111–120 of 175 posts
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I wasn't talking about the protagonist.
Who else doesn't communicate? The vampire isn't a candidate for having done anything to themselves.
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If we're going in this direction, you might find enjoyable the book Echopraxia (and its predecessor, Blindsight ). Without spoiling too much, it features a group of people that pushed their cognitive wetware and hardware to the point they can't even communicate with normal humans anymore.
I've read Blindsight, but wasn't aware of Echopraxia. I'll look for it. One common disappointment I have with sci-fi is how often AIs or alien intelligence are so close to human intelligence. In the Star Trek universe, every alien species is essentially humanoid with some added prosthetic and makeup. This is understandable in a weekly TV show with a tight schedule and budget. But I've read lots of books where the ali…
And along the lines of good portrayal of non-human intelligence, I can also recommend Children of Time, and its sequel, Children of Ruin. Both deal with Earth animal species getting uplifted and left to create their own civilizations.
Highly, highly recommend Vinge's A Deepness In The Sky [0], which won the Hugo in 2000. It's a hard-sci-fi story about how various societies, human and alien, attempt to assert control & hegemony over centuries of time (in many ways thinking of this as a distributed systems and code documentation problem!), and how critical and impactful the role of language translation is in helping people to understand foreign ways…
+1. A Deepness in the Sky is one of the most underrated works of speculative fiction that I've read. It is a masterwork of plotting and character work. A Fire Upon the Deep has some great ideas and some characters that have stuck with me, but I think Deepness is a far superior work. Its brilliance is that it has the structure of a great work of fiction but you can basically just read it as straight pulp science ficti…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we're going in this direction, you might find enjoyable the book Echopraxia (and its predecessor, Blindsight ). Without spoiling too much, it features a group of people that pushed their cognitive wetware and hardware to the point they can't even communicate with normal humans anymore.
I've read Blindsight, but wasn't aware of Echopraxia. I'll look for it. One common disappointment I have with sci-fi is how often AIs or alien intelligence are so close to human intelligence. In the Star Trek universe, every alien species is essentially humanoid with some added prosthetic and makeup. This is understandable in a weekly TV show with a tight schedule and budget. But I've read lots of books where the ali…
I didn't use to think this way, but now if we ever met an alien species, it wouldn't surprise me if we had enough cognitive and emotional common ground to establish meaningful relations provided they are carbon-based lifeforms or analogous.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who else doesn't communicate? The vampire isn't a candidate for having done anything to themselves.
The protagonist is a synthesist - whose sole job is to translate the incomprehensible in-language of the augmented scientists to mission control
Highly, highly recommend Vinge's A Deepness In The Sky [0], which won the Hugo in 2000. It's a hard-sci-fi story about how various societies, human and alien, attempt to assert control & hegemony over centuries of time (in many ways thinking of this as a distributed systems and code documentation problem!), and how critical and impactful the role of language translation is in helping people to understand foreign ways…
Not only is Deepness one of the best sci-fi stories I've read, it's also immensely better than Fire Upon the Deep. I read it first, and it's basically essential sci-fi in my book.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've read Blindsight, but wasn't aware of Echopraxia. I'll look for it. One common disappointment I have with sci-fi is how often AIs or alien intelligence are so close to human intelligence. In the Star Trek universe, every alien species is essentially humanoid with some added prosthetic and makeup. This is understandable in a weekly TV show with a tight schedule and budget. But I've read lots of books where the ali…
We've observed perhaps the closest thing to alien intelligence in the form of intelligent cephalopods -- like squids, octopuses, and cuttlefish. What surprises me about octopuses is how, despite a brain structure that diverged from our lineage perhaps billions of years ago and is vastly different from ours (they have a small central brain and enormously innervated tentacles each with its own local processing), they m…
I can't imagine a life form that won't look fondly upon another life form that helps them get their preferred food, and helps limit or avoid discomfort.
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
This is in my list of top 10 (ish) books I've read. If you've enjoyed it, He's got two more books in the Zones of Thought universe: A Deepness In The Sky, which follows Pham in his Queng Ho days before A Fire Upon The Deep (recommended!) as well as Children Of The Sky, which follows Ravna and the children on the Tines world as a direct sequel to Fire Upon The Deep.
Some other really thought provoking books by Vinge which often go overlooked is "The Peace Wars" and "Marooned in Realtime" My personal guilty favorite (I say guilty because he really buys into the outdated concept of the technological singularity) is Rainbow's End, which deals with notions of augmented reality, digitalization of books, and even touches on right-to-repair issues in a way.