131–140 of 175 posts
https://hugospodcast.com/podcast/hugos-there-podcast-57-a-fi...
As someone who read the book when I was younger and the internet was younger, I’ve always wished for the ‘Net to have translation pathway headers.
The second chapter is the best of the best - as a pure adventure episode, the characters, and the way the Tines' strangeness is indirectly explained.
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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…
These are the only sci-fi books I'm aware of that include a believable, fleshed-out secular explanation for the existence of supernatural, god-like beings in the Transcend. As an atheist who usually can't say out loud what I really think about facile, Earth-bound supernatural beliefs, I was enchanted to find this feature included in this already-mesmerizing world.
Here: https://3e.org/vvannot/ is Vinge's *ANNOTATED* copy of A Fire Upon The Deep; all the editing notes he, his editors, and test readers sent to each other during the writing of the book. This should be mirrored more widely before it gets lost...
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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…
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Minds:_The_Octopus,_the_...
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Liu Cixin managed to provide some very interesting answers regarding the nature of the cosmic dark forest and higher dimensional space in Death's End, the third book in the Three Body Problem trilogy. The Expanse book nine, Leviathan Falls, will probably explain the advanced alien conflict and unknown aggressors that proceeded human discovery in the distant past. Given how the authors have handled mysterious alien st…
Oh come on, it's a nice book and I enjoyed reading it but his physics are pure bullshit and his game theory is based on pop psychology.
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…
I strongly recommend the publication order instead. Deepness ought to work standalone, but you'll be missing dramatic irony.
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+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…
I recently read Fire Upon the Deep and I think I'd agree that Vinge is great at speculative fiction. I hadn't looked at the publish/copyright date when I borrowed the ebook from my library. I was shocked just now to see it's a thirty year old book. Zero signs or hints of it, at least to me. The concept that computers/AIs can be affected by the region of space they're in is a nifty idea I don't think I've seen before,…
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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…