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The Minds keep humans around because they like to gently caress them and they only shame Meatfucker because it admits it.
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Mar 4, 2021 22:54
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90s Cringe Rock posted:The Minds keep humans around because they like to gently caress them and they only shame Meatfucker because it admits it. Meatfucker was shamed because it would invade people's privacy and literally rip thoughts out of their minds. Minds hosed humans in big orgies at least twice on screen and its presented as a pretty normal thing. Sex in general is largely destigmatized, the biggest issue people ever have is the one dude im Player of Games who only hosed women and everyone thinks he's weird as hell.
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Mar 4, 2021 23:03
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General Battuta posted:That's not a plot hole! A weird inconsistency that goes against the flow of logic established in the story? I guess there might be a better word for it than plot hole. It breaks my suspension of disbelief at least.
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Mar 4, 2021 23:07
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Minds not being as smart as they think they are is one of my favourite features of the Culture. Excession in particular where - a Mind indulges in exactly the same juvenile 'get revenge on Hitler' antics as Zakalwe and gets dunked on about it - a Minds smugs about how the material universe is beneath them and then smash cut to their mate who is flying a breathless tour of cool stars because it's fascinated by them - all the Minds start a civil war in their exclusive Mayfair dinner club over a higher dimensional entity, which decides they are bickering children not worth its attention and leaves The Minds are godlike but they absolutely believe their own hype and they're great fun to read about. Actually if there's one consistent message in the Culture, it isn't that utopia is not enough. I think it's specifically that the Culture's attitude of "yeah well I ran the numbers and war/peace/stellar engineering/uplift is the best solution" isn't really good enough to sustain either the humans or the Minds on its own. Hell, Special Circumstances specifically exists for situations where the morality calculator spits out a divide by zero.
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Mar 4, 2021 23:42
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Minds just keep all the quadrillions of humans around to use the occasional referrers that pop out, change my mind
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Mar 5, 2021 00:08
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Mauser posted:I have about 15 pages left in Memory and this one just arrived today, but work is getting in the way You've got a treat waiting for you! I'm enjoying it a lot.
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Mar 5, 2021 00:40
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I know! Memory took soooo long to get going (as I complained earlier in the thread) but it definitely got going and it was good! It definitely needed a lot of build up for the various factions and plot points, but my only complaint is that I didn't really get the seductive nature of imperial culture coming out in that slow build up as much as it seems to peak out later when the riots and factional street battle action actually starts ups. I definitely get that aspect of it, thinking about the pull that colonial empires had on the elites in colonial and post-colonial settings.
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Mar 5, 2021 01:03
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Re: Star Trek books, this is a good site doing a reread of all of them, is a great walk down memory lane for a bunch of stuff I read 20-25 years ago - http://deepspacespines.com/ Modern stuff I checked out after the relaunch as I got behind and always meant to get back but never did. I did read some of the side series and probably would have read the Discovery and Picard novels had corona not happened to disrupt when and how I read to make it more older pulp stuff I grabbed off the internet instead of books I saw while at the bookstore/library
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Mar 5, 2021 01:15
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thotsky posted:A weird inconsistency that goes against the flow of logic established in the story? I guess there might be a better word for it than plot hole. It breaks my suspension of disbelief at least. It's not though. In fact, they've made perfect Minds without the flaws. It's just that any Mind they make perfect immediately ascends into a higher plane of existence within a few minutes like the super-advanced cultures do.
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Mar 5, 2021 02:43
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Danhenge posted:Didn't he come out of a non-Culture culture? Zakalwe did, but I meant the referrer who sends Sma after him.
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Mar 5, 2021 02:54
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freebooter posted:Randomly picked up Alastair Reynolds' short story collection Beyond the Aquila Rift at a bookstore the other day and am reminded of how much I like him. The only other collection of his I've read is Galactic North, and I think he's actually better at the shorter form. The titular story, Beyond the Aquila Rift, is just an instant classic of the creepy sci-fi mystery genre. Head's up, the short stories Beyond the Aquila Rift and Zima Blue both got animated adaptions in the Netflix series Love, Death & Robots (which is a collection of short films based on various sci-fi short stories).
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Mar 5, 2021 02:54
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Ooooohhhh the Rift one was one of my favorites. Man that was creepy.
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Mar 5, 2021 03:01
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They're supposed to be doing another round and I would really like it if Diamond Dogs (from that same collection) was one of them.
