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Just finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora. Been meaning to read it for a while, as I'd heard good things, but I've been apprehensive as I recently bounced off of Ministry for the Future pretty hard. Anyway, I got it from my local library as an ebook. Started it, kinda struggled to get into it, put it down for a while, then realized the return date was coming up so I figured I'd give it one more shot. It finally hooked me once the ship's AI took over the narrative. I burned through nearly all the rest of it and had like 50 pages left, but it turns out I misinterpreted the loan expiration date and it locked me out before I could finish. I ended up enjoying the AI parts of the novel way more than the generation ship stuff. Like, I loved how the ship attains sentience essentially because it was ordered to become a storyteller and the sequence near the end where it's internal monologue shifts from 'we' to 'I' right before it dies during the final sun pass was goddamn beautiful, and I firmly believe the novel should've just ended right then and there. The fact that it just keeps going honestly kinda soured me on it, and once my library loan expired, I really had no desire to go back and finish those last 50 or so pages. The stuff on Earth just felt so unnecessary, like KSR was worried people would go "but what happened to so-and-so??" so he just keeps on going. I think I also expected certain things to be cleverer than they ended up being. I kept on expecting another twist about the alleged second ship, like it would be revealed the entire thing was a fabricated story to keep people in line and also make them overestimate the ship's actual control over them, but nope, it's seemingly exactly as presented. Or, like, I kept on waiting for the other shoe to drop about Freya, that she's not actually as dumb as she believes herself to be, and she's in fact been held back by this bad self-image of herself that was instilled from her childhood eavesdropping of her parent's concerns. But, nope, she goes the entire novel continually thinking "man I'm not as good as my mom was" and even the ship's AI, who is telling the story, is like "yep, that's right, she definitely wasn't as good as her mom". The dilemma with the target planet being "poisonous" felt a little contrived. Like, I get the threat of the pseudo-prions or whatever they were, but it seemed like everyone just gave up on the planet way too quick. I understand they were low on supplies and couldn't wait for forever to find a solution, and also it was traumatic to have most of the landing party die, but even still...it's like, you spent hundreds of years and literal generations to get here, and this is all it took for you to give up? There were no contingencies or backup plans? Nobody who originally planned the journey, any of the prior generations of travelers, or any of the current travelers ever considered this sort of thing? The fact that Jochi apparently survives just fine with the prions in him for multiple subjective decades just reinforced the idea in my head. Eh, I guess its all meant to tie into the later bits about how callous the original designers were, with the "dandelion" strategy and the amount of suffering that results in for the majority of projects that don't succeed. I dunno. All in all, I feel like it was a great story about AI wrapped in a so-so story about the dangers of space colonization.
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May 11, 2023 03:22
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Sinatrapod posted:it felt like KSR chastising himself for not paying attention to the real world's struggles. This reminds me of the bit toward the end where he also chastises his earlier Red Mars series while describing the terraforming efforts in this version of Mars. It mentions that perchlorates in the Martian soil make it essentially impossible to farm, and will make the terraforming take a minimum of a few thousand years, not the few hundred they were hoping (like what happened in Red Mars). If I recall correctly, this was one of the real-life criticisms of Red Mars, so him mentioning it here is a straight-up self-own. There's few other things mentioned along these lines, i.e. "whoa this seemingly minor thing ended up being way more of an impediment than we initially thought!". It was actually a bit of a bummer to read, like KSR was beating himself up. Just, like:  here's all the ways you were wrong about this, idiot
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May 13, 2023 18:56
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WarpDogs posted:I read a book as a kid about an alien invasion where toward the end its revealed the aliens used a lot of biblical imagery. it's left ambiguous as to whether a previous invasion by the aliens was the "real" source of inspiration behind Judeo-Christian mythology, or if the aliens were actually divine beings / angels and the invasion was the apocalypse Sounds like Dean Koontz's The Taking. World-wide abductions are revealed to be to be the literal Rapture, and the malicious aliens menacing the main characters are actually demons.
