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Yeah the gee-whiz plucky wolflings vs. stodgy alien orthodoxy is a bit eyeroll (and even more so when combined with Brin’s space cadet dialogue). Buuuuut hey. Maybe it’s necessary to counterbalance all the tragedy and loss in the book. poo poo don’t go too good for the Earthkids.
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Aug 16, 2022 19:04
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I do like how the Tymbrimi sponsored us, as a bit
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Aug 16, 2022 19:06
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day-gas posted:It's definitely very "humanity gently caress yeah" and "humans are super duper cool and special" which was grating all the way through the three books of the series I read. It's IMHO kind of even more grating because of the Terrans' total (and in some cases fully self-inflicted) material inferiority to the Galactics. "Yes, the murderous hunter-ant people kick our rear end 3 to 1 in an even fight, and every galactic civilization is our materially better, richer, and probably has a higher standard of living than us, but our creativity, for instance the way we refuse to embrace the higher end galactic technology and still use spin sections on our ships shows we're superior." It's a surprisingly spiritual view for a book that is so textually skeptical of religion. General Battuta posted:Yeah the gee-whiz plucky wolflings vs. stodgy alien orthodoxy is a bit eyeroll (and even more so when combined with Brin’s space cadet dialogue). Buuuuut hey. Maybe it’s necessary to counterbalance all the tragedy and loss in the book. poo poo don’t go too good for the Earthkids. This is certainly true, but I still found myself rooting for the galactics, especially because they're generally a lot more interesting than the humans.
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Aug 16, 2022 19:19
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Brin could write an entertaining tale, but the way his follow-up Uplift trilogy ended with a giant wet fart made me p.much lose any further interest.
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Aug 16, 2022 19:20
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zoux posted:I do like how the Tymbrimi sponsored us, as a bit To be honest I actually do like a lot of the stuff in Uplift. Like, Uplift War and Startide Rising are both pretty cool. They're just a bit hampered, as with all of Brin's work, by his boring 1990s liberal politics. I found myself, as an alien, just wanting an entire book entirely from the galactics perspective trying to deal with these ridiculous wolflings who lucked out onto a verdant planet and almost became senior patrons by default, but are not utterly unable to actually defend that claim.
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Aug 16, 2022 19:25
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Prestige status in David Brin's Uplift Universe setting is set by how old your race is, what alien race originally uplifted you into sophonthood, and then most importantly to intergalactic status how many client alien races you have uplifted into sophont status. Most aliens races have uplifted zero to to one client races into sophont status in the Uplift Universe setting, with the very oldest and most powerful alien races having uplifted maybe three or four races into sophont status. Meanwhile by the time aliens stumbled upon humankind in the Uplift Universe, humankind had become sophonts by themselves (strike 1), were young as hell yet already had spacefaring technology(strike 2), had uplifted dolphins and chimpanzee into sophonthood already, started the first stages of uplifting gorillas, and were also considering uplifting a few more mammalian species like dogs or bears or hippos or cats or elephants or camels too (strike three ranging into infinity). The alien confederacy that accepted humanity into it's ranks immediately went "Jesus gently caress. Imagine 1000 years from now. We gotta stamp these fuckers out now. ASAP before they become too strong. Who bids for ownership of the dolphins?" and things went predictably down hill until Startide Rising made the humans vs everyone else war overt. Like I've said before, the Uplift Universe setting is interesting. It's just laden with David Brin ruining the premise and the universe setting by David Brin being horny as gently caress, David Brin writing out his libertarian utopia fantasy planet, David Brin being deep into eugenics, David Brin being deeply into plotting out the future sexual activities of uplifted dolphins and uplifted chimpanzees, etc. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 19:44 on Aug 16, 2022 |
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Aug 16, 2022 19:40
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FBH991 posted:The thing that always feels missing from uplift is the idea that these incredibly powerful alien civilizations might have a point, and that just giving into them and being absorbed into their culture might be on the whole better for us. IIRC there's a Glynn Stewart book that does exactly that; opens with the alien war fleet rolling into orbit and announcing the subjugation of earth, a single experimental FTL warship escapes with orders to steal as much alien poo poo as they can and come back later to help the resistance, etc. It ends with the crew of the ship going "holy poo poo, galactic society is a terrifying shitshow and being conquered & absorbed by these guys is probably one of the least bad things that could happen to us once we got noticed at all, let's head back home and surrender".
