the other without destroying what they need.
At the Table: The grain shipments from Demeter-VII are three weeks overdue. The TG 6 orbital Kepler Station responds with probability storms warping spacetime around the agricultural world. But the transcendent station-dwellers cannot take over farming—their optimization-focused minds cannot think down to soil chemistry and bacterial cycles. The TG 2 farmers know this and leverage their irreplaceable knowledge: "Your replicators can't conjure what was never grown." The party's TG 3-4 ship becomes essential as cognitive translators between incompatible worldviews.
Why This Matters: Political backgrounding obscures how technology is never politically neutral. Advanced technologies require enormous coordination to develop and maintain, creating opportunities for centralized control. They often increase inequality by benefiting those with access to capital and education. Making political economy visible transforms heroism from individual competence to collective coordination.
The Bacon Strip Connection: Political relationships operate at multiple scales simultaneously. The galactic trade war matters, and so does the moment when a farmer chooses to share food with a stranger. Structural change requires cultural shifts in how people understand what matters most.
Blind Spot #5: Competence Mythology
When Expertise Becomes Enemy
The Problem: Science fiction assumes that expertise, preparation, and advanced training always improve outcomes. More dice, better gear, higher skill levels—the mechanical structure of most science fiction games assumes that competence is transferable across contexts, that what makes you effective in one situation will make you effective in others.
What's Missing: The contingency of competence—recognition that expertise is largely domain-specific and the mental habits that make you excellent in one area can actively interfere with learning in another. Real paradigm breaks require not just learning new skills but unlearning old ones, abandoning familiar cognitive frameworks that have become counterproductive.
At the Table: The party's expert diplomat, trained in TG 6 consensus-building protocols, attempts to negotiate with TG 2 tribal leaders. She rolls multiple successes using her advanced training—but her systematic approach to conflict resolution completely misses the honor-based dynamics actually governing the situation. Her competence in sophisticated diplomacy becomes a liability when dealing with people who think in terms of personal reputation and kinship obligations.
Why This Matters: The competence mythology reflects cultural faith in the transferability of expertise—the assumption that smart people are smart across domains, that good problem-solvers can solve any problem. But cognitive science suggests expertise creates specialized adaptations that work brilliantly within their domains and can interfere with each other across boundaries.
The Bacon Strip Connection: The most sophisticated form of competence might be contingent confidence: the ability to trust your training while remaining curious about its limits, to act decisively while staying open to feedback suggesting you might be wrong. Strategic humility becomes more valuable than traditional expertise when contexts shift rapidly.
Blind Spot #6: Linear Tech Progression
The Ladder Fallacy
The Problem: Science fiction typically represents technological development as a single ladder where "higher" is always "better." TL 15 civilizations are treated as evolved TL 5 civilizations with better equipment, rather than potentially incommensurable ways of organizing knowledge, capability, and social relationships.
What's Missing: Technological incommensurability—recognition that different technological ecosystems can develop along such different trajectories that comparison becomes meaningless rather than merely difficult. The TG 6 civilization that can manipulate probability but cannot understand soil chemistry is not "more advanced" than the TG 2 society with sophisticated agricultural knowledge—they are differently capable in ways that create opportunities for both conflict and collaboration.
At the Table: The party encounters archaeological ruins from a vanished civilization that somehow combined TG 1 biological knowledge with TG 5 materials science in ways that produce effects resembling TG 6 reality manipulation. Their "primitive" understanding of ecosystem relationships enabled technological capabilities that pure systematic advancement cannot replicate. The ruins challenge basic assumptions about how technological development works.
Why This Matters: Linear progression assumptions reflect contemporary technological determinism—the faith that current directions of development represent optimal paths rather than contingent choices shaped by particular cultural priorities. This makes it difficult to imagine alternative technological trajectories that might serve human flourishing differently.
The Bacon Strip Connection: The most interesting technological encounters might involve incompatible forms of excellence—situations where different approaches to the relationship between mind and matter create capabilities that cannot be ranked hierarchically but must be appreciated as different kinds of intelligence.
