StrixNebulosa posted:ADHD medication. I am also a speed reader
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Feb 24, 2024 00:27
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Whirling posted:Anyway, any books with more interesting/fun takes on AI? Peter Watts’ Sunflowers stuff (especially The Freeze-Frame Revolution) has a neat take on AI. Whirling posted:Yeah that's a thing that's always made me a little wary in sci-fi is the idea that an AI is the most competent and qualified being to lead society because of how smart it might be and its always better to let it do what it wants. Starfish (also Watts) has some really funny responses to this kind of stuff with its smart gels / head cheeses. But as I’m sure you’ve seen in this thread, the Rifters books are heavy on 90s edgelordiness, so keep that in mind.
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Mar 14, 2024 14:27
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pradmer posted:Pushing Ice by Alistair Reynolds - $2.99 mllaneza posted:This is really good. It's a big story that scales out over millennia and myriads of time, told from the perspective of people caught up in some bullshit and experience a lot of relativistic time compression. I just finished Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days (prompted by a “haunted house in space” discussion earlier in this thread) which were my first Reynolds, so I’m stoked this came up. Looking forward to starting it later. Thanks!
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Mar 16, 2024 13:17
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Mikojan posted:I'm on a space opera binge lately and I'm curious if there are any obvious suggestions. Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained are sick, I just read those recently. I haven’t read the next set of books in the series, but there’s more if you’re into it. Check out Hyperion if you haven’t. Just do yourself a favor and stop after the second book. First one’s on sale right now: pradmer posted:Hyperion (#1) by Dan Simmons - $1.99
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Mar 18, 2024 18:37
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Mikojan posted:Checking out the hamilton chap. Seems like he wrote a trilorgy called 'the Void'. Is that one worth picking up as well? They’re on my list but I’ve not read them yet. They’re in very distant future of same universe as the Commonwealth Saga books (Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained) with some overlap in characters. They’re supposedly heavier on fantasy (as opposed to sci fi) elements, for what that’s worth.
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Mar 18, 2024 19:52
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Anode posted:I think Nick Harkaway’s Titanium Noir was written to that exact brief, sans cyberspace. I’m not sure I would recommend it exactly, but it hit the spot. Have you read The Gone-Away World? If so, what’d you think? I ask because it’s the only Harkaway I’ve read, and I absolutely loved it, so I’m trying to gauge if I should check out Titanium Noir
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Apr 1, 2024 15:10
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Finished Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds. Thoroughly enjoyed it. As a blue collar shift worker myself, I was very sympathetic to the “most bullshit possible shift imaginable” premise for the crew of the Rockhopper. (full book spoilers) I don’t think they ever fully explained the “Cutoff” as far as the Fountainhead aliens metering future (past) human tech to the stranded Rockhopper crew. It was established that it’s very improbable the Fountainheads would have encountered only one of the Thai ships, if they encountered any at all. It was also speculated that intelligence is very rare, and that two star-faring races would never exist in our galaxy simultaneously (hence the “Spican” Structure they occupy at end of book, as a means to facilitate contact at the end of time and space). I also remember a throwaway line from Ryan Axford pointing out that the Fountainheads’ description of their (past) galactic empire closely matched Chromis’ description of the Congress of the Lindblad Ring. Also, one of the competing ideas to commemorate 10,000 years of human hegemony was a “Fountain” project. I guess we are meant to assume the Fountainheads are highly evolved humans? Also, I would totally read a Cosmic Avenger sequel about Svetlana et al. larping Star Trek at the end of time.
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Apr 8, 2024 23:19
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Yeah, don’t wait for Brüks to drive the plot—it doesn’t happen. Jim and Valerie (and Portia) do some cool poo poo though.
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Apr 21, 2024 12:37
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Gaius Marius posted:Finished Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds. Same! Just got back from a beach weekend where I was able to finish it. It’s my second full-length Reynolds novel after Pushing Ice. Dude apparently loves honeypot traps setup by ancient aliens. I’m a sucker for BDO sci fi so I enjoyed (in both novels) the way the plot is basically structured around a series of increasingly bigger, dumber objects. Decided to start Chasm City next and I’m enjoying it so far. Cool to see Sky’s Edge (and by extension Ana Khouri) fleshed out. I’ve already got Galactic North in my Kindle library so I’ll probably read that too before moving onto Redemption Ark, because I saw something about the former containing stories/characters continued in the latter. Gaius Marius posted:people trailing off right at the moment of revelation or on some false moment of consequence that is resolved off screen. Yeah, this bugged me too the first time it happened, but I chose to trust that those gaps would be filled before book ended. I’m glad my trust wasn’t misplaced lol Gaius Marius posted:Reynolds is […] not very interesting when he's trying to compose an action set piece, the only one of which I found at all interesting was the first when Volyova kills her Gunner. Ah man, you didn’t like the wrestling match between the spider-room and the hijacked cache-weapon?