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Aug 16, 2022 19:41
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quantumfoam posted:If the concept of the Uplift universe still sounds sort of interesting to anyone after the past page of posts, skip David Brin entirely and go to the original source, which is: Eh, I'll go to bat for Weird Paul here. I don't think it's out of the realm of science fiction to posit a scenario where a fictitious version of Werner von Braun was not actually a Nazi, contrary to reality. Beyond that, the rest of the Nazis in the Instrumentality stories are portrayed as spectacular fuckups who ended up killing themselves with their doomsday weapons because they weren't up to their own standards of genetic purity, and the unsubtle contrast is that the pre-Instrumentality True Men are brought down because they're up to the same kind of totalitarian eugenicist business. I would never argue that the Smith stories are without some extremely weird baggage, but they come down pretty squarely against eugenics and authoritarianism.
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Aug 16, 2022 19:42
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So, cause he died recently and I've liked some of his stuff I read in the distant past, I was reading through Eric Flint's stuff and I ended up reading the books he wrote with Weber, especially the Torch books, (in this case Torch of Freedom) and it kind of brought home to me the thing I ultimately dislike about Weber books. Like, it's not even the ridiculous advantages Weber often gives his protagonists. There's plenty of books with extremely strong protagonists, even extremely strong protagonist cultures that don't come off as nearly as annoying. The problem is the way that god seems to favor them. Like the Mesans are about to do a big attack to waste Torch, and the heroes have found out about it not through any cleverness or anything, but just cause some dude owed money to an arms dealer and blew the whole operational secrecy so that some dude he was buying supplies from wouldn't kill his rear end somehow. I'm trying to get to like, the one space battle in the whole series where the bad guys have in some ways a tech advantage but that combined with how twee is kind of cramping my style.
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Aug 16, 2022 19:43
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It's a fairly common trope (what's a different word for trope? I hate it) that humans in scifi universes are a low-mid species, but we have a certain ineffable je ne sais quoi, some it factor that eventually gives us a leg up in that particular universe. There's usually a species that's twice a strong and ferocious, one that is incredibly smart and tech adept, one that is super spiritual and wise, etc. but our Human Nature catapults us into the S Tier. So are there any novels where humans are the big swinging dicks in space, we're the strongest, we're the smartest, all the other aliens are scrubs who cannot hope to overcome our incredible strength and minds? FBH991 posted:So, cause he died recently and I've liked some of his stuff I read in the distant past, I was reading through Eric Flint's stuff and I ended up reading the books he wrote with Weber, especially the Torch books, (in this case Torch of Freedom) and it kind of brought home to me the thing I ultimately dislike about Weber books. Like, it's not even the ridiculous advantages Weber often gives his protagonists. There's plenty of books with extremely strong protagonists, even extremely strong protagonist cultures that don't come off as nearly as annoying. The problem is the way that god seems to favor them. I don't know if you guys have seen this but I came across it this weekend and thought it was funny. David Weber orders a pizza
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Aug 16, 2022 20:02
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Star wars
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Aug 16, 2022 20:04
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zoux posted:So are there any novels where humans are the big swinging dicks in space, we're the strongest, we're the smartest, all the other aliens are scrubs who cannot hope to overcome our incredible strength and minds?] yeah there's a ton of them. anything written by John Ringo although humanity generally is a latecomer to the galactic stage so they have to rely on import technologies for a short while. First Contact is probably the premier 'humans gently caress yeah' book, with unbelievable technologic superiority. in a strange twist from fiction of this type, humans are also stronger and faster etc, but it's almost a cultural difference that causes this- aliens who join their civilization or even just survive fights against them or their allies long enough end up overcoming biological differences and become just as strong and hard to put down. it's like the reason humanity is strong is because they listened to that one fort minor song too much
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Aug 16, 2022 20:15
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zoux posted:So are there any novels where humans are the big swinging dicks in space, we're the strongest, we're the smartest, all the other aliens are scrubs who cannot hope to overcome our incredible strength and minds? not really my thing, mostly, but I know it exists
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Aug 16, 2022 20:17
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The big thing is usually those books are so bad that I don't have to read them. Startide Rising is good enough I want to read it quality just makes it uncanny valley.