Blind Spot #7: Cultural Indulgence
The View from Abundance
The Problem: Science fiction emerges primarily from societies of relative abundance, where material security creates psychological space for speculation about futures unconstrained by immediate survival needs. This cultural position shapes what the genre can see and what remains systematically invisible, treating abundance perspectives as universal rather than particular.
What's Missing: Recognition of positional bias—acknowledgment that the blind spots catalogued here reflect specific historical and cultural circumstances rather than universal truths about technology, society, or human nature. Most human societies throughout history have lived much closer to material limits, experienced technological change as disruption rather than improvement, seen traditional competence become liability in rapidly changing circumstances.
At the Table: The party encounters a civilization that has deliberately limited its technological development to maintain ecological balance and social cohesion. Rather than being "primitive," they represent a sophisticated alternative path that prioritizes sustainability over efficiency, community resilience over individual optimization. Their "lower" tech level enables capabilities—social coordination, environmental harmony, psychological stability—that "higher" tech societies have lost.
Why This Matters: Cultural indulgence is not inherently problematic—abundance creates possibilities for imagination that scarcity forecloses. But it becomes problematic when naturalized, when the perspective of abundance is mistaken for universal human perspective. Recognizing cultural position enables cognitive humility about one's own interpretive frameworks.
The Bacon Strip Connection: The most sophisticated science fiction might be multi-scalar culturally: aware of its own cultural position while remaining open to insights from other positions, grounded in particular traditions while capable of learning from different ones.
The Interdependent Web: How Blind Spots Reinforce Each Other
These seven blind spots do not exist in isolation—they form an interconnected ecology of mutual reinforcement, where each erasure makes the others more invisible and more necessary. Understanding this web reveals why addressing individual blind spots often feels unsatisfying: they protect each other by making each erasure seem necessary for maintaining the others.
Chain Reaction #1: Spectacle Through Erasure Logistics Erasure + Political Backgrounding = Imperial Spectacle
Coruscant can gleam precisely because we never see the grain barges or calculate who controls their distribution. Making material dependencies invisible enables treating power relationships as natural rather than contingent. The impossible city works aesthetically because it erases the questions that would reveal its political foundations.
Chain Reaction #2: Hero Mythology Through Simplification Hardware Bias + Competence Mythology = Transferable Expertise
If technology is just better tools, then experts with access to the best tools should be universally capable. Reducing technology to equipment lists reinforces the assumption that competence scales linearly across contexts. This eliminates the dramatic possibility of paradigm breaks where expertise becomes liability.
Chain Reaction #3: Utopian Blindness Through Projection Cultural Indulgence + Boredom Erasure = Post-Scarcity Assumptions
From positions of relative abundance, it becomes natural to project that abundance onto imagined futures. The cultural inability to see abundance as a problem makes it nearly impossible to imagine psychological consequences of solved material problems. Post-scarcity becomes utopia by definition rather than by investigation.
The Web Effect
This interdependence explains why science fiction's limitations persist despite being relatively easy to identify once pointed out. They are not simply oversights but functional elements of a coherent worldview—a way of imagining futures that preserves optimistic technological trajectories while avoiding uncomfortable implications.
Breaking the web requires not just identifying individual blind spots but developing alternative frameworks that can hold the tensions they typically resolve through erasure. The bacon strip principle offers one such framework: multi-scalar thinking that can navigate between cosmic and intimate concerns without sacrificing either.
The Heretical Framework: Reading Science Fiction Against Itself
Recognizing these blind spots as systematic rather than accidental constitutes a form of intellectual heresy against several established orthodoxies within science fiction culture:
Against Hard SF Orthodoxy: Questioning whether systematic rigor is the only "serious" way to approach speculative futures, suggesting that wonder and spectacle have legitimate epistemological value alongside careful extrapolation.
Against Space Opera Faith: Insisting that material dependencies matter even in mythic futures, exposing political foundations of gleaming empires, refusing to let technological sublime erase questions of power and distribution.
