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redleader posted:i can't speak to the audiobook version, but i don't think you can get much cozier than becky chamber's a psalm for the wild-built and its sequel a prayer for the crown-shy Oh yea I did do both of those on audiobook already, would be a great recommend though.
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Feb 15, 2024 00:13
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A Proper Uppercut posted:Looking for some more low stakes/cozy SFF for audiobook listening. I've found that style works better in case my attention wanders. Some stuff that worked well was Murderbot, Wayfarers, Goblin Emperor and the sequels, Legends and Lattes and the sequel. A Half-Built Garden Light from Uncommon Stars The Singing Hills Cycle novellas
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Feb 15, 2024 00:24
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A Proper Uppercut posted:Looking for some more low stakes/cozy SFF for audiobook listening. I've found that style works better in case my attention wanders. Some stuff that worked well was Murderbot, Wayfarers, Goblin Emperor and the sequels, Legends and Lattes and the sequel. Naomi Novik's stuff would probably fit the bill, especially her two standalone books Uprooted and Spinning Silver.
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Feb 15, 2024 00:28
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A Proper Uppercut posted:Looking for some more low stakes/cozy SFF for audiobook listening. I've found that style works better in case my attention wanders. Some stuff that worked well was Murderbot, Wayfarers, Goblin Emperor and the sequels, Legends and Lattes and the sequel. Lawrence Watt-Evans' Ethshar books haven't been mentioned here in a while and they definitely fit the bill. Low-stakes fantasy, slightly comedic, no one is horrifically evil. Plus the premises are fun - for example With A Single Spell is about a apprentice wizard whose teacher dies after teaching him a spell to light fires and nothing else, and now he has to find a way to make a living. Also read (or listen to in this case) Bridge of Birds. Rain Brain fucked around with this message at 00:31 on Feb 15, 2024 |
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Feb 15, 2024 00:28
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I've read most of the Ethshar books and all of Novik's stuff. The Golden Enclave audiobooks are really good. Thanks for the reminder on Bridge of Birds, always meant to get around to that one.Stuporstar posted:A Half-Built Garden And I'll look into these, thanks! Edit: Picked up Light from Uncommon Stars and the first Singing Hills Cycle book. There doesn't appear to be an audiobook for Bridge of Birds, pretty surprised about that. A Proper Uppercut fucked around with this message at 00:51 on Feb 15, 2024 |
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Feb 15, 2024 00:41
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A Proper Uppercut posted:I've read most of the Ethshar books and all of Novik's stuff. The Golden Enclave audiobooks are really good. Thanks for the reminder on Bridge of Birds, always meant to get around to that one. Taking this as a sign to reread a Bridge of Birds
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Feb 15, 2024 01:03
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A Proper Uppercut posted:Looking for some more low stakes/cozy SFF for audiobook listening. I've found that style works better in case my attention wanders. Some stuff that worked well was Murderbot, Wayfarers, Goblin Emperor and the sequels, Legends and Lattes and the sequel. Lois McMaster Bujold's Sharing Knife books.
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Feb 15, 2024 01:16
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Myrmidongs posted:Just finished Children of Ruin (Book 2 if you don't remember the order from the title like me). After Children of Time, which is admittedly a hard act to follow, it was a little bit of a letdown. I don't think it did a good job adopting a central theme and wavered too much between "wow, we gotta learn to communicate", and concepts of virtual / simulation becomes so powerful it blurs the line between simulation a real thing. I think if Tchaikovsky had picked just one and stuck with it, he could have kept the trim narrative, or he had the option of adding a lot more pages and explore more thoroughly. Final Architecture series was pretty solid. Not as good as Children of Time, better than Children of Ruin. I also still need to read Children of Memory. And the Baru series Some of the characters in TFA series also end up more interesting than I expected at first glance. Particularly The Unspeakable Aklu, the Razor and the Hook. Evil Fluffy fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Feb 15, 2024 |
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Feb 15, 2024 01:29
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Evil Fluffy posted:I also still need to read Children of Memory. Ehh. You won't hate the time you spend with it, but if you've got literally anything else on your to-read list, maybe bump that other thing up first.
