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Re: Nuke Books - I read The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against The United States by Dr Jeffrey Lewis (Author) a couple years or so back and it's blackly comic, just what I was wanting. "The plot is so absurd and implausible―a nuclear war prompted by a presidential tweet―that it feels devastatingly true. The 2020 COMMISSION REPORT is a brilliantly conceived page-turner. Let’s hope it isn’t prophetic ― Eric Schlosser, author of COMMAND AND CONTROL" And if you haven't read COMMAND AND CONTROL it's some real scary nuclear-related nonfiction, well worth a look. 
NoneMoreNegative fucked around with this message at 10:35 on Feb 22, 2022 |
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Feb 22, 2022 10:33
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quantumfoam posted:Alfred Bester: No disagreement about his novels after Stars my Destination not being worth reading, unless you got paid to do so. I do still like his short story books, Flowered Thundermug is still a great yarn.
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Feb 22, 2022 11:15
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NoneMoreNegative posted:Re: Nuke Books - I read If you want scary nuke-related nonfiction, try Robert Scheer's With Enough Shovels, which is an investigation into just how ignorant the Reagan-Bush administrations were about the survivability of nuclear war. But the reigning god emperor of scary nuclear war stories is still When the Wind Blows.
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Feb 22, 2022 15:38
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If people are starting to discuss 1980's post-apocalypse nuclear survival fiction in this thread, Dean Ing needs to be acknowledged. Dean Ing went next level and included guides for building homemade fallout detectors out of common household items in at least two of his books that were published in the 1980's. Plus although it came out 2 decades before the 1980's, there is also Alas Babylon, one of the earliest post-nuclear apocalypse fiction novels that got read by and heavily influenced boring-rear end people such as JFK, Kissinger, Robert S McNamara, David Bowie, Stephen King, etc. Plus wikipedia claims there was tv-movie adaptation of it starring a pre-fame Burt Reynolds.
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Feb 22, 2022 16:10
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I remember liking Alas Babylon but I can't remember a single detail about it, whereas I read The Last American just before and remember pretty much all of it. So that pretty much speaks for itself I think.
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Feb 22, 2022 16:27
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NoneMoreNegative posted:And if you haven't read COMMAND AND CONTROL it's some real scary nuclear-related nonfiction, well worth a look. Command And Control is absolutely terrifying and everyone should read it. Different kind of apocalypse but I finished The Last Policeman today, which I've seen recommended here a few times. Really enjoyed it, it's a very good police procedural in a different setting. I confidently expect to have more Don't Look Up-esque anxiety dreams tonight.
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Feb 22, 2022 17:16
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Randomly just finished One Second Later which in some ways is a standard “world going to hell” apocalypse book (it starts the day of disaster and ends one year after, mainly focused on the first 3-6 months). The difference is (1) it’s based on an EMP wiping out all electronics in the USA, so no fallout, explosions or anything, just electronics going poof, (2) it’s set entirely in a small NC town outside Asheville, and (3) it’s written by a guy who collaborated on books with Newt Gingrich and is basically a “WE NEED TO WORRY ABOUT EMPS!!!” alarm. There’s some semi hilarious one off lines like “we spent billions on global warming, which might not even be REAL, and we never spent a dime to defend ourselves against EMPS!!!”. It’s pretty relentlessly grim and terrible but also kind of weird and insane (America going from normal to cannibalism in like two months) in a newt Gingrich moon colony kind of way. Semi enjoyable for those who enjoy the breakdown of society part of post apocalyptic books and back of book pull quotes from Larry Niven and Harry Turtledove.
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Feb 22, 2022 17:25
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freebooter posted:edit - if anyone else is interested in the 1980s nuclear war genre (for some reason I started reading it a lot again after Trump became president) the other good one I've read in recent years is Whitley Streiber's Warday, which takes place 10 years after a limited nuclear conflict that only knocks out a few cities but still causes widespread fallout issues and total economic collapse, and is a sort of "fake real account" book that follows a journalist as he travels around a now-balkanised United States interviewing people. Also often deeply silly, but still very good. Yeah, I read a poo poo-ton of those books back in the day as an angsty, precocious kid, and that's one of the ones I remember as being good. Best one I've read in recent years was thread favourite David Mace's Fire Lance, which follows one of the few remaining strategic assets (a giant hyper-advanced warship loaded with lots and lots of nuclear cruise missiles) some weeks after the last war killed 90%+ of the population of the northern hemisphere (and probably doomed everyone else everywhere). loving glad I never read that back in the day, I was dealing with enough anxiety.
