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Book review: There Is No Antimemetics Division

stephendiehl.com

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Re: Book review: There Is No Antimemetics Division

#231

Post by anthonyrstevens »

specproc wrote: post #214
gravypod wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any recommendations for science fiction books that explore interesting ideas? There is no Antimemetics Division was really interesting in how some of the scenarios play out. I don't read much but I've been trying to do that more. I really liked the book. Things like the memory consuming entity, async research, etc I enjoyed.

Exploring "interesting ideas" is kinda broad, but I find Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, and Iain [M.] Banks all packed full of stuff that gets the noodle baking.

J. G. Ballard's "High-Rise" and "The Drowned World" are both excellent reads with very interesting stuff going on.

Re: Book review: There Is No Antimemetics Division

#232

Post by anthonyrstevens »

danielheath wrote: post #148
gravypod wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any recommendations for science fiction books that explore interesting ideas? There is no Antimemetics Division was really interesting in how some of the scenarios play out. I don't read much but I've been trying to do that more. I really liked the book. Things like the memory consuming entity, async research, etc I enjoyed.

“Valuable humans in transit”, maybe? The “Ancillary” series, for sure.

+1 for the Ancillary series by Ann Leckie.

Re: Book review: There Is No Antimemetics Division

#233

Post by jodrellblank »

gravypod wrote: post #129
mjg2 wrote: post #87

I just finished this book and complained about it the whole time. The prose is amateur and peppered with cliches (e.g. you should be fined for publishing the phrase "their suit was so sharp it could cut"). His attempt to write about the inner thoughts of the characters was pretty simple. The descriptions of violence and horror also felt child-like, especially the dialogue during those moments (e.g. Redd's introductio…

Do you have any recommendations for science fiction books that explore interesting ideas? There is no Antimemetics Division was really interesting in how some of the scenarios play out. I don't read much but I've been trying to do that more. I really liked the book. Things like the memory consuming entity, async research, etc I enjoyed.

> "science fiction books that explore interesting ideas?"

I think that's a big part of being in the Sci-Fi genre and I don't really get people whinging about writing style - this isn't Chaucer, it's fun geeky ideas. I second basically any Greg Egan and Charles Stross and Arthur C. Clarke stories, and:

Vernor Vinge's trilogy: A Deepness in the Sky, A Fire Upon the Deep, Across Realtime. Ideas from "World War II on an alien planet around a variable star where the whole planet freezes every few years" to timewarp bubbles, galactic zones of thought, cyborg enhancements, semi-sentient plants.

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky - what if we use genetic engineering to forcibly evolve monkeys towards human intelligence? Whoops our virus infected spiders instead.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir - much lighter Hollywood popcorn-action sci-fi, a potential world-ending threat and a cool alien encounter.

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin - What if a guy's dreams could change reality, he sees a therapist who has a dream-influencing machine and wants to take over the world.

Peter F. Hamilton trilogies, much more fantasy mixed with sci-fi but has future Space Opera ideas - genetically engineered, cyborg enhanced, mind uploaded, human factions, several varieties of aliens, various future-techs.

Re: Book review: There Is No Antimemetics Division

#234

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

Borrible wrote: post #221

Forget about it. Read The Raw Shark Texts instead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Raw_Shark_Texts

I thought that was going to be related to Alan Moore and Watchmen. There's the comic within the comic where the protagonist eats raw shark and of course the link to the Rorschach character.

Re: Book review: There Is No Antimemetics Division

#235

Post by woolion »

sph wrote: post #229
woolion wrote: post #191

I have been thinking a lot about a notion of self-paradoxical knowledge, meaning knowledge that actively makes your reasoning worse. For example, knowledge of extremely rare diseases causes the mind to over-evaluate their importance by many orders of magnitude (there are many variants of this effect). Or trying to explain some concepts of the object/subject construction tend to use a language that is grounded on the…

> I have been thinking a lot about a notion of self-paradoxical knowledge, meaning knowledge that actively makes your reasoning worse. There could be a hypothetical class of ideas that just knowing about them is actively harmful. For a fictional example, imagine learning how to detect a hostile alien race that has been living with us on earth all this time. Or if one day we invent a thought experiment that induces ps…

I had seen this, but all the examples correspond to having an actual, external threat as a result of this knowledge. I thought more about the buddhist parable that men don't know when they'll die, because only buddhas are able to live with this information. I guess it's very close to 'malinformation', but this is still related to an external actor manipulating what you know with an external goal, rather than intrinsic to the information.