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Feb 15, 2024 02:10
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A Proper Uppercut posted:Looking for some more low stakes/cozy SFF for audiobook listening. I've found that style works better in case my attention wanders. Some stuff that worked well was Murderbot, Wayfarers, Goblin Emperor and the sequels, Legends and Lattes and the sequel. If podcasts are ok, I suggest the Lost Terminal podcast. quote:How do you learn to be human if there's no-one around to teach you? Please note the Seasons link leads to a page summarizing each season which may be spoilers. I suggest searching for the podcast wherever you listen to them instead The transcripts can be consistently found on the official patreon page, not the main website. I'll link it here. https://www.patreon.com/lostterminalpod It is incredibly charming and endearing. It includes some pretty decent lgbt characters and even tactfully too, wow! I really enjoy the interactions between Seth and his friend(s), as well as the neat parts about telecommunications. Who knew ham radios and satellites were so fascinating? The episodes at usually 15 to 20 minutes long. But they can be shorter if you choose to skip the included music interlude in every episode. It's also one of the few sources that portray (medium plot / recurring character spoiler) Dissociative Identity Disorder and the System members with any sort of tact, compassion, or realism to the real life version. Honestly theres a lot of compassion in this world setting and I half wish I lived there.
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Feb 15, 2024 02:52
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grassy gnoll posted:Ehh. You won't hate the time you spend with it, but if you've got literally anything else on your to-read list, maybe bump that other thing up first. This is why I haven't read it yet, the reviews I saw for it made me decide to backlog it and other stuff like the Sanderson secret project novels came out and jumped the line ahead of it.
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Feb 15, 2024 03:00
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grassy gnoll posted:Ehh. You won't hate the time you spend with it, but if you've got literally anything else on your to-read list, maybe bump that other thing up first. I felt like it had an incredibly satisfying ending, but the other 80% of the book to get there was kind of a slog, and if I ever feel like I want to reread it I'll probably just read the corvid chapters + the ending and skip the rest, yeah. I don't at all regret reading it, though.
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Feb 15, 2024 03:32
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ToxicFrog posted:Personally, I found a lot of the concepts interesting but didn't actually like the book itself. But I'm also the only person ITT with that opinion, as far as I can tell, so yeah, you should probably read it. I have a blindsight theory, based on studiously avoiding all evidence to the contrary, that the people who find blindsight effective are those who can countenance the existence of Philosophical Zombies. Those for whom an imminent invasion of PZs is as worrying as an incursion of married bachelors find it an interesting thought experiment but not really that engaging.
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Feb 15, 2024 03:45
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ToxicFrog posted:I felt like it had an incredibly satisfying ending, but the other 80% of the book to get there was kind of a slog, and if I ever feel like I want to reread it I'll probably just read the corvid chapters + the ending and skip the rest, yeah. I don't at all regret reading it, though. Same here. The other plot was wonky and leaned a bit too hard on cliffhangers (the wrong term but like hiding info from the reader that characters had access to) to make an otherwise ok story appear more interesting than it really was. Corvids owned though.
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Feb 15, 2024 03:52
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Fumblemouse posted:I have a blindsight theory, based on studiously avoiding all evidence to the contrary, that the people who find blindsight effective are those who can countenance the existence of Philosophical Zombies. Those for whom an imminent invasion of PZs is as worrying as an incursion of married bachelors find it an interesting thought experiment but not really that engaging. I've never heard of a PZ before! And after a brief jaunt to wikipedia, I can confirm that the idea of a PZ is a 'so what?' to me, and I didn't like Blindsight despite trying to multiple times, so I guess I'm +1 for your theory 
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Feb 15, 2024 03:56
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I guess my feeling about blindslight is slightly different in that I enjoyed it and liked how it incorporated these concepts into a story but I didn't find it that scary or concerning
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Feb 15, 2024 04:04
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Fumblemouse posted:I have a blindsight theory, based on studiously avoiding all evidence to the contrary, that the people who find blindsight effective are those who can countenance the existence of Philosophical Zombies. Those for whom an imminent invasion of PZs is as worrying as an incursion of married bachelors find it an interesting thought experiment but not really that engaging. StrixNebulosa posted:I've never heard of a PZ before! And after a brief jaunt to wikipedia, I can confirm that the idea of a PZ is a 'so what?' to me, and I didn't like Blindsight despite trying to multiple times, so I guess I'm +1 for your theory The most plausible real life pop-sci prediction Blindsight makes is that corporate structures are paradise for sociopaths. If you're willing to conflate sociopathy with Blindsight's 'consciousness gets in the way' hypothesis it's not so much an imminent invasion as a fait accompli: the world is going to poo poo because the people in control aren't alive inside and don't care. Of course I think most of us would attribute that dead-insideness to a combination of power, isolation, believing-their-own-bullshit and cocaine abuse, not some kind of neural hardwiring. Anyway I think that theory's not quite there, because Blindsight's appeal isn't just in its science fictional premise, it's in the book being a really good "exploring a haunted house in space" story. It's Alien with an alien as surprising and upsetting as the chestburster, but coming from a whole different angle. Compare to Foreigner, which has a similar 'aliens are fundamentally built different' philosophical premise but which gets most of its appeal from being a fantasy of manners starring an angry little bottom who has to endure great suffering in a land of unpredictable and dangerous tops. It's a book About First Contact, but it's also about a guy who can't get a laptop charger and has to go on long horse rides because he's stuck in a Ruritanian romance. Blindsight similarly is About First Contact but it's also about a tiny isolated crew following a mysterious transmission, getting in spacesuits, and exploring a nightmarish megastructure where Something Might Be Alive. It's fun on that level even if you don't really care about the consciousness pessimism.