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Feb 22, 2022 17:50
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I got in touch with David Mace recently. He was astonished anyone remembered, let alone still read, his books. I think he was very moved; he'd kind of filed his whole writing career away as a failure. He has found happiness through dance. He dances a lot and is involved in local government. He did share some chilling Cold War stories. quote:There I was. living with Renate in Freiburg. Pershings in the Bundesrepublik, Tomahawks In the UK. And I discovered from official sources... Two medium-yield warheads had been tasked on Freiburg to pre-emptively render it uninhabitable and unusable by any potential Warsaw Pact advance westward across the Black Forest through the only likely corridor, at the opening of which sat the city. To protect me from the possibility of being removed forcibly from a relatively benign capitalist lifestyle and condemned to a far less desirable Communist existence - but still existence, still having a life - I was to be killed.
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Feb 22, 2022 22:01
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General Battuta posted:I got in touch with David Mace recently. He was astonished anyone remembered, let alone still read, his books. I think he was very moved; he'd kind of filed his whole writing career away as a failure. I am so, so happy he's found happiness. His books are amazing.
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Feb 22, 2022 22:11
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I'm glad that he wasn't friendly fire nuked to block the commies from claiming some territory. Reading any real history books
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Feb 22, 2022 23:29
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Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City (The Siege #1) by KJ Parker - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078W5M7DB/ World of Trouble (Last Policeman #3) by Ben H Winters - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HXYHVNU/ Jack of Shadows by Roger Zelazny - $4.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01F7T7R5O/
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Feb 22, 2022 23:36
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Most of the time more obscure artists are just completely thrilled to meet a fan.
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Feb 23, 2022 03:25
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16 Ways is sick, btw. Highly recommend. KJ Parker is usually a little too dreary for me but something about that whole series just clicks right.
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Feb 23, 2022 06:32
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Oh, wow, Living Alone really was kind of fantastic.
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Feb 23, 2022 06:39
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Sibling of TB posted:I'm glad that he wasn't friendly fire nuked to block the commies from claiming some territory. Reading any real history books Dr. Strangelove was just barely fiction.
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Feb 23, 2022 10:11
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Larry Parrish posted:16 Ways is sick, btw. Highly recommend. KJ Parker is usually a little too dreary for me but something about that whole series just clicks right. Yeah he played up his comedy chops a lot more in these books I feel. Writing in first person probably helped. His third person books feel much more removed.
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Feb 23, 2022 12:39
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Larry Parrish posted:16 Ways is sick, btw. Highly recommend. KJ Parker is usually a little too dreary for me but something about that whole series just clicks right. I bounced hard of the third. Didn't really feel as the mc earned his wins.
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Feb 23, 2022 13:11
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vuk83 posted:I bounced hard of the third. Didn't really feel as the mc earned his wins. That's the whole point of the book OP. He gets everything he wants in the way he wants and it doesn't fill the emptiness in him and it doesn't make anything better for the countrymen he hates either.
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Feb 23, 2022 13:31
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Reading Blindsight based on name dropping in the previous page, then unrelatedly someone mentions it on twitter the same day, and so it's frequency illusion/ kismet. It's enjoyable, but it's making me think more about the way evopsych is this sort of pernicious mental filler, and about the sort of edgy reductionist isn't-your-mind-blown thrill, which this book is definitely serving up, usually with like two to three words italicized.