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Aug 16, 2022 20:18
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Still going through Ethshar. At this point I've gone through The Misenchanted Sword, Ithanalin's Restoration, The Spell of the Black Dagger, Taking Flight, With a Single Spell and The Unwilling Warlord. I'm about to start The Blood of a Dragon. Cosy still isn't the best description of them for me. There's parts, big parts of the books that are fine/okay. A lot of "fish out of water" stuff, which is kind of my jam. But then there's other stuff. Like the princess that the main dude from Single Spell has to marry (in addition to his first wife) being 16. Or the princess that the main guy from Unwilling Warlord would inevitably (and happily) marry being 14. Oh and Vond deciding that as a conqueror/empire builder one thing he really wanted was a harem. Again, there's nothing graphic going on. We don't visit the harem or sit in on explicit sex scenes. It was up-thread quite a bit, but somebody posted something about how even if the internal logic of a story supports Rape Orcs, the author really isn't required to include Rape Orcs. So, on the one hand, yeah, Watt-Evans could probably justify youthful marriages, bigamy and harems as something that would "realistically" occur in his world. I just wish he hadn't. Like, maybe because of magic the various ages of consent got bumped to 18 and harems are considered passe. The bigamy wouldn't bother me except that one of the "women" involved is a 16 year old girl. The Misenchanted Sword was fine on all this fronts. I just wish that trend had continued.
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Aug 16, 2022 20:20
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FBH991 posted:The big thing is usually those books are so bad that I don't have to read them. Startide Rising is good enough I want to read it quality just makes it uncanny valley. Larry Parrish posted:yeah there's a ton of them. anything written by John Ringo although humanity generally is a latecomer to the galactic stage so they have to rely on import technologies for a short while. First Contact is probably the premier 'humans gently caress yeah' book, with unbelievable technologic superiority. in a strange twist from fiction of this type, humans are also stronger and faster etc, but it's almost a cultural difference that causes this- aliens who join their civilization or even just survive fights against them or their allies long enough end up overcoming biological differences and become just as strong and hard to put down. it's like the reason humanity is strong is because they listened to that one fort minor song too much DACK FAYDEN posted:infinitely many. the keyword you want, and I'm not making this up, is "humanity gently caress yeah". there's an entire subreddit and everything. often ends up adjacent to the weird dark enlightenment fuckers, but not in bed enough with them to be actual nazis. there's like, a fuckin 800-chapter web serial about it with good ratings on royalroad and so on Yeah I figured they were bad, but I read very, very few sci fi stories in which humans are anything but an upstart civ in a well-worn, millenia old galactic order. Or there is no galactic order because the Solution to the Fermi Paradox got everyone and now it's gonna get us.
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Aug 16, 2022 20:23
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it's a lot more common in mil sci fi. there's usually something humanity does or is that's 'weaker' than the others like our population is lower or w.e. but it doesn't end up mattering because we're simply the best soldiers the universe has ever seen etc
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Aug 16, 2022 20:26
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Now I'm wondering what the objectively least common trait that humanity has actually is, like, if we were to somehow make first contact with 100 randomly generated species what is the thing about humanity that'd be the least likely for an intelligent species to have?