Re: Book review: There Is No Antimemetics Division

#236

Post by Angostura »

brookst wrote: post #210
Angostura wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoyed Gnomon, but boy I didn't find it an easy read

The second and third times through get easier, once you can appreciate the patterns and links that seem extraneous and confusing at first. Totally different kind of book, but I’d put it up with Infinite Jest as far as being convoluted but incredibly rewarding. And of course more SD / tech focused.

Thank you. I'll give it another go. I did enjoy Angelmaker as an enjoyable romp

Re: Book review: There Is No Antimemetics Division

#237

Post by bluewin »

solstice wrote: post #204
bluewin wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent a fair amount of time thinking about this and the character of antimemes. Even ended up writing a whole taxonomy and mathematical framework for it. In general a meme is specific to an entity-pair, with self-censoring information as a subset of antimeme that makes the information itself remove itself from the mind that learns it. In general though, information that is an antimeme is not the same thing as a cat…

Isn't there also a physics angle to antimemes (as portrayed in TINAD)? Self-erasing information sounds like a reduction of entropy and should therefore be a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, no?

It's only a violation in the same way life is in violation. If the system is open it's fine to mess about as long as energy flows.

Of note, information is actually pretty low entropy in general, there are only a few confined states that information is valid in. Erasure just makes it statistically hard to recover the information in a usable timeline. So going from a sequence of 1's to a sequence of any number is increasing entropy.

If you go through the solution to Maxwell's demon it will help here too

Re: Book review: There Is No Antimemetics Division

#238

Post by mikehollinger »

mindcrime wrote: post #147
gravypod wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any recommendations for science fiction books that explore interesting ideas? There is no Antimemetics Division was really interesting in how some of the scenarios play out. I don't read much but I've been trying to do that more. I really liked the book. Things like the memory consuming entity, async research, etc I enjoyed.

Glasshouse[1] by Charles Stross Permutation City[2] by Greg Egan We Are Legion (We Are Bob)[3] by Dennis E. Taylor Halting State[4] by Charles Stross Singularity Sky[5] by Charles Stross Dungeon Crawler Carl[6] by Matt Dinniman Zero World[7] by Jason M. Hough The Shockwave Rider[8] by John Brunner [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasshouse_(novel) [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City [3]: https://ww…

Oh. Nice.

I'd add the Zones of Thought series by Verner Vinge. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep

Re: Book review: There Is No Antimemetics Division

#239

Post by Taniwha »

brookst wrote: post #174
gravypod wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any recommendations for science fiction books that explore interesting ideas? There is no Antimemetics Division was really interesting in how some of the scenarios play out. I don't read much but I've been trying to do that more. I really liked the book. Things like the memory consuming entity, async research, etc I enjoyed.

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway has some of the same “unreliable world” aspects with great writing to boot.

If you like unreliable narration and rug pulls Nick Harkaway's novel 'The Gone-Away World' really takes the cake (and is brilliant)

Re: Book review: There Is No Antimemetics Division

#240

Post by AndrewDucker »

mjburgess wrote: post #76
doug_durham wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the book and at no time did I think "Christianity". It seems like motivated reasoning on your part. At no time did the book ever preach, or was even moralistic.

I'm referring to the ending of the published version, which is quite different than v1, which ends abburptly, in particular the sections before and after: > “She steps back from him. She flexes what could be wings.” > “In ideatic space everything is possible and everything is real and every metaphor is apt. She sees a galaxy of shining points: people, all the people who have ever existed, packed almost densely enough…

That doesn't look like anything specific to Christianity to me.
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