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Fallom posted:If it resembles a belief like "If I die, then my descendents will carry on my legacy" (but much stronger) then I'm cool with that. I think that's a fair way to phrase it, though it would certainly be much stronger. Remember, both forks who emerge from the backup process are you, in every way that the person you will be thirty seconds from now qualifies as you. But you need to be very careful to specify the point of view of the observer when you're dealing with brain copying/backups. If you're talking about the self immediately pre-backup, before the moment of recording, the belief would be 'If one I dies, another I will carry on my legacy*.' This self will be causally connected to both resulting forks. From the perspective of either fork, post-backup, the belief is 'gently caress backups, if I die, it's over!' I replied to your volcano example in an edit above; I think it offers a really good case study. And a lot of my frustration with this argument has more to do with the notion that teleportation is murder than the somewhat convoluted logic of mind scans. *I do want to make it super clear that I'm not arguing that the 'self' will somehow be stretched across the multiple forks. Once the backup scan finishes, that's it: the resulting forks are on their own.
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Jul 9, 2013 03:03
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I've been rereading the Foundation books, and the First Foundation/Second Foundation/Gaia trichotomy of the new ones makes me a lot queasier this time around. It's also kind of weird that apparently during the thirty years or whenever between the original short stories and Foundation's Edge Asimov got tired of the whole idea of psychohistory and decided that his books would be about collectively-intelligent superorganisms. What I'm wondering is where the hell the Encyclopedia Galactica excerpts, allegedly from 1020 Foundation Era, are now supposed to be from. Surely not Galaxia. Not just an issue of them being in the original books and overriden by the new ones, because the prequels were written after Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth but they still have the encyclopedia excerpts before each chapter.
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Jul 9, 2013 04:13
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While I do like the Foundation's Edge/and Earth sequels (I especially love all the tying in of the earlier Empire and Robots references), I agree that Galaxia has always been a huge problem for me and I've never liked it. I don't remember the source but I did remember hearing that near the end of his life Asimov also changed his mind about Galaxia and wanted to write more basically ending it but I guess we'll never know. However for the 1020 FE Encyclopedia Galactica stuff, I do think that it's mentioned that Galaxia will take centuries to be established, so I suppose that's wiggle room enough for the Second Empire to be established and around for a while before the Galaxia mind-meld happens. Incidentally I don't know if it's just me but I've always felt that the character of Pelorat was supposed to be a stand-in for Asimov himself. Also, the original Foundation Trilogy are maybe my favorite novels ever. I don't know what it is about them and they definitely have their faults but there's just something about them that makes it so easy for me to reread them every year, when it's extremely rare for me to reread books even once.
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Jul 9, 2013 04:57
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Continuing these minor derails with some recommendations- On the Foundation front, aside from the original series there have been some pretty good other authors' takes on them. The magnificent B-team of hard SF writers Benford, Bear, and Brin put out (respectively) Foundation's Fear, Foundation And Chaos, and Foundation's Triumph which I seem to recall enjoying pretty well. I also recently found a great 2001 book set in a late Second-Foundation period called Psychohistorical Crisis by Donald Kingsbury that I'd never before heard of that is full of some pretty cool spy shenanigans and the repercussions of artificial brain augmentation on the Foundation. I had a pretty good time even if it looks like his other works are a little creepy. And back with the theories-of-identity discussion the aforementioned and fantastic David Brin wrote a fantastic standalone SF dectective-noir that goes all freaky Philip K. Dick called Kiln People. It's in a future where almost everyone can 3D-print clay avatars/clones with copies of their minds in them and download their memories later. There are color-coded quality and use hierarchies where the cheap ones are stupid near-automatons that do your chores and don't upload their boring memories and expensive smart ones that can learn stuff and research for you and specialty models that can be spies or prostitutes or whatever. It's not space ships and blasters, but there's some great chase scenes and punchouts in between pondering about what makes us human and the like. (That said Brin's Uplift series is great too and has some pretty sweet and imaginative alien races (and spaceship chases), but they mostly stick to planetary action and byzantine alien politics so it's not necessarily thread-appropriate either.)
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Jul 9, 2013 05:44
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General Battuta posted:
This is how the Commonwealth series does things though I believe. I haven't read them in a while, but my recollection is that everyone has implanted datachips that constantly back them up so that as long as the chip is recovered they can "resume" from the point of their death. I remember wishing that he would have done more exploration of how society deals with the fact that inequality has extended to whether or not you die (do poor people get government-provided backups? How often does actual unwanted death occur? Why isn't this THE major political issue?) but that discussion is probably not well suited to his style of novel. There was definitely room for it if you take out all of his trademark terribly written sex scenes though.
