|
I think the setting is hard to follow in part because it's so alien to our current experience, and were the story to stop and explain exactly what the characters are talking about, whichever character was doing the explaining would sound like a complete idiot. Imagine that you're reading a crime thriller set in modern New York City, say, and two detectives are discussing where a suspect had been on the evening in question. If one detective were to stop in the middle and spend five pages of dialogue explaining that a cellphone is an electronic communication device which receives a signal from a network of towers spread throughout the city, thus allowing anyone who knows the unique identification number of the phone to "call" it at any time and transmit and receive audio signals, allowing that person to communicate with the person holding the phone, and further, the central computer of the company which administers these devices can track the relative signal strengths of the nearby towers when a "call" is made, so by contacting the company the detectives might be able to find out where the suspect had been on the night of... you see what I'm getting at, if you read that you would probably throw the book across the room in disgust. And in TQT and TFP, all of the insane technology which shapes the worlds the characters interact in--gevulot, mind copying/piracy, nanomachines, subatomic particle communication and weapons, the destruction of Jupiter--would be such basic facts of life to everyone involved, just as integrated into their lives as mobile phones, air travel and the internet are integrated into ours, that for them to regularly pause and and discuss the mundane details of it would come across as incredibly stilted and dumb. Rajaniemi is already doing the reader as much of a favor as he can by starting the protagonist in a relative state of amnesia, so a lot of the world is new to him, but going any further would have ruined a lot of the artfulness of the wonderful setting he's imagined. That said, I understand the physics involved pretty well, and I can imagine how someone without a science background would have a really hard time figuring out what's going on. I absolutely loved both books and found them to be the most imaginative sci fi I've read in many years, particularly the explanation toward the end of TFP for why the Zoku and Sobornost are at war. The Sobornost's "Great Common Task" is to upload the mind of everyone who has ever lived (and even try to reconstruct the minds of those who died before the invention of mind uploading) into classical computers, so that they can be copied repeatedly such that no matter how many computers are destroyed, the data will never be permanently lost so all of those copied minds will survive for eternity. The Zoku, on the other hand, believe that consciousness is quantum in nature, and since a quantum state cannot be duplicated, only altered or passed from one system to another (this is called the No-Cloning Theorem in modern physics), all attempts to copy one's mind into a classical state must fail to preserve consciousness and thus kill the person being copied, creating an artificial being which is no longer alive even if it appears to be to outside observers. The Sobornost believe they are eliminating death and making everyone immortal, and the Zoku believe that the Sobornost are trying to kill every conscious being in the solar system; such a difference can never be reconciled and the two sides will strive for the other's destruction until one or the other wins.
|
#
¿
Aug 22, 2013 17:45
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 19, 2024 04:48 |
|
|
Srice posted:
Ahahaha, that's loving fantastic. That is indeed the perfect example of what I was trying to say. And if I remember correctly, it's bullshit like that (except about the fascinating wonder that is the late 90s internet) which made me put down The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo after a hundred pages or so and never look at it again. k-uno fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Aug 22, 2013 |
|
#
¿
Aug 22, 2013 18:33
|
|