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Feb 23, 2022 13:40
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Magic apex predator psychopaths are a plague on fiction and now the concept starting to make its way into genuine political belief E: see also The Expanse
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Feb 23, 2022 16:13
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There's nothing magical about Blindsight's vampires, though. They never could've developed civilization or technology because they're completely solitary. Without baseline humans to make stuff and teach them ideas they're just boogymen - individually deadly but incapable of any advancement. Sure, they're smart, but very little of human success as a species has to do with individual smarts. It's all about the cultural learning. What the vampires represent, allegorically, is a very real problem: the more your cooperative work-together build-a-better-world types succeed at creating peace and rule of law, the more power and surplus available becomes accessible for hijacking by defectors. There's a sort of Lotka-Volterra relationship between cooperators and sociopaths. The sociopaths need enough cooperators to keep the system running and feeding them. If they get out of control it all falls apart. If the idea that society gets hijacked by blithely self-interested sociopaths at the highest levels filters into political discourse maybe it'll do some good at getting them out of boardrooms and legislatures. Maybe. I'm not optimistic!
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Feb 23, 2022 16:45
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Honestly the most unrealistic part about the vampires is that they can learn. Human social mimicry is a very specialized adaptation, and predators with narrow niches tend to stick to their scripts of being really good at a few baked-in things. You seem to need to be an omnivore with a kind of unpredictable diet to really get a generalist brain. Or at least that's what I read in a book about human evolution and a book about weird birds.
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Feb 23, 2022 16:51
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Watts thinks self-awareness is an evolutionary side-effect that's also kind of a dead end. One that's costly in terms of resources and not as useful as people tend to think. The vampire thing is definitely mixed up with that idea.
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Feb 23, 2022 17:57
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Re: Blindsight, I don't know whether to find the idea of autistic people being vampire remnants offensive or cool as hell. I'm digging into The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers, and am amused to learn that this book about people being trapped indoors by natural disaster was not inspired by the pandemic.
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Feb 23, 2022 20:41
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General Battuta posted:Honestly the most unrealistic part about the vampires is that they can learn. Human social mimicry is a very specialized adaptation, and predators with narrow niches tend to stick to their scripts of being really good at a few baked-in things. You seem to need to be an omnivore with a kind of unpredictable diet to really get a generalist brain. What’s the bird book? Sounds interesting. As for Blindsight vampires, they’re an interesting idea but I think the crucifix thing is kind of silly.
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Feb 23, 2022 20:44
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FPyat posted:Re: Blindsight, I don't know whether to find the idea of autistic people being vampire remnants offensive or cool as hell. I kinda hate it, personally, because it flies really close to the sun of "autism is basically psychopathy" or "autistic people don't have empathy," both of which are incredibly wrong and thoroughly discredited. I also walked away from Blindsight with a bad taste in my mouth. Yeah, the question of "what purpose does consciousness actually serve" is a cool one, but the novel felt like it came down on the side of "no purpose and it's actually bad" with a lot more certainty than warranted. But I might have missed something!
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Feb 23, 2022 21:02
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No, that's pretty much Watt's expressed personal philosophy.
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Feb 23, 2022 21:04
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Watts is intensely, POWERFULLY nihilist and so he's interesting to read but also difficult to read. I'll be honest - I haven't finished Blindsight. I've gotten like 50~ pages into it three times and just... it's interesting but not worth the push to read. I can't put a finger on why exactly (it's been too long) but I didn't enjoy any of the characters, I remember that. Starfish, at least, had more interesting messes going on. (For the record I'm also autistic and boy howdy do I feel every emotion - I just suck at regulating them, or conveying them at times! Thanks, ADHD, for helping out!)
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Feb 23, 2022 21:18
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Ceebees posted:No, that's pretty much Watt's expressed personal philosophy. Is he openly nihilistic about it though? Because I read Blindsight as a criticism of hyper-rationalist consciousness-doesnt-matter types. The non-sentient Rorschach (and the eldritch super-AIs in the sequel) are incredibly terrifying unknown horrors. Humanity in Blindsight is being split into post-humans modifying their brains to the point they barely count as human any more, or unaltered normals living listless pointless lives until they give up and plug themselves into heaven. It's hardly singing the praises of rationality. Keaton tries to reduce all behaviour to evolutionarily programmed reproductive strategies, and it's awful and everybody hates him for it. We may not be able to find an evolutionary purpose to consciousness, but it clearly exists, so we just have to deal with it. Or if we can't prove it exists, all of our instincts scream that it must exist. Keaton's attempt to deliberately and rationally create social mannerisms and relationships feels like a fairly sensitive portrayal of autism (I'm in the middle of a referral for potential autism diagnosis, and Keaton's mindset in those moments really struck a chord with me) but I'm not sure how I reconcile that with the vampire stuff and everybody dunking in Keaton when he takes it too far. I think Blindsight is also a lot less serious than a lot of people take it as. There's some levity around the neuro-philosophy too - the book of Oogenesis is great, and the Chinese Room/ruling elite being non-sentient are very tongue-in-cheek, there's a gag about how super-AIs have figured out the meaning of life but can't explain it to mere human brains. And the crucifix-glitch reads to me as a biologist playfully speculating about how you could make something absurd like vampires actually function. Basically I read Blindsight as a "What If?" rather than a manifesto.