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Jul 9, 2013 14:07
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I am reading the Honor Harrington series at the moment and am wondering if any of you have any recommendations of books like it?
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Jul 9, 2013 16:30
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Fenrra posted:I am reading the Honor Harrington series at the moment and am wondering if any of you have any recommendations of books like it? TBH I thought they were pretty boring. Read the Vorkosigan books, they're much better.
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Jul 9, 2013 16:49
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Fenrra posted:I am reading the Honor Harrington series at the moment and am wondering if any of you have any recommendations of books like it? The lost fleet books might do you right; they have a lot of similar elements.
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Jul 9, 2013 18:44
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Thanks to both of you for the tips. Added both to my list of books to read!
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Jul 9, 2013 20:36
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blackmongoose posted:This is how the Commonwealth series does things though I believe. I haven't read them in a while, but my recollection is that everyone has implanted datachips that constantly back them up so that as long as the chip is recovered they can "resume" from the point of their death. I remember wishing that he would have done more exploration of how society deals with the fact that inequality has extended to whether or not you die (do poor people get government-provided backups? How often does actual unwanted death occur? Why isn't this THE major political issue?) but that discussion is probably not well suited to his style of novel. There was definitely room for it if you take out all of his trademark terribly written sex scenes though. It actually works like insurance. A character was talking about half of his paycheck going to re-life insurance. Body death is pretty rare in the commonwealth. When you get to the end of your current body's usefulness, you go in for rejuve. After living a number of lives, you can choose to download your consciousness into an A.I. (that has stationed itself on an asteroid I think?). In the void trilogy, which takes place 1200 years later; the AI has progressed to the point that it is called ANA. It is the governing body of humanity, and is made up of millions of people who have chosen to download their consciousness into it. It has different factions with different goals. The main ANA goal is to move human society into a post physical existence. Withing humanity, there is the Higher Culture, and the Advancer Culture. Highers are the people wanting to progress into a post-physical state; advancers are more technological. There's also a religion based upon the shared dream of a man who dreamt of a new culture in the Void; the center of the Galaxy. Sorry for the wall o' text. I really like these books.
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Jul 10, 2013 15:50
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The Void Trilogy was an interesting story, but the technology got too "out there" for me. It seemed all crazy metaphysical stuff that wasn't relatable at all, and all the fights turned into a weird Super Saiyan showdown... if that makes sense.
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Jul 10, 2013 18:45
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syphon posted:The Void Trilogy was an interesting story, but the technology got too "out there" for me. It seemed all crazy metaphysical stuff that wasn't relatable at all, and all the fights turned into a weird Super Saiyan showdown... if that makes sense. It does. I chock it up to being set so far in the future. I really dig the interludes-- the dream sequences.
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Jul 10, 2013 19:08
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syphon posted:The Void Trilogy was an interesting story, but the technology got too "out there" for me. It seemed all crazy metaphysical stuff that wasn't relatable at all, and all the fights turned into a weird Super Saiyan showdown... if that makes sense. Sadly, I'm a sucker for spaced-out space battles like that, so I bought and devoured the Void Trilogy in a matter of days. Hamilton's sex szenes however are kind of grating. Sometimes his books read like he couldn't decide if he wanted to write science fiction or pornography.
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Jul 10, 2013 20:33
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Libluini posted:Sadly, I'm a sucker for spaced-out space battles like that, so I bought and devoured the Void Trilogy in a matter of days. Hamilton's sex szenes however are kind of grating. Sometimes his books read like he couldn't decide if he wanted to write science fiction or pornography. Literally filled with dicks. Dick party of the 24th century.
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Jul 10, 2013 21:42
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General Battuta posted:I think that's a fair way to phrase it, though it would certainly be much stronger. Remember, both forks who emerge from the backup process are you, in every way that the person you will be thirty seconds from now qualifies as you. Did you ever read Kiln People? It was an interesting take on mind uploading, as the forks only lasted a day or so and had to either be abandoned or merged back into the personality of the primary meat human.
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Jul 11, 2013 00:35
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andrew smash posted:Did you ever read Kiln People? It was an interesting take on mind uploading, as the forks only lasted a day or so and had to either be abandoned or merged back into the personality of the primary meat human. I did. I thought it suffered from Brin's weird gee-golly-whiz style, but it was a super cool concept.