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Apr 22, 2024 02:40
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e:f,bBenagain posted:Wait I still don't get the pun The novel is titled Redemption Ark which is a pun on the term “redemption arc”
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Apr 25, 2024 14:51
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FPyat posted:Were the cache weapons actually sentient or was I misreading the scene where one freaks outs Ilia? I don’t think they were sentient. (Revelation Space spoilers) I think you’re referencing a scene in chapter 9 when Volyova’s on the way to speak with the captain and notices a cache-weapon out of place. It’s later revealed to Khouri, after the same cache-weapon seemingly arms itself, that the Mademoiselle took control of it to kill Sylveste by destroying the planet Resurgam. Volyova ends up destroying the cache-weapon by wrestling it into Nostalgia for Infinity’s engine wake with the spider-room.
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Apr 25, 2024 16:36
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shrike82 posted:transforming the setting into a post-fall theocracy founded on a macguffin from the first two books was interesting. I really enjoyed Endymion for that reason. Captain de Soya, the Pax, their interstellar logistics, etc. were so sick. But then I DNF’d The Rise of Endymion and I doubt I’ll pick it back up. Couldn’t get past the romance between the grown man and the child with future-adult-brain or whatever. I know it was present in both books, but the ratio of cool space Catholics to creepy poo poo really nosedived in the last book for me.
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Apr 27, 2024 13:12
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Re: immersion-breaking loan words, I’m reminded of Asimov’s preface to Nightfall (novel):an ironically long explanation of ‘semantic convenience’ posted:Kalgash is an alien world and it is not our intention to have you think that it is identical to Earth, even though we depict its people as speaking a language that you can understand, and using terms that are familiar to you. Those words should be understood as mere equivalents of alien terms-that is, a conventional set of equivalents of the same sort that a writer of novels uses when he has foreign characters speaking with each other in their own language but nevertheless transcribes their words in the language of the reader. So when the people of Kalgash speak of "miles," or "hands," or "cars," or "computers," they mean their own units of distance, their own grasping-organs, their own ground-transportation devices, their own information-processing machines, etc. The computers used on Kalgash are not necessarily compatible with the ones used in New York or London or Stockholm, and the "mile" that we use in this book is not necessarily the American unit of 5,280 feet. But it seemed simpler and more desirable to use these familiar terms in describing events on this wholly alien world than it would have been to invent a long series of wholly Kalgashian terms.
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Apr 28, 2024 14:31
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Funny, Yuuji-san is the biggest departure from my headcanon. (I thought he was described in the text as having chimeric blackface.)
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Apr 30, 2024 15:14
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Continuing my Alastair Reynolds kick, I just finished Chasm City. Dude has a gift for weird aliens. The hamadryads were cool (although I wasn’t a huge fan of the snakebite deus ex machina during climax), but the grubs and their void warren kicked rear end and I wanted to know more about the “jumper clowns” they referenced (what a name).
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May 2, 2024 13:36
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For me, (outside of sentimental special cases) physical books are only value-add when they’re literal handbooks designed to be navigated physically. I’m thinking like Ugly’s Electrical References, American Electricians’ Handbook, Machinery’s Handbook, etc.
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May 10, 2024 22:05
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 08:31 |
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Gaius Marius posted:Finding out just where the Cache weapons came from and how they were acquired makes the Nostalgia for Infinity crew seem way cooler. But it does make me wish I'd read that heist novel instead of the ship parts of Revelation Space I’m reading Redemption Ark now, about a quarter the way through, so I’ve only gotten the cache-weapons’ backstory in broad strokes so far, and yeah it is cool. One of those rare instances where the answer to a cool mystery isn’t a letdown. I’d love to read the heist novel too but the “haunted spaceship with doomsday weapons of unknown provenance” vibes were my favorite parts of Revelation Space, idk if I’d trade straight across given the option.
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May 11, 2024 20:33
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