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Aug 16, 2022 20:29
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DACK FAYDEN posted:Now I'm wondering what the objectively least common trait that humanity has actually is, like, if we were to somehow make first contact with 100 randomly generated species what is the thing about humanity that'd be the least likely for an intelligent species to have? According to Star Trek: a smooth forehead But for all we know, it could be anything. One thing that I've seen crop up in more than one story are aliens expressing bafflement that we use the same hole for breathing, communication, and eating.
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Aug 16, 2022 20:35
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DACK FAYDEN posted:Now I'm wondering what the objectively least common trait that humanity has actually is, like, if we were to somehow make first contact with 100 randomly generated species what is the thing about humanity that'd be the least likely for an intelligent species to have? Balls as a pee storage organ
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Aug 16, 2022 20:35
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This is basically John Campbell's influence, having humans be superior to aliens was one of his requirements, so early writers went along or wrote empty galaxies (Asimov), and the Tropes got established and passed down to the next cohort of writers and on. (With exceptions. Lovecraft and heirs were exploring the opposite view in horror, and when the genres recombined that gets back in. And Tenn was somehow able to get around it.) Anyways, Brin. I absolutely love the very end of his Foundation book. A clever and consistent fixfic for the later chronological books, in the best traditions of officially licensed fanfic.
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Aug 16, 2022 20:36
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DACK FAYDEN posted:Now I'm wondering what the objectively least common trait that humanity has actually is, like, if we were to somehow make first contact with 100 randomly generated species what is the thing about humanity that'd be the least likely for an intelligent species to have? Endurance running is our most extraordinary trait not closely linked to sapience.
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Aug 16, 2022 20:37
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yeah it's probably being endurance hunters and maybe being omnivorous
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Aug 16, 2022 20:40
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grassy gnoll posted:Eh, I'll go to bat for Weird Paul here. I don't think it's out of the realm of science fiction to posit a scenario where a fictitious version of Werner von Braun was not actually a Nazi, contrary to reality. Beyond that, the rest of the Nazis in the Instrumentality stories are portrayed as spectacular fuckups who ended up killing themselves with their doomsday weapons because they weren't up to their own standards of genetic purity, and the unsubtle contrast is that the pre-Instrumentality True Men are brought down because they're up to the same kind of totalitarian eugenicist business. I would never argue that the Smith stories are without some extremely weird baggage, but they come down pretty squarely against eugenics and authoritarianism. The issues I have with the Instrumentality of Mankind origin story aren't really about that stuff, it's that: -A series of brides teach the "jaded hundreds of years old" hero old-world human values that got lost when humanity turned everything over to computers. -the hero and his series of brides introduce pre-computerization human culture into the Instrumentality that leads to a spiritual rebirth of mankind -the brides the hero marries were cryogenically frozen and shot into high Earth orbit a long time ago -the brides are sisters that the hero marries sequentially once the oldest bride becomes too old -there is a bunch of literal sub-human people running around that act as servants/literal slaves to the hero and brides that is apparently 1000% ok with the old world human values the brides have. -the brides were cryogenically frozen and launched into space using Nazi Germany era technology -the brides got cryogenically frozen and shot into high Earth orbit around the peak of World War 2 -the brides are pre-teen German girls that got launched into space/cryogenically frozen to avoid the downfall of the Nazi regime. -the father of the Germans girls/future brides was 100% not a Nazi but had enough pull with the Nazi regime and Nazi scientists to have free access to cryogenic freezing technology and a bunch of V-2 rockets. -the pre-teen German girls that got cryogenically frozen and shot into space were born and raised in Germany during Hitler's rise to power but are not totally steeped in Nazi ideology, the author 100% double pinky swears so. wink wink wink.
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Aug 16, 2022 20:46
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DACK FAYDEN posted:Now I'm wondering what the objectively least common trait that humanity has actually is, like, if we were to somehow make first contact with 100 randomly generated species what is the thing about humanity that'd be the least likely for an intelligent species to have? According to a pc game called Galactic Civilizations 1, we'd be really good at marketing and selling blue jeans to other alien lifeforms.