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Mar 5, 2021 03:14
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Ccs posted:I picked up The Unspoken Name because Tor was offering it free as this month's ebook. It's good so far! Books about traveling with wizards are definitely my thing, although I suspect as with a certain other popular fantasy series that this would-be Gandalf is not going to turn out to be all sunshine and rainbows. good to hear, i chucked it on my kindle because it was free, free+good is a perfect value proposition
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Mar 5, 2021 03:37
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Strategic Tea posted:
Or that Utopia is enough for a long time, for most people, but eventually you either go into storage or radically reinvent yourself. Even post-scarcity and almost no death gets boring eventually
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Mar 5, 2021 03:40
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muscles like this! posted:Head's up, the short stories Beyond the Aquila Rift and Zima Blue both got animated adaptions in the Netflix series Love, Death & Robots (which is a collection of short films based on various sci-fi short stories). Love, Death, and Robots is something I couldn't get more than halfway through. And that first half was shockingly misogynistic. There are no healthy female characters. They're all fluff, background, ugly, and victims, victims, victims. It was the kitsune's story that ended it for me. That was just repeated degradation of what could have been a strong, distinctive character, ground into a filthy morass of perversion and body erasure. Or look at the piece about the farmers jumping into battlemechs to fend off an alien swarm. There are women in that story, but you have the housewives who bundle the kids into shelter to ride out the danger passively, and an old, ugly, mean spirited woman who nobody likes. She's the only one allowed to act and... that's a dire message. There's nothing better in anything else. Maybe it gets better later, but I'm not planning to see for myself.
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Mar 5, 2021 06:57
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The order of Love, Death, and Robots is randomized; we don't know which episodes you've seen or not seen when you say you've watched the first half. Not that I want to have a conversation about Love, Death and Robots, its just an interesting Netflix oddity.
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Mar 5, 2021 09:37
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branedotorg posted:Or that Utopia is enough for a long time, for most people, but eventually you either go into storage or radically reinvent yourself. It's a weirdly pessimistic take compared to something like Star Trek: The Next Generation, where improving oneself and the human condition is how humans stay fulfilled in a post-scarcity society. The culture books have this conceit that the minds of the Culture have basically explored pretty much everything already and is teetering on the edge of simply leaving this plane of existence, but eschewing it as some kind of cop-out.
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Mar 5, 2021 10:21
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muscles like this! posted:Head's up, the short stories Beyond the Aquila Rift and Zima Blue both got animated adaptions in the Netflix series Love, Death & Robots (which is a collection of short films based on various sci-fi short stories). I saw when googling it, yeah, and had vaguely heard of LDR. Which is exactly the kind of short video anthology series I would have been interested in about five years ago when I was surfing through sharehouses and just had a laptop, but now I'm like, watching longer films on TV in the evening with my partner... but then at the same time I easily spent a cumulative 90 minutes today arguing with dickheads on Twitter? Can I not set aside 15 minutes to watch an adaptation of a short story I really enjoyed? I will, eventually, it's just weird how people's priorities shift. (Also for the record I read Zima Blue last night, and meh, that was a nothingburger, one of his weakest stories.)
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Mar 5, 2021 14:13
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Yeah Love Death Robots is some of the best animation studios in the world adapting some the worst scripts. Even the few good ones like Aquila Rift are more meh than they should be, and the resolution of Zima Blue is disappointing, it's more notable for the excellent Robert Valley style of the animation. Netflix is making another season though, and i'm sure it will be a lot of the same crap labored over by amazing visual artists. branedotorg posted:good to hear, i chucked it on my kindle because it was free, free+good is a perfect value proposition I'm further in it now, it's still really good. The fact that they're Orcs kind of has a bigger impact now? A little? It's still mostly for the aesthetic though. The first 5 chapters have enough plot for an entire book, but the pacing doesn't feel rushed. The author is just telling a very expansive story and has good control over economy of storytelling, so gets through a load of stuff at a quick pace.
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Mar 5, 2021 16:02
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UK Kindle daily deals includes The Fifth Season for 99p.
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Mar 5, 2021 18:16
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A Wizard of Earthsea (Earthsea #1) by Ursula K Le Guin - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008T9L6AM/ The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005MZN2B2/ Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth by JRR Tolkien - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00796E7CA/ The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01E6HYNGE/
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Mar 5, 2021 19:16
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Maybe I'm misremembering because it's been a while, but didn't some of the protagonists living in the Culture ultimately find the ability to have everything actually unsatisfying?
