81–90 of 110 posts
It is well written and a good story. Its kind of a strange story of revenge with a AI as the protagonist.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Once upon a time I would have agreed - but these days I find poor characterisation stalls my suspension of disbelief just as much as dodgy physics. So my current favourite is Fiasco by Lem. The physics at least sounds convincing and the characters are all too human.
That reminds me of one reviewer who described the weirdest aliens in any science fiction novel as the human characters in a particular Robert L. Forward novel....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That reminds me of one reviewer who described the weirdest aliens in any science fiction novel as the human characters in a particular Robert L. Forward novel....
That sounds tantalizing. I tried googling around but couldn't figure out which book that might be. Can you try to dig up the name? The only Robert Forward I've read is Dragon's Egg, which was great. I should read more by him.
One the other hand the same reviewer described the aliens in the novel as being Californian surfers....
At the moment I'm a lot into short stories, and that'd mean Ted Chiang of course, and Greg Evan, as well as some of Vinge Vernor.
Some more good ones: Ilium/Olympos - Dan Simmons Centuries - A. A. Attanasio Callahan's Crosstime Saloon - Spider Robinson Signal to Noise - Eric Nylund
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Abraham_(author)#The_Exp...
The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons.
I have strong opinions about this. My criteria for a book being science fiction and not fantasy is that is must be based on scientific thinking. The author must have done some work to determine whether whats happening in his book is at least plausible according to real science, and then work out the details of how it would actually function. So I regard most "science fiction" books and almost all "science fiction" fi…
I'm sure you know this, but you never say so which makes it a bit frustrating: what you refer to as "real science fiction" is commonly known as "hard science fiction" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction ). The "opposite", i.e. what you refer to as re-skinned fantasy, often falls into the "space opera" subgenre ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_opera ). For instance, "Star Wars" is often referred to…