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Feb 15, 2024 04:06
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Holy cannoli. So - since I realized I was never going to actually read Blindsight (despite liking Peter Watts' Starfish) all the way through, I sat down and read its wikipedia article and.... wait. The big twist of the novel is that Watts is straight up stealing the plot twist from Brian M Stableford's David Lydyard trilogy? Like, I'll give him credit for mixing in hardcore nihilism and a weird future society and vampires, but I'm having the very... hipster experience of 'wait I've seen this before, but in something older and way less appreciated because no one but me has read it!' I don't know how to feel about this, I'm not usually in a position to feel like a horrific snob in this way. (And they're both ripping from older authors, so there's nothing new under the sun!) (PS you might try reading Stableford's prose and be confused at how I could stomach it and not Watts, and to answer that: I just like his style more? Somehow? My tolerance for writing styles is all over the place and that's OK!) Anyways, I've been wondering about the deal with Blindsight for ages and it's nice to finally know. Thanks, goons. Spoiler thoughts: The idea that you inhabit a universe filled with people who can never understand you on a fundamental level just... isn't scary I guess? Sorry Lovecraft, Watts, Stableford. Sometimes fellow humans are too alien to be comprehensible and that's OK in my books.
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Feb 15, 2024 04:09
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General Battuta posted:The most plausible real life pop-sci prediction Blindsight makes is that corporate structures are paradise for sociopaths. If you're willing to conflate sociopathy with Blindsight's 'consciousness gets in the way' hypothesis it's not so much an imminent invasion as a fait accompli: the world is going to poo poo because the people in control aren't alive inside and don't care. This is a better post than the one I made... but also the way you describe Blindsight makes it sound like something I want to read, and I know I've bounced off of it multiple times. How do you feel about writing a version of it that I'd enjoy, since you're done with Exordia?
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Feb 15, 2024 04:11
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Have you read SHIP OF FOOLS/UNTO LEVIATHAN by Richard Paul Russo? It's basically Catholic Blindsight.
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Feb 15, 2024 04:15
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General Battuta posted:Have you read SHIP OF FOOLS/UNTO LEVIATHAN by Richard Paul Russo? It's basically Catholic Blindsight. *frantically running to buy that* No, I haven't! Thank you!
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Feb 15, 2024 04:15
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StrixNebulosa posted:since you're done with Exordia? Some of us want a sequel 
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Feb 15, 2024 04:17
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General Battuta posted:a fantasy of manners starring an angry little bottom who has to endure great suffering in a land of unpredictable and dangerous tops. StrixNebulosa posted:Spoiler thoughts: The idea that you inhabit a universe filled with people who can never understand you on a fundamental level just... isn't scary I guess? Sorry Lovecraft, Watts, Stableford. Sometimes fellow humans are too alien to be comprehensible and that's OK in my books. mystes fucked around with this message at 04:22 on Feb 15, 2024 |
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Feb 15, 2024 04:19
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General Battuta posted:Anyway I think that theory's not quite there, because Blindsight's appeal isn't just in its science fictional premise, it's in the book being a really good "exploring a haunted house in space" story. It's Alien with an alien as surprising and upsetting as the chestburster, but coming from a whole different angle. "Exploring a haunted house in space" actually sounds like something that should be extremely my jam, but by the time I got to those parts of Blindsight I was already completely disengaged from the story, so that aspect fell pretty flat for me. Similarly, Ship of Fools sounded very appealing but I remember the "haunted house exploration" being a really minor part of the book and most of the book being about steadily escalating paranoia and infighting among the crew without ever leaving the ship. I want, like, haunted Rama or something.
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Feb 15, 2024 04:25
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ToxicFrog posted:"Exploring a haunted house in space" actually sounds like something that should be extremely my jam, but by the time I got to those parts of Blindsight I was already completely disengaged from the story, so that aspect fell pretty flat for me. So you should read Gideon the Ninth, which is about exploring a haunted house in space - but for real this time!