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Mar 5, 2021 23:27
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crazyvanman posted:Maybe I'm misremembering because it's been a while, but didn't some of the protagonists living in the Culture ultimately find the ability to have everything actually unsatisfying? Yes, and the Minds take great care to ensure that positions are found where they can satisfy their desires to be challenged, such as Contact or other voluntary services like Quietus in Surface Detail. Or even finding them a nice empty rock to try and survive on all by their lonesome, if that would make them happy. Lemniscate Blue fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Mar 6, 2021 |
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Mar 6, 2021 01:16
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team overhead smash posted:UK Kindle daily deals includes The Fifth Season for 99p. They're on a roll, one of today's deals is Dead Lies Dreaming by Charles Stross.
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Mar 6, 2021 01:43
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Another thing the later books in the Culture series highlight is that it's really weird and kind of off-puttingly stubborn that they haven't ascended to another plane of existence yet.
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Mar 6, 2021 09:55
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Apparently my 18 year old brain, that is 10 years ago, interpreted all of this as raising questions about whether this all meant that luxury communism was actually a good thing or not. Maybe if I read it now I'd come to a different conclusion.
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Mar 6, 2021 12:41
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trust me when i say being bored to death is better than starving or freezing to death.
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Mar 6, 2021 13:09
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some criticism I have heard of the Culture from a left-perspective is that, like Star Trek, it's merely a post-scarcity utopia - liberalism rather than communism, with all the humans as bourgeoisie
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Mar 6, 2021 15:58
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Strategic Tea posted:Minds not being as smart as they think they are is one of my favourite features of the Culture. Best bit of Excession is Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The having a complete mental breakdown at the realisation that maybe the only reason Minds have been friendly freedom loving hippies isn't because they're moral, but because they haven't yet needed to not be that. crazyvanman posted:Maybe I'm misremembering because it's been a while, but didn't some of the protagonists living in the Culture ultimately find the ability to have everything actually unsatisfying? The Hydrogen Sonata has a big subplot about Life Goals and the main character is stubbornly attempting to learn to play the Hydrogen Sonata just because it's a challenge, and if you decide something has meaning, then it has meaning. It doesn't need to be particularly important or significant for it be something worth caring about. And the Sonata is neither of those things, and is actually a godawful travesty.
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Mar 6, 2021 16:21
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All this just reminded me of an email I got from a machine-learning newsletter thing where she asked an AI routine to generate Culture ship names. My favourite was 'Absently Tilting to One Side' but there were a few really good ones. Aha found the link. https://aiweirdness.com/post/185883998702/ais-named-by-ais Other highlights: Not Disquieting At All Friendly Head Crusher Protip: Don't Ask
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Mar 6, 2021 16:57
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Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City (Siege #1) by KJ Parker - $3.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078W5M7DB/ Jade City (Green Bone Saga #1) by Fonda Lee - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XRCBRX8/
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Mar 6, 2021 18:29
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Lt. Danger posted:some criticism I have heard of the Culture from a left-perspective is that, like Star Trek, it's merely a post-scarcity utopia - liberalism rather than communism, with all the humans as bourgeoisie It is both hilarious and deeply sad that someone can be so wrapped up in their politics that "post-scarcity utopia where all of humanity's material and emotional needs are met, leaving everyone to pursue their best lives" is seen as insufficient.
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Mar 6, 2021 19:32
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There is something a little disquieting about humanity basically being the indulged pets of godlike AIs. Like sure, they can do basically anything they want, but they're not fundamentally in control of their society or the high level decisions it makes as a civilisation and you don't have to really read too far into the setting to conclude any real large-scale democratic exercises are simulated, gamed out and subsequently shaped by elite Mind groups. It's an open question whether that is a good thing or not and whether quantifiably fewer atrocities is worth entering a civilisational playpen, but it's something worth considering
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Mar 6, 2021 19:59
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I think you can view it as triumphant in that we presumably made the Minds, and they both capture and retain human values rather than turning into unknowable and uncaring elder gods.