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Jul 11, 2013 16:44
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General Battuta posted:I did. I thought it suffered from Brin's weird gee-golly-whiz style, but it was a super cool concept. I agree, like much of brin's stuff the tone is kind of annoying and it sort of goes off the rails at the end, but i liked it anyway.
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Jul 12, 2013 03:31
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Chairman Capone posted:A reading group I'm a part of just did Redshirts. It's the first John Scalzi book I've read and I enjoyed it a lot. The rest of the group did also, even though surprisingly few of them had actually seen Star Trek, which I would have thought to be a big factor in how much a reader would enjoy it. Try The God Engines. Best book by Scalzi I've read, and I think I've read quite a few. Most didn't make that great an impression on me, though.
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Jul 13, 2013 10:12
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Fallorn posted:David Weber John Ringo The Empire of man series is fun to read because it is so over to top with Four armed aliens that quad wield pistols. It is awesome bad. You mean awesome good!  Anyways, I would like some recommendations for Alien invasion stories. I don't care when they were written or bad the authors politics are. I've enjoyed everything from War of the Worlds to John Ringo's Legacy of the Aldenta and Into the Looking Glass. Footfall by Niven is probably my favorite from this genre, and I have a lot of love for Turtledove's terrible Worldwar series. I even read the ID4 novelization. So, what do you guys got?
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Jul 13, 2013 12:04
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Charlz Guybon posted:You mean awesome good! The Last World War by Dayton Ward Also read Heinlein's Puppet Masters and the original Wells' War of the Worlds if you haven't already.
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Jul 13, 2013 12:50
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:The Last World War by Dayton Ward Thanks, will do! I actually think I have a copy of this in my giant of pile of books not yet read. No idea why I haven't gotten around to it yet. Yeah, I've read War of the Worlds, I mentioned it in my post.
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Jul 13, 2013 13:18
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I'm a bit unnerved here. I usually like the normal airplane fiction, noir, horror, etc but started looking at a wider variety and this thread was awesome for that. I started with Revelation Space, read all of those, then discovered the Culture, which lead to non space opera books by Iaian Banks, and I read all those. Now I have finished the Nights Dawn, Void, and Commonwealth series by Hamilton. I'm still on the space opera kick and my current try is Brin's Uplift series, which brings me to my dilemma. Sundiver is loving terrible. Does this get better?
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Jul 15, 2013 03:09
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I just started reading C. Cherryh's Cryteen. it seems to throw a ton of political details at you with Union, Alliance, and Sol(?) Does it continue like this? I like the setting but the politics are drowning me. Also I'm not even sure if this book is a space opera. I know it was originally three separate books. Beastie fucked around with this message at 03:20 on Jul 15, 2013 |
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Jul 15, 2013 03:13
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Beastie posted:I just started reading C. Cherryh's Cryteen. it seems to throw a ton of political details at you with Union, Alliance, and Sol(?) Does it continue like this? I like the setting but the politics are drowning me. Though it's not one of my favourites, Cyteenis widely loved. The most politics heavy bit is the beginning, from memory. After a Significant Event occurs, it eases off. Cherryh is awesome, aside from her endless Foreigner series (again, IMO). But most of her books have a lot of politics in them. Personal favourite is probably the Chanur books, which are essentially Traveller.
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Jul 15, 2013 04:48
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jackyl posted:I'm a bit unnerved here. I usually like the normal airplane fiction, noir, horror, etc but started looking at a wider variety and this thread was awesome for that. I started with Revelation Space, read all of those, then discovered the Culture, which lead to non space opera books by Iaian Banks, and I read all those. Not sure if I'd call any of them as straight up space opera since they only do swashbuckling and spaceship dogfights on occasion, but there's a lot still to love there. Sundiver is pretty different from the other books, sort of just a murder mystery but with weird aliens and superscience kind of thing. It is a look at the setting and some of the cultures involved, but other than that there really aren't any significant carryovers since the other books take place centuries later and both human technology and their political situation has shifted. The next two books (Startide Rising and The Uplift War) focus on uplifted dolphins in deep space and uplifted chimpanzees on a besieged Earth (respectively) and how they react and defend themselves against nearly overwhelming forces of angry aliens. There's a lot of hiding and spying and personal heroism while various antagonist races try to capture or eradicate them and their humans/allies. Also there are some little romances sprinkled throughout that are pretty sweet. The trilogy that follows them revolves around several very varied refugee species on a hidden world surviving in an ad hoc culture and what happens when the outer universe and its hosed up political situation stumbles in and ruins everything. The writing for Sundiver does feel weaker to me than the rest of the books in the series; and the others generally have more action if that's what you're hoping for. You didn't say what you specifically didn't like about Sundiver, but as long as it's not his specific voice as an author it does indeed get better. Still has lots of science wonkery and some kind of pat plotting though. Be warned that I'm a pretty big Brin fan so you should probably take all this with a pinch of salt.
