201–210 of 211 posts
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Blindsight's near future predictions are also looking more reasonable (aside from the vampires maybe)
I read Blindsight three times, and I’m still not sure what happened…
Anyone have recommendations on books that can rival the first part of Accelerando in number of prescient ideas about how the near future, pre singularity might look? My own list is: Starmaker by Olaf Stapledon Counting Heads by David Marusek Nexus by Ramez Naam Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge But I'm always on the look out for more! The more predictive the better!
Not necessarily books, but: Pantheon/the stories it's based on by Ken Liu (though I really do recommend the animated series). Maybe more conventional/dated, but I always recommend it for "getting" the emotional, person-to-person side in a particular way that few others do: .hack//SIGN. None of the characters ever quite realize what's going on, but elements - especially the soundtrack - seem to understand that everyon…
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> Its irrelevant if you can provide for yourself. The ecosystem cannot support 9 billion Hunter gatherers - period. I didn’t suggest that it could, but the number that it can support is certainly more than zero. If that’s the only choice in a hypothetical scenario where global infrastructure goes kablooey, then people who can figure out how to provide for themselves will outlive those who can’t. From there it’s natur…
Whether you survive is going to be almost entirely determined by factors not in your control and an obtainable skillset is statistically insignificant. The one critical skill is the one people discount almost immediately: social. You're statistically likely to simply be stuck in collapsing logistics system alongside everyone else: whether you can kill and dress your own rabbit doesn't matter because their aren't any.
Anyone have recommendations on books that can rival the first part of Accelerando in number of prescient ideas about how the near future, pre singularity might look? My own list is: Starmaker by Olaf Stapledon Counting Heads by David Marusek Nexus by Ramez Naam Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge But I'm always on the look out for more! The more predictive the better!
Accelerando is a true masterpiece. Crypto and endless speculation, AI and lobsters, space exploration - all in all just "this is our near future". TBH, I know of just handful of Sci-Fi novels as fundamental and as let's say prophetic as this one. The others to my taste in the same category is Nexus trilogy by Ramez Naam (even if a bit farfetched by now), The Diamond Age (="The Illustrated Primer" is peak AI) by Neil…
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Does he invent things though? Probably more brokering than inventing, and as the "idea guy", whatever he does come up with he doesn't need to build because the world is so overflowing with AI and 3d printers elsewhere. With no need to build, does he spend time on design then? We can imagine, but IIRC, it's not shown, and mostly it is enough to just have an idea. Manfred's a smart guy and a worthy hero, but I think we…
I'm not a fan of actually-existing late-stage capitalism, frankly. What I want is Banksian fully automated luxury gay space communism. (You can quote me on that. I hate what tech has turned into.)
But I always wondered if you’ve ever considered writing something more aspirational? Something that would make you happy to have people copying.
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> He's got such total dependency on his agents that when he loses his glasses he's basically no longer functional, Is this new? I don't think I could function without everything that was available in the 1950. I live because I have access to electricity, super markets, running water, working sewage, etc.. Take them away and I would not be able to fend for myself, especially in any major city. Put me in a forest I don…
This boggles my mind because you know how incapable you are during a crisis, and yet you seem content in that state. Help me understand the cognitive dissonance and how you deal with it
The scenario isn't a temporary crisis, it's total collapse, end of the world stuff. Why would I be so keen on surviving that? What for? Everyone and everything I enjoy in life would be gone anyway.
It's like the billionaires' apocalypse bunkers. What do they think they would be doing all day, and to what end? Even if they managed to secure enough clean air, clean food, and clean water, how many years are they planning to spend in their bunker pool, or watching their local movie library until the TV breaks? What's the end goal there?
I get that survivalists have a whole subculture, and it's an interest and hobby people enjoy doing, that's cool. But I think even they, if this happened and their skills allowed them to survive, would pretty soon start wondering why they would want to try to survive by all means possible in a barren, empty, dead world. If the survivalism is a fun hobby for someone, sure, but to force oneself to learn those skills for a potential apocalypse scenario doesn't seem to me like a reasonable thing to invest time in at all.
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Alastair Reynolds (high-concept space opera, well written), Adrian Tchaikovsky (first contact, aliens, can't write nearly as well as Banks), Neal Asher (AI-run civilisation, inventive nastiness). Nobody's exactly like Banks though.
> Alastair Reynolds Love Reynolds, but unfortunately he is not half as a good writer as Banks. Then again, not many are. Reynolods books are full of cool ideas though.
My big problem with Reynolds, I think, was that his characters are hard to distinguish. He seems to have a few stock personalities that he re-uses. The only one that really stood out for me as fully realized was Clavain.
It's a bit worrying that we're recommending SF that's a quarter of a century old - my SF reading has really dropped off since Gardner Dozois died. I need to read something published in the last 6 months.
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I think A Fire Upon the Deep would be a more enjoyable starting place for someone that likes the Culture series, even though A Deepness in the Sky is generally considered the better novel.
I wish I had read Deepness first as Fire sort of spoils it (granted, either direction will spoil some things)