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Feb 15, 2024 04:26
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mystes posted:Yeah I didn't find that part scary and I was sort of bemused to learn that watts really thinks it is, but I still think it's enjoyable if you're interested in stuff like philosophical zombies? Maybe not if you aren't though. The idea that everyone around you is just pretending to have the lights on inside and will gently caress you over the moment it's convenient—perhaps even hunt you like prey!—is pretty deeply connected to a lot of basic human fears imo. Finding out a loved one isn't who they pretended to be, seeing a community turn against you, being queer or a woman or a member of the wrong minority in some places and times (today included), hell, even the very basic 'I confided in Zelda but she told everything to Ganon and now I'm getting fired'...there are a lot of ways to run into that 'masks off' moment. I don't think it's some obscure fear for nerds. It's pretty easy to understand. We don't know what's going on in other peoples' heads and sometimes it's not at all what we imagine. Our world is also dominated right now by systems that seem to most of us to be very powerful but seemingly unconscious. Like everyone's taking orders but the orders aren't coming from anywhere, they're just dictated by a kind of distributed logic. Arguably I guess the orders are actually coming from various conference rooms where the light bending rich people exert their influence on each other, but from the perspective of a random citizen the world seems to be run by decerebrate gods. So Blindsight is also about the horror of the universe being controlled by things without intent or inner life, just a calculating drive to maximize their own survival. Like giant bacterial colonies, expanding.
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Feb 15, 2024 04:39
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ToxicFrog posted:"Exploring a haunted house in space" actually sounds like something that should be extremely my jam, but by the time I got to those parts of Blindsight I was already completely disengaged from the story, so that aspect fell pretty flat for me. You would likely enjoy Reynolds' Diamond Dogs. It's about exploring a spooky sci fi place rather than a ship, but it's also one of his better works. Unless you want spooky versions of the Rama sequels, in which case you could watch Made in Abyss while you wait for the police to arrive.
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Feb 15, 2024 04:49
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I quite dig most of the book's ideas but I have to admit I couldn't quite buy into the proposal that unconscious alien life would interpret human speech as nonsensical, and therefore an attack. Just don't see what about the things people say about themselves and their feelings is fundamentally illegible to a nonsentient intelligence. If nonsentience is necessarily sociopathic, that would lead me to think of consciousness as a strong evolutionary advantage for social species.
FPyat fucked around with this message at 04:57 on Feb 15, 2024 |
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Feb 15, 2024 04:53
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FPyat posted:I quite dig most of the book's ideas but I have to admit I couldn't quite buy into the proposal that unconscious alien life would interpret human speech as nonsensical, and therefore an attack. Just don't see what about the things people say about themselves and their feelings is fundamentally illegible to a nonsentient intelligence. If you think of it as bacteria exchanging plasmids instead of intelligences exchanging symbols it makes sense. If another bacteria hands you a long string of genetic information and you go to the trouble of translating it and it's just information that talks about itself — talks about itself vastly more than anything useful to your survival — then it's clearly not communication, it's a virus or a prion, or the cognitive equivalent of a .zip bomb. It's a thing that is propagating itself at the cost of your energy and time. That makes it an attack. One of the things I think is most valuable about the book regardless of whether you buy into its premise (and I don't think even Watts does, entirely) is that it really forces you to confront your implicit anthropocentric assumptions about how an alien would think or communicate. It takes the idea that aliens might be unimaginable and incomprehensible seriously, but instead of throwing up its hands and casting Lovecraft, it uses science to pick a spot in the phase space of possible alien cognitions and say "well, this is deeply nonhuman, what would it be like to meet?" General Battuta fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Feb 15, 2024 |
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Feb 15, 2024 04:56
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StrixNebulosa posted:So you should read Gideon the Ninth, which is about exploring a haunted house in space - but for real this time! I did and I liked it a lot! And I'm looking forward to rereading the whole thing when Alecto drops and getting The Full Mindfuck Experience™ from Harrow by reading it immediately after Gideon. And yeah, thinking a bit more about what makes a "haunted house story" for me, a large part of it is the house-as-environment. I want the characters to loving marinate in it, gradually uncovering its secrets (probably at terrible cost to themselves). I want it to be as much character as setting. Ship of Fools isn't a bad book, but it's haunted-house-as-inciting-incident; the Scoobies show up in their van, look around the entrance hall, go "gently caress this", and drive off, and the rest of the book is about how encountering this horrific thing has marked and changed them, how the sickness is inside them now (or perhaps always was) and there's no running from it -- which is a very different shape of story. grassy gnoll posted:You would likely enjoy Reynolds' Diamond Dogs. It's about exploring a spooky sci fi place rather than a ship, but it's also one of his better works. Diamond Dogs is quite possibly my favourite Reynolds, yeah. Apropos the Rama sequels, I remember the first ~80% of Rama II actually being pretty good and the last 20% being dire, but I also mostly remember it from the Sierra puzzle game adaptation, which dropped the last part of the book entirely and probably made a lot of other cuts. I regret reading book 3 and I never read book 4.