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May 23, 2023 18:28
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Love a good 2nd person perspective book. I think Charles Stross had a near-future series written like this.
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Jun 15, 2023 18:40
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Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds? Set in a far future Africa. It's not mil-scifi, but if you like it, I think it's the start of a trilogy. I only read the first one but I thought it was pretty interesting, not a setting I've seen often in scifi.
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Jan 3, 2024 00:56
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Gaius Marius posted:And is there ever a moment McCarthy is unclear? His prose is precise enough that they would only be a distraction. Problematic Pigeon posted:And McCarthy has such a good ear for dialogue you don't really need quotation marks to tell when narration ends and dialogue begins, and each character has such a specific voice it's always clear who is talking in a conversation. I think it depends. I remember reading The Road a couple years back and not having any issues with understanding or parsing dialogue from narration. Then last year I read Stella Maris and it drove me insane. It seems like he went out of his way to make it even MORE unclear, ironically by removing all narration and having it be purely dialogue. You'd think this simplify things, but what kept tripping me up was there's never any indication of who's speaking. Now, sure, it's only two characters speaking, alternating back and forth. A psychologist and a patient, so most of the time it's pretty clear from context who's talking. A note at the beginning indicates that everything is a transcription of the recordings of their sessions. Except...who the gently caress would create a transcription without any indication of who's-saying-what? Or any indication of pertinent facts from the recording like "patient began to cry" or "patient was silent for several minutes", etc? You have to glean this from little hints here and there but nothing's clear, and lots of other details are simply not mentioned at all. Why? Because literally the only thing on the page is the words the characters said. Not how they said them, and anything else that might be valuable for the reader to know: body language, non-verbal actions like gestures, facial expressions...nope! Unless somebody verbally says something out loud, you are completely in the dark. Again, most the time you can still figure stuff out from context clues, but the way he wrote the dialogue makes it challenging. Lots of short or one word responses. Lots of one person repeating what the other just said (especially the one word responses). Lots of times where one character will imitate what they think the other character is going to say, and so on. Basically, stuff that only becomes difficult to parse if you intentionally remove all indication of who's talking and how they're saying it. And most of the time without punctuation so you have to intuit the tone or tenor of the conversation purely on vibes. What drove me over the edge was one particular section where the order of who-was-saying-what seemed to mess up. Like, they're alternating back and forth but at one point it's like "okay this should definitely be the doctor talking but he's saying things that don't make sense for him to say, and would only make sense of the patient was saying it instead", and the following line is the same but vice versa. Is it a formatting mistake? Did McCarthy forgot to put a line break somewhere, or put one where it doesn't belong? Was it intentional? Am I just misinterpreting and this is another instance of characters imitating each other (for the entire rest of the chapter)? Who knows! Ugh. It definitely made me hesitant to pick up the companion novel.
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Mar 1, 2024 01:12
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zoux posted:Something that always bothered me about the Inhibitor universe The inhibitors' raison detre is to prevent the rise of galaxy spanning civilizations because they would get in the way of a project to shepherd our galaxy through the collision with the Andromeda galaxy in 3 bn years. And if they don't, both galaxies won't be able to support life. But it's a "collision" in name only, more accurately the galaxies are going to pass through one another. I guess gravitational forces could move things around but it's not like every star is going to crash into another one It's been a while since I read anything in that series, but wasn't it explained/handwaved as having something to do with the various gas clouds and nebulae in each galaxy colliding? Like, even though they're so diffuse, the relative velocities would heat them up so much they'd start giving off huge amounts of radiation, sterilizing massive regions of space? Or maybe something about the merger of the supermassive black holes causing problems? I could be totally misremembering, though.
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Mar 8, 2024 05:40
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frogbs posted:Ok, so i've queued up samples of a few books folks recommended here, along with others I found randomly searching around. Will report back if any stick: I think I've read most of these except Childhood's End, and I don't recall there being any spiders. The closest would maybe be starfish-esque aliens in Blindsight? Like, if your issue with spiders is the number of appendages they have, I guess?
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Mar 29, 2024 15:20
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