201–210 of 291 posts
Greg Egan check.
No Peter Watts, understandable Blindsight is relatively recent and unknown. (Seriously though drop everything and read this now: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm)
No Stanislaw Lem you best be trolling.
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Glad to see that this time someone else is recommending this too, full of interesting ideas and overall a good hard sci-fi novel. We need more novels about these themes.
Um, hard sci-fi? Some handwavy "upload person to computer" stuff and then "we'll just rearrange the universe over here, don't mind us". I did read it a long time ago, but I don't remember anything that specific in it.
Thought I might see 'Flowers for Algernon' on here.
The problem there is maybe that the novel length treatment of the idea is not quite as amazing as the original short story. One author that I find sadly missing from the list is John Brunner. Each of "Stand on Zanzibar", "The Sheep Look Up", and "Shockwave Rider" would arguably deserve a place on this list.
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it's not really a secret that most of Hollywood, the media, and much of progressivism and culture in general is organized around liberal jewish values. Cross 'jewish' and that line make sense. There is nothing specifically 'jewish' about those values. If anything, they're Greek. We don't owe a lot to the pre-Socratic societies, apart from them inspiring the Greeks to their greatness. In Western civilization, everythi…
I think that what's uniquely jewish is the implicit model of spiritual development that's glorified in so much of modern culture. That is, in judaism spiritual development comes from fully engaging with the physical and secular world, and immersing yourself in all of its problems and opportunities. In protestantism, spiritual development comes from contemplative experiences (e.g. thoreau) that are set apart from ever…
The opposing trend, which you might say treats religion as a form of escapism, is something that's really found only in certain strains of Protestantism, Islam, and Buddhism.
What? No mention of Lois McMaster Bujold and her excellent Vorkosigan series? Bujold won four Hugo awards for her work, just behind Heinlein (who won five), and I'm always surprised that she isn't better known.
Bujold has a noteworthy digital philosophy as well. The entire Vorkosigan series is available online http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/24-CryoburnCD/CryoburnCD/ ... all of it beautifully unencrypted and unencumbered. What’s the catch? This disk and its contents may be copied and shared, but NOT sold. All commercial rights are reserved. That’s it.
>"The people’s right to access information shall not be abridged. It’s the first item in the Constitution."
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Something Dune accomplishes really well -- and which very few sci-fi books or movies have ever pulled off quite as effectively -- is weaving a lot of background, and culture, and esoteric terminology, into the story without disrupting the story's flow. There aren't lengthy, disjointed sidebars about what X means, or why Y exists. Instead, X and Y are woven into the narrative via context, allowing the reader to pick u…
But the irony is that Harkonnen _sees_ himself as that sort of evil mastermind, when he's actually made himself quite stupid.
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I'm a fan of Greg Egan (which is on there). Quarantine and Permutation City are really great books. Schildt's Ladder was good but a bit too hard for me to grok.
I agree with those titles, and would add Diaspora which I just finished. Truly mindblowing stuff, although it may be a bit too abstract and technical for some.
Egan's stuff divides evenly into near-future and distant future science fiction; the distant future stuff tends to be very abstract. His latest novel, Zendegi, is a very near-future setting, and coincidentally is a more accessible read than most of his other stuff. I'd recommend it to start with.
Probably the most surprising thing about this list is that whoever made it didn't insert Amazon affiliate links into it. Anyway, these lists always raise the question of what does "good" mean exactly? Inevitably they're dominated by books that were, in their time, incredibly significant. You see the same things in computing books. Someone will always recommend "Design Patterns" but (IMHO) it is the dullest, driest bo…
This is a very weird statement to make, the architects of Cyberpunk (Gibson, Sterling etc.) are Japanophiles if anything, the opposite of Xenophobic. Do you have any evidence to back this statement up?
Cyberpunk was just an extrapolation of the tech scene of the 80s, Japanese tech was massively superior to other countries and, rightly thinking that tech would rule the future, they made Japan the dominant superpower - unfortunately the Lost Decade put paid to that.
One omission that may fit this crowd well is "Daemon" and it's sequel "Freedom(tm)" by Daniel Suarez http://thedaemon.com/ These books are very well written and billed as a 'techno-thriller'. I think they are also near-term science fiction, and have a lot of very interesting ideas. The books chronicle the rise of a very digital culture and a revolution driven by technology. The technology is amazingly well researched…
Stories of Your Life and Others http://www.amazon.com/Stories-Your-Life-Ted-Chiang/dp/193152...)
The Lifecycle of Software Objects* http://www.amazon.com/Lifecycle-Software-Objects-Ted-Chiang/...
*if there's a more HN title for a novella ever I haven't heard of it!