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Feb 15, 2024 04:58
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ToxicFrog posted:Ship of Fools isn't a bad book, but it's haunted-house-as-inciting-incident; the Scoobies show up in their van, look around the entrance hall, go "gently caress this", and drive off, and the rest of the book is about how encountering this horrific thing has marked and changed them, how the sickness is inside them now (or perhaps always was) and there's no running from it -- which is a very different shape of story. That's just not true. They go deep into the haunted house and find something very hosed up.
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Feb 15, 2024 05:00
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I reread the scrambler-view passage and the human transmissions it receives first include emotions and aesthetics, which seem more self-explanatory in their incomprehensibility to it, though I could imagine that they could be translated in Selfish Gene-evopsych terms into a Scramber's view of reality. That last two radio snippets - "Pay attention, now— Understand." Those kind of make me question how such an entity could create a spacefaring technological base, when I'd think that grappling with incomprehension of reality is fundamental to science.
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Feb 15, 2024 05:08
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Does an LLM need to grapple with understanding text in order to learn from it? I'd argue the LLM cannot experience anything, including understanding, incomprehension, or even reality. Scramblers work the same way.
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Feb 15, 2024 05:13
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As of the current state of the art, I'd say that their lack of cognition inhibits the accuracy and logical coherence of their outputs. But who knows, maybe the next 10 years of iteration will make me eat my words.
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Feb 15, 2024 05:22
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General Battuta posted:That's just not true. They go deep into the haunted house and find something very hosed up. I pulled out my copy to refresh my memory and it turns out I had completely forgotten about the haunted ship that occupies the middle ~20% of the book -- my memory of it is entirely dominated by the few chapters near the start where they visit Antioch and the entire back half of the book where they're trying to tow the alien ship away. Mea culpa. Still, I stand by the general thrust of that statement; three-quarters of the book is entirely shipbound, either leadup to their forays into the haunted house(s), dealing with the aftermath, or ship politics. It's a very different vibe and not at all what I'd describe as a "haunted house story" or a "big dumb object story", both of which it was pitched to me as.
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Feb 15, 2024 05:26
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The reason that several books and authors were mysteriously ruled "not eligible" in the 2023 Hugo Awards was because the Americans and Canadians on the committee took it upon themselves to voluntarily self-censor any nominees who they thought might offend the Chinese government. A member of the nomination committee leaked the emails where they compiled dossiers on nominees, along with an apology for her role in it. https://file770.com/the-2023-hugo-awards-a-report-on-censorship-and-exclusion/
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Feb 15, 2024 05:40
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To not offend the sponsors, is the suspicion from that member of the nomination committeequote:“Investment deals valued at approximately $1.09 billion were signed during the 81st World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) held in Chengdu.” But this has all been known from the start that it was the American and Canadians that removed nominees. They have been saying that from the start, even before they released emails showing it. The emails do show that none of the Chinese members of the nomination committee were involved at all though.
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Feb 15, 2024 05:53
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General Battuta posted:Does an LLM need to grapple with understanding text in order to learn from it? I'd argue the LLM cannot experience anything, including understanding, incomprehension, or even reality. Scramblers work the same way. Bacteria don't need to understand the ocean or my kitchen counter to evolve to live there.
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Feb 15, 2024 06:18
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FPyat posted:I quite dig most of the book's ideas but I have to admit I couldn't quite buy into the proposal that unconscious alien life would interpret human speech as nonsensical, and therefore an attack. Just don't see what about the things people say about themselves and their feelings is fundamentally illegible to a nonsentient intelligence. If nonsentience is necessarily sociopathic, that would lead me to think of consciousness as a strong evolutionary advantage for social species. Having three young special needs children while being slightly autistic myself. This is actually the part of the book that i relate most strongly to at this time. Especially while being bombarded with nonsense questions while utterly exhausted at the end of a day.
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Feb 15, 2024 06:34
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General Battuta posted:Does an LLM need to grapple with understanding text in order to learn from it? I'd argue the LLM cannot experience anything, including understanding, incomprehension, or even reality. Scramblers work the same way. I am still low key mad that searle was completely right
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