Against Simulation Gaming: Making competence unreliable, privileging cognitive frameworks over gear optimization, arguing that meaning-making is as mechanically important as resource management.
Against Genre Purity: Mixing materialist critique with aesthetic appreciation, treating multiple interpretive lenses as simultaneously valid, refusing to choose between realism and romance.
The Productive Paradox
The deepest heresy may be suggesting that science fiction's contradictions are not bugs to be fixed but features to be explored. The logistics of galactic empire are simultaneously impossible and essential. Technological differences are simultaneously hierarchical and incommensurable. Abundance is simultaneously liberating and emptying.
The bacon strip principle suggests these contradictions are not problems to be resolved but productive tensions to be navigated. The most interesting science fiction might emerge not from choosing sides but from creating narrative frameworks that can hold multiple truths simultaneously.
Multi-Scalar Hermeneutics
This heretical approach requires what might be called strategic eclecticism: the ability to shift between systematic analysis and aesthetic appreciation, between political critique and wonder, between optimization and care, depending on what the situation demands. Not because all approaches are equally valid in all contexts, but because complex realities require cognitive flexibility that no single approach can provide.
The goal is not to eliminate cultural perspective—an impossible task—but to make it conscious of itself, to recognize abundance as one viewpoint among many rather than the natural baseline for imagining futures.
The Contemporary Stakes: Why This Matters Now
The blind spots mapped here have implications extending far beyond science fiction into how we approach any complex system that shapes human experience while exceeding normal comprehension scales. Climate change, artificial intelligence, global economic networks, democratic governance—all challenge consciousness to operate across scales that require both systematic sophistication and embodied wisdom.
The Translator Crisis
Perhaps most urgently, these blind spots reveal the disappearance of what might be called the translator class: people who can bridge between incommensurable worldviews without losing fluency in any of them. In our own moment of cognitive polarization, we desperately need what the TG 3-4 characters represent—the capacity to navigate between systematic analysis and embodied meaning, technological optimism and political critique, individual agency and collective responsibility.
The Design Challenge
The bacon strip principle ultimately poses a design challenge for consciousness in the 21st century: How do we develop cognitive capabilities that can operate across the scales contemporary problems require while preserving the human-scale meaning that makes such operation worthwhile?
This is not just a science fiction question—it is the central existential challenge of technological civilization. The tools we create to solve problems at one scale consistently create new problems at other scales. The cognitive frameworks that work brilliantly in some contexts become obstacles in others.
Multi-Scalar Citizenship
The most important implication may be that effective citizenship in technological civilization requires multi-scalar literacy: the ability to think systemically about large-scale coordination while never losing touch with the embodied meaning that makes such coordination worthwhile. To care about climate policy and remember birthdays. To understand global supply chains and notice when the neighbor's dog needs a bacon strip.
Conclusion: The Revolution Starts with Lunch
Science fiction's blind spots turn out to be maps of territories that consciousness has not yet learned to inhabit. They reveal not just limitations of individual imagination but systematic challenges that any consciousness faces when encountering complexity that exceeds normal comprehension scales.
The bacon strip principle offers not a solution to these challenges but a way of dancing with them: an approach that begins with embodied meaning and works outward to systematic complexity, that privileges no single scale while remaining capable of operating across all scales.
The Practical Application
For creators: Use this field guide as a diagnostic tool. When building worlds, ask not just "How do the systems work?" but "How do the systems serve what matters most?" When designing conflicts, consider not just individual competence but cognitive frameworks encountering their limits. When imagining technologies, think not just about capabilities but about how different capabilities shape consciousness.
For players and readers: Develop multi-scalar literacy. Notice when stories privilege systematic complexity over human meaning, or vice versa. Look for the bacon strip moments that anchor impossible futures in embodied experience. Practice holding both systematic analysis and aesthetic appreciation simultaneously.
For critics and scholars: Recognize the bacon strip principle as an interpretive methodology that can illuminate not just science fiction but any cultural product that attempts to navigate between individual and collective scales of meaning.