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Jul 15, 2013 09:23
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jackyl posted:I'm a bit unnerved here. I usually like the normal airplane fiction, noir, horror, etc but started looking at a wider variety and this thread was awesome for that. I started with Revelation Space, read all of those, then discovered the Culture, which lead to non space opera books by Iaian Banks, and I read all those. How did you end up liking the The Night's Dawn Trilogy? Been hearing about it for a while and wondering if it is any good.
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Jul 15, 2013 14:43
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jackyl posted:I'm a bit unnerved here. I usually like the normal airplane fiction, noir, horror, etc but started looking at a wider variety and this thread was awesome for that. I started with Revelation Space, read all of those, then discovered the Culture, which lead to non space opera books by Iaian Banks, and I read all those. No, just go to Startide Rising.
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Jul 15, 2013 15:14
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Fenrra posted:How did you end up liking the The Night's Dawn Trilogy? Been hearing about it for a while and wondering if it is any good. The ending is pure deux ex machina and contains a questionable marriage between the author's self write-in star captain space pimp character and an underage person however, it's certainly above the level of most airport fiction I've picked up. coyo7e fucked around with this message at 19:07 on Jul 17, 2013 |
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Jul 15, 2013 17:58
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Charlz Guybon posted:You mean awesome good! I used to like reading War of the Worlds spinoff/sequel/continuation stuff. I'd in particular recommend the short story anthology War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches, where a bunch of authors each write about a historical figure's take on the Martian invasion. Walter Jon Williams' one about the Dowager Empress of China won a few awards, I believe. Then there's also War of the Worlds: New Millennium, which I haven't read, but is apparently an attempt to update the original novel to the early 21st century. And of course you can't go wrong with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Scarlet Traces, if you don't mind comics. Also, given you like Niven, have you read any of the Man-Kzin Wars anthologies? Very few of the entries are written by Niven and it's mainly space war rather than alien invasion, but the stories set on Wonderland during its conquest and occupation by the Kzin are pretty much alien invasion tropes. I also remember liking Robert Silverberg's The Alien Years, but it's been a long time so I don't know how well it holds up.
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Jul 15, 2013 18:57
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Wow. The ending of Forward the Foundation is pretty unsatisfying and kind of gross. The big conflict of the end of that book is "How will Hari Seldon get funding for psychohistory?" And it turns out when you get enough people who randomly happen to have mindrape powers together, they can just cast Dominate Person on the Chief Librarian, wealthy prospective donors, and the Emperor to solve all your problems. It doesn't really have anything to do with psychohistory or convincing people or anything, it's just brute force. Also it has even more Twisting. The books' perpetual inclusion of space karate never gets any less stupid.
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Jul 15, 2013 22:55
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I sure hope I'm not alone in this, but some of the newer Horus Heresy books are quite good. Especially Dan Abnett's Prospero Burns surprised me positively: It's a methaphorical masterwork.
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Jul 16, 2013 11:30
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Fenrra posted:How did you end up liking the The Night's Dawn Trilogy? Been hearing about it for a while and wondering if it is any good. It was an interesting concept and a fun ride, but I read it while on a beach and drinking, so take that with a grain of salt. Space Al Capone is a loving hysterical concept, but if you read it straight through in, say, a week, you'll see some inconsistencies. For example, the space zombies start out impervious to energy weapons from any distance in Night's Dawn , but then it turns out that they just short out energy weapons close to them. But, quite frankly, it doesn't matter because space Al Capone. The series is ridiculous enough but has has enough space opera style that it is worth the Kindle price. I will say that I enjoyed the Commonwealth saga a ton more, even though I read the Void series first. Don't make my mistake, you'll like it better if you start with Pandora's Star - and I still really liked it. Edit: ThaGhettoJew posted:NThe writing for Sundiver does feel weaker to me than the rest of the books in the series; and the others generally have more action if that's what you're hoping for. You didn't say what you specifically didn't like about Sundiver, but as long as it's not his specific voice as an author it does indeed get better. Still has lots of science wonkery and some kind of pat plotting though. Be warned that I'm a pretty big Brin fan so you should probably take all this with a pinch of salt. Yeah, you're right, I should have said. The voice is what killed me. Culla banged his head against the wall!!! There was an acrid stench from the bathroom!! Quit with the Matthew Reilly, damnit!!! Or are you paid by the exclamation point?!?! let it mellow fucked around with this message at 04:26 on Jul 17, 2013 |
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Jul 17, 2013 04:18
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jackyl posted:Yeah, you're right, I should have said. The voice is what killed me. Culla banged his head against the wall!!! There was an acrid stench from the bathroom!! Quit with the Matthew Reilly, damnit!!! Or are you paid by the exclamation point?!?! I do believe he gets some kind of graded commission from the Punctuators' Union, yes. There are an awful lot of ellipses in some of his dolphin-brain freakouts for example. I still maintain that the later books are superior in most regards to Sundiver, but there's absolutely no need to hurt yourself over genre fiction unless you're starved for options or suffer too greatly from the sunk-cost fallacy. I learned that lesson from the GRRM Bad Thread.