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Feb 23, 2022 21:34
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StrixNebulosa posted:Watts is intensely, POWERFULLY nihilist and so he's interesting to read but also difficult to read. Yeah there's a lot of stuff I just nope right out of these days.
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Feb 23, 2022 22:02
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I don't agree with Blindsight's take on consciousness but I find it both provocative (in that it provokes me to think about what adaptive role consciousness plays in alien beings I write) and super, super effective as a horror story. It attacks one of the central and tacitly unchallenged assumptions we have about ourselves: that we're better than everybody else because we are aware. It's like Ligotti with footnotes. If that unsettles you, fair nough, but you don't have to agree with its thesis to really love it. (And yeah the autism thing is pretty dumb) If you want to see Watts at his most nihilistic then (don't) read Behemoth. That one left me feeling really gross.
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Feb 23, 2022 22:06
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If you look at his total work and also his blog it's hard to argue that he isn't a nihilist. I don't think he's a comfortable nihilist, which is where the sense of playfulness comes from. He doesn't enjoy his conclusions, merely believes they are correct.
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Feb 23, 2022 22:11
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General Battuta posted:I don't agree with Blindsight's take on consciousness but I find it both provocative (in that it provokes me to think about what adaptive role consciousness plays in alien beings I write) and super, super effective as a horror story. It attacks one of the central and tacitly unchallenged assumptions we have about ourselves: that we're better than everybody else because we are aware. It's like Ligotti with footnotes. I adore Starfish and will recommend it to anyone who wants deep sea psychological horror. I haven't read the sequels because a) they weren't at my library and b) of your posts and I think I'm better off for avoiding them.
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Feb 23, 2022 22:14
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General Battuta posted:I don't agree with Blindsight's take on consciousness but I find it both provocative (in that it provokes me to think about what adaptive role consciousness plays in alien beings I write) and super, super effective as a horror story. It attacks one of the central and tacitly unchallenged assumptions we have about ourselves: that we're better than everybody else because we are aware. It's like Ligotti with footnotes. Yeah same. It's a horror story where the horrific thing is a philosophical viewpoint instead of a monster;
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Feb 23, 2022 22:16
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Qwertycoatl posted:Yeah same. It's a horror story where the horrific thing is a philosophical viewpoint instead of a monster; There's also the horror of "I had a mom but she went into the VR computer land and abandoned me and my dad" which - I'm remembering now was part of why I didn't want to keep reading it. I adore horror novels but there are some topics I just don't want to spend time with, and this isn't judgment of the novel.
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Feb 23, 2022 22:19
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Quorum posted:Yeah, the question of "what purpose does consciousness actually serve" is a cool one, but the novel felt like it came down on the side of "no purpose and it's actually bad" with a lot more certainty than warranted. You should try reading Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos lol
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Feb 23, 2022 22:27
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Tiny Timbs posted:You should try reading Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos lol I remember reading a few of his in high school and thinking they owned. What's cool about Galapagos?
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Feb 23, 2022 22:28
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It's something like a playful version of Children of Men and Blindsight that drives at the same conclusion as Watts that sapience is not conducive to life and is ultimately an evolutionary dead end Honestly it's been so long since I've read it I can't remember if it was good or not, but it did undercut some of the shock value of Blindsight when I read that later on Tiny Timbs fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Feb 23, 2022 |
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Feb 23, 2022 22:32
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Watts is deeply into writing misery fiction and believing that he's the smartest person in the world, nay, the solar star system.. My favorite thing about Peter Watts is him IRL constantly suffering the consequences of his actions while thinking he's the smartest person in the solar star system. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Feb 23, 2022 22:43
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