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Mar 6, 2021 20:10
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multijoe posted:There is something a little disquieting about humanity basically being the indulged pets of godlike AIs. Like sure, they can do basically anything they want, but they're not fundamentally in control of their society or the high level decisions it makes as a civilisation and you don't have to really read too far into the setting to conclude any real large-scale democratic exercises are simulated, gamed out and subsequently shaped by elite Mind groups. It's an open question whether that is a good thing or not and whether quantifiably fewer atrocities is worth entering a civilisational playpen, but it's something worth considering it's an ideal form of government for most people. Everything just happens, and happens in a way that's quantifiably good for you. Sometimes you get to participate in a Culture-wide vote. And if you wanted to live under a different system, I'm sure you and your friends could find an Orbital willing to give you a whole Plate if there wasn't already a Tendency or splinter faction doing exactly that.
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Mar 6, 2021 21:17
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Stayed up until 2am finishing City of Miracles , the last book in Robert J Bennett's Divine Cities trilogy. Got them as a Christmas gift from a friend and I super enjoyed them! I feel like these books could have easily gotten too bogged down in world building and lore but it did a real good job of not throwing too much at the reader while still making the world feel pretty fleshed out. Would recommend!
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Mar 6, 2021 21:40
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multijoe posted:There is something a little disquieting about humanity basically being the indulged pets of godlike AIs. Like sure, they can do basically anything they want, but they're not fundamentally in control of their society or the high level decisions it makes as a civilisation and you don't have to really read too far into the setting to conclude any real large-scale democratic exercises are simulated, gamed out and subsequently shaped by elite Mind groups. It's an open question whether that is a good thing or not and whether quantifiably fewer atrocities is worth entering a civilizational playpen, but it's something worth considering As someone said earlier, it's very possible that the Minds keep around 30 trillion humans for the 30-40 total people who can predict events with near 100% accuracy. For the rest of us the little technological gods will learn faster than you ever will, even if you get glands in your body that can bring you up to AI functionality for thinking. The Minds are just way above what you'll ever be. Humans are not really even good as soldiers because the human as an as a soldier or warrior, the body itself, is extremely antiquated due to physical limitations. Honestly I think that one of the major risks in a FALC style post-scarcity society is the lack of stakes which robs people of identity through labor, Minds or not. If you exist now then capitalism requires more and more physical and mental and emotional energy from you, but many people find identity in what they do. Not everyone, but many. To suddenly be freed to think and then not having anything to do in terms of labor for a lot of people is to basically be deprived of meaning. Meaning and identity are frequently (but not always) found in labor, even if their relationship with that meaning isn't a healthy one. Some people find identity meaning in religion and that meaning is laid out before them. Or gently caress, maybe you find meaning in shallow consumerism. But for many people, believing that life has no inherent meaning is terrifying and one of the only ways to deal with that is to assign something meaning and strive for that thing no matter how arbitrary that thing is. One of the theorized pitfalls of FALC is losing a source of meaning as our relationship with our labor as a means of survival is basically deprived from us. If machines are what keep the lights on and grow your food and treat your water and make medicine and are your doctors and pilots and whatnot, a lot of meaning in peoples' lives first becomes lost and then can't even be meaningfully achieved. You can take up a hobby and earn a dozen PHD's because you're bored or become a master woodworker or solo explore space or even choose a life where you technologically regress on purpose and be the Culture version of the Amish. These are all basically hobbies or lifestyle choices though. To me this was illustrated in the show "The Good Place" at the end (season 4 spoilers ahead) where the cast literally goes to heaven and they do basically do everything and anything. They're full post-scarcity, death is optional and also everyone you ever loved gets to go to heaven at some point. Then Tahani, one of the characters, who was a British socialite, masters woodworking and then she well...Has nothing left to do. She becomes a mix of fulfilled and bored and part of making heaven palatable for people was to allow them to die or pass on or whatever. And she contemplates dying until she takes on a job meant for non-human angels or demons or whatever in designing her own version of heaven for others to live in. A job which for her should literally be impossible, but hey, she's got eternity to do it. And that's why she doesn't die when the rest of the cast does, the only survivor of the "human" cast. She found meaning even if that meaning was considered impossible for her. tl;dr The social implications of FALC actually kind of terrify me because we'd be deprived of some of the normal avenues of creating meaning and identity for ourselves.
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Mar 6, 2021 21:46
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Read 17776, which is both the best example of that argument for and response to that viewpoint that I’ve seen.
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Mar 6, 2021 22:01
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You can create and work without being exploited for your labor. Tahani did not become an architect for the pay, and her decision was not somehow more fulfilling than Jason’s decision to meditate for a thousand years or Chidi and Eleanor‘a decisions to die.
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Mar 6, 2021 22:03
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