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Jul 17, 2013 09:02
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I liked Sundiver (it's cheesy, basically "Agatha Christie does hard SF in the Mass Effect universe"), but Startide Rising is way cooler. Go straight to that if you want to read a book about the first dolphin-run space mission (with a few humans along but only as civilian observers) with tons of species-building (dolphin language, culture, etc etc).
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Jul 17, 2013 10:53
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quote:It was an interesting concept and a fun ride, but I read it while on a beach and drinking, so take that with a grain of salt. Space Al Capone is a loving hysterical concept, but if you read it straight through in, say, a week, you'll see some inconsistencies. For example, the space zombies start out impervious to energy weapons from any distance in Night's Dawn , but then it turns out that they just short out energy weapons close to them. But, quite frankly, it doesn't matter because space Al Capone. The series is ridiculous enough but has has enough space opera style that it is worth the Kindle price. As a counter-point, I would argue that Space Al Capone should not be in spoiler tags. I wasted however long of my life reading up to that point, and seeing that was the impetus I needed to never read anything by Hamilton again. If you are on the fence I would strongly suggest mousing over the spoilers so you don't waste your time. I thought I was reading a space opera novel, but I got an awful fan fiction and ghost story instead.
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Jul 17, 2013 13:28
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systran posted:As a counter-point, I would argue that Space Al Capone should not be in spoiler tags. I wasted however long of my life reading up to that point, and seeing that was the impetus I needed to never read anything by Hamilton again. If you are on the fence I would strongly suggest mousing over the spoilers so you don't waste your time. I want to echo this. Additionally, even if you're happy with goofy stuff like was spoilered, the ending is really unsatisfying. I think I posted about it here before, but it was actually the ending + people here saying all his endings are similarly unsatisfying that got me to pretty much ignore Hamilton. E: That's not to say no one should read it, but if you aren't enjoying the first book or the spoilered type of stuff, don't slog through the next couple thousand pages in the trilogy, just drop it! sourdough fucked around with this message at 22:58 on Jul 17, 2013 |
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Jul 17, 2013 22:53
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I agree the ending was horrible, but the rest of it was fun. I've read everything King wrote, so that wasn't exactly a new scenario for me. The Commonwealth books were similar, but you knew all along that there were deus ex machina components involved (Gore, SI, ANA..[). Still, don't let that detract from the ride. ThaGhettoJew posted:dolphin-brain freakouts Reynolds did an amazing job with that, and I can't deny that I was thinking about Sleek every time Brin mentioned the dolphin.
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Jul 18, 2013 00:38
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Thanks jackyl and coyo7e. Going to pick it up to read on a fight. Seems cheap and fun enough for that.
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Jul 19, 2013 05:54
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John Magnum posted:Wow. The ending of Forward the Foundation is pretty unsatisfying and kind of gross. The big conflict of the end of that book is "How will Hari Seldon get funding for psychohistory?" And it turns out when you get enough people who randomly happen to have mindrape powers together, they can just cast Dominate Person on the Chief Librarian, wealthy prospective donors, and the Emperor to solve all your problems. It doesn't really have anything to do with psychohistory or convincing people or anything, it's just brute force. Between Prelude, Forward, Foundation's Fear, and Foundation and Chaos it just seems clear in hindsight that they should have left Seldon as a mythical character.
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Jul 20, 2013 00:19
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Libluini posted:I sure hope I'm not alone in this, but some of the newer Horus Heresy books are quite good. Pick up ADB's stuff. It's really good. As someone in the BL thread put it "He got literature in my bolter-porn" Has anyone else read Neptune's Brood yet? I finished it the week it came out, and have been mulling over some parts and want to discuss it.
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Jul 20, 2013 01:25
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