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Aug 16, 2022 20:50
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quantumfoam posted:According to a pc game called Galactic Civilizations 1, we'd be really good at marketing and selling blue jeans to other alien lifeforms.  Thranguy posted:Endurance running is our most extraordinary trait not closely linked to sapience.
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Aug 16, 2022 20:56
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Bipedalism might be weird, it's not actually very stable and walking is really just controlled falling.
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Aug 16, 2022 20:57
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Athletics in general may be a place to look. Being able to throw a ball at 90 mph and reliably hit the strike zone at that distance is a suite of capabilities that may be quite rare.
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Aug 16, 2022 21:04
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zoux posted:Bipedalism might be weird, it's not actually very stable and walking is really just controlled falling.
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Aug 16, 2022 21:11
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bipedalism is insanely energy efficient, and all efficient things tend to pop up a lot in biology
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Aug 16, 2022 21:13
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zoux posted:It's a fairly common trope (what's a different word for trope? I hate it) Cliché
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Aug 16, 2022 21:14
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the pizza story is really funny, thanks for sharing that
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Aug 16, 2022 21:14
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DACK FAYDEN posted:
Lots of creatures on earth move at various speeds though. Horses immediately come to mind.
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Aug 16, 2022 21:14
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Every species of non-sessile animal on the planet is variable speed
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Aug 16, 2022 21:19
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zoux posted:So are there any novels where humans are the big swinging dicks in space, we're the strongest, we're the smartest, all the other aliens are scrubs who cannot hope to overcome our incredible strength and minds? Alan Dean Foster Damned trilogy comes to mind - humanity is unique because we’re the only species that hasn’t evolved to abhor violence, so we’re incredibly effective in the millennia-long interstellar war.
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Aug 16, 2022 21:33
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quantumfoam posted:The issues I have with the Instrumentality of Mankind origin story aren't really about that stuff, it's that: Don't get me wrong, Linebarger had weird sexual hangups even for a sci-fi writer. Just saying 'cause it's 2022 and everything is the way it is, dude seems against Nazism, and I figure he was in a better position to know the inner workings of Paperclip than anybody else in the field.
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Aug 16, 2022 21:52
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General Battuta posted:Yeah the gee-whiz plucky wolflings vs. stodgy alien orthodoxy is a bit eyeroll (yeah yeah efb). Remulak fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Aug 16, 2022 |
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Aug 16, 2022 21:58
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DACK FAYDEN posted:Now I'm wondering what the objectively least common trait that humanity has actually is, like, if we were to somehow make first contact with 100 randomly generated species what is the thing about humanity that'd be the least likely for an intelligent species to have? We are insanely inbred, just a fuckin genetic monoculture. Shameful
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Aug 16, 2022 22:30
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grassy gnoll posted:Don't get me wrong, Linebarger had weird sexual hangups even for a sci-fi writer. Just saying 'cause it's 2022 and everything is the way it is, dude seems against Nazism, and I figure he was in a better position to know the inner workings of Paperclip than anybody else in the field. No real arguments with you. I just wanted to state why I felt a story that was written by a person who wrote literal textbooks about psychological warfare during wartime/was deep lifelong friends with anti-communist china felt suspect when it had the wit and wisdom of time-displaced Nazi era german children being the backbone of humankind discovering itself again after thousands of years of stagnation. That re-discovery story doesn't tend to be included in the works of Cordwainer Smith collections. Having said, that, my favorite Paul Linebarger/Cordwainer Smith story ever written is "Golden the Ship Was...", which is pure psychological war bluffing.
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Aug 16, 2022 22:41
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Behold Humanity is a decent sci fi series about humans in space. It's set after we get crazy technological, after a war with an insect race almost glassed the planet. Basically we just go out and help people and be not assholes.
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