The Ultimate Stakes
The most radical implication may be that consciousness itself is multi-scalar—that the capacity to hold different levels of meaning simultaneously is not a cognitive luxury but an essential feature of what makes human experience human. The futures most worth inhabiting might be those that preserve and enhance this capacity rather than optimize for any single scale of concern.
Futures where the fusion reactors work AND the birthdays are remembered. Where the trade routes function AND strangers share food. Where galactic governments operate AND dogs get their bacon strips.
The revolution starts with lunch because lunch is where consciousness encounters the daily miracle of matter becoming meaning, where systematic infrastructure meets irreducible particularity, where the cosmic and intimate discover they need each other more than either can survive alone.
That may be the most important thing science fiction can teach us: that the universe is simultaneously impossibly vast and intimately small, and that consciousness capable of inhabiting both scales simultaneously might be the most remarkable thing it has produced so far.
"Sometimes the bacon strip matters more than the entire apparatus of galactic logistics—not because the apparatus doesn't matter, but because without the bacon strip, we forget what the apparatus is for."
Appendix: Quick Reference for GMs and Creators
Diagnostic Questions for Worldbuilding:
- Where does the food come from, and who controls its distribution?
- What cognitive frameworks do different technologies create and require?
- How does abundance change what people struggle with?
- What power relationships are made invisible by technological spectacle?
- When does expertise become liability rather than asset?
- What alternative technological paths might serve different values?
- Whose cultural perspective is being universalized?
Red Flags in Science Fiction:
- Supply chains that never appear or matter
- Technology represented only through equipment lists
- Post-scarcity societies without psychological complexity
- Political relationships that seem "natural" rather than constructed
- Expertise that transfers perfectly across all contexts
- Linear technological progression with no alternative paths
- Single cultural perspective treated as universal
Bacon Strip Moments to Preserve:
- Individual choices that matter despite vast scales
- Embodied wisdom that systematic analysis misses
- Care that scales up through logistics and organization
- Wonder that coexists with understanding rather than being replaced by it
- Meaning-making that operates across multiple scales simultaneously
Appendix: The Final Heresy
The Bacon Strip Principle as Paradigm Navigation
Science fiction loves to imagine what happens when technologies, empires, or minds exceed our comprehension. Our hack gives this a number: 3+ TG difference = paradigm break. At that threshold, your competence betrays you. The toolset that worked yesterday becomes the liability today. Translation collapses.
But what about meaning? What happens when the scales of interpretation themselves diverge beyond comprehension?
- Zoom-in (TG 1–2): The embodied present. The car is hot, the bacon strip is delicious, the dog wags her tail.
- Zoom-out (TG 3–5): The systemic frame. Industrial agriculture, planetary supply chains, climate systems, empire logistics.
- Zoom-off-the-scale (TG 6+): The cosmic shrug. Entropy, absurdity, the universe doesn’t care if your ship or civilization survives.
At these different scales, meaning becomes incommensurable. The “But, complicity!” critique lives in the zoom-out frame—true, but incomplete. The dog’s tail wag lives in the zoom-in frame—true, but incomplete. The heat-death-of-the-universe lives in the cosmic frame—true, but incomplete.
Here’s the heresy:When systematic analysis hits paradigm break territory, you don’t abandon meaning—you invert it. You anchor back down to embodied immediacy. You wag your tail. You share the bacon.
This isn’t escapism. It’s a multi-scalar praxis:
- Feed the dog and critique the food system.
- Wag the tail and recognize the empire is fragile.
- Accept snacks and build better futures.
The Bacon Strip Principle is the meaning-making inversion rule:
When scales of interpretation diverge beyond translation, ground yourself in the embodied present. Then climb back up to the system with renewed clarity.
The Final Heresy:The smallest act of embodied care—the wag of a tail, the sharing of a snack—can be as valid a response to impossible futures as the grandest systemic analysis. Not because it fixes the system, but because it keeps you alive, connected, and able to keep playing.
The revolution that starts with lunch ends with tail wags in impossible circumstances.
Low Tech ↔ High Tech, a Lasers & Feelings hack is available as a free download on itch.io.