Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work?
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blog.stephenwolfram.com
Not sure how closely the movie follows the short story's plot, but obviously spoilers could be involved, so fair warning. Here is a PDF version of the story: http://cfile203.uf.daum.net/attach/254E884754DC52CB277F4F
I guess discussing the differences makes for a huge spoiler. Perhaps I can say that the movie has a major plot about military conflicts (obgu orgjrra uhznaf naq urcgncbqf, naq orgjrra uhzna angvbaf) that's absent from the original story. Also, in the movie we learn jul gur urcgncbqf ivfvgrq Rnegu, whereas in the story guvf erznvaf n pbzcyrgr zlfgrel.
In the story Louise ersyrpgf n terng qrny ba jung vg zrnaf gb xabj gur shgher naq ubj guvf vagrenpgf jvgu serr jvyy, while in the movie this isn't really depicted at all, except sbe gur prageny cybg nobhg xabjvat gur sngr bs ure zneevntr naq ure qnhtugre nurnq bs gvzr.
The craftsmanship is good, although not great (the split structure feels a bit forced, for example). To use one's skill like this is... sad.
The grandmaster of depressing SF was PKD. Story of Your Life left me with the same feeling of hopelessness and sadness as Ubik, which itself demonstrates great craftsmanship.
Despite being raised atheist, I remember reading a novelised story of Jesus' life as a teenager where Joseph told a young Jesus that no cross was ever built well because great craftsmen refused to build instruments of death. I thought of this passage whilst reading Ubik and I think of it with Story of My Life.
I'll add to these two the otherwise pretty good Hyperion Cantos, for its ending, although I think the author did paint himself in a corner there. Some series are better left unfinished...
Peter Watts, known in the science fiction world as 'The Antidote for Optimism', has some of his novels online. I would strongly recommend his multiple award winning Blindsight:
http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
...because it's fascinating first contact novel; crazy, well researched, aliens that are genuinely alien, and not quite as bleak as his other books. (Still quite bleak.) There's a sequel, Echopraxia, that is also awesome, and will introduce you to Portia Labiata, the most intelligent spider in the world.
Also, space vampires.
Clearly we're on the same page. Any other recommendations?
Man... I've been trying to get started on it for months! My eye was caught by it at random in the "New" section of my local library, and then the jacket held me when it said (paraphrased) that it had basically won every Chinese SF award there is. The book was the 2nd of the series, though, and the 1st was checked out...
It's been completely checked out every time I've been in a library since then, and I've been to three different ones.
I guess it must be good? Your mention of it only adds fuel to the fire. At some point I'll be intentional enough about it enough to place a hold or buy them, I guess.
However the real value in the book for me was twofold: first, some insight into the way PRC folks think (some mistake it for a bad translation or criticise the way the characters are thinking as "unrealistic" - I would say instead it's often very Chinese); second, this is one of few books depicting information warfare.
On the first I have not much more to say. I've lived in Asia for a while so I recognise some patterns, but I don't speak Mandarin. My understanding of PRC folks is purely based on my interaction with my friends there. Nevertheless based on this I would say that a lot of the ways in which the characters' thinking differs from that of say, those in a Vernon Vinge novel are typically Chinese. In the same vein there is the hilarious dating show Fei Cheng Wu Rao although it's hard to pick up a subtitled version (it airs on one of the Australian channels occasionally).
Information warfare is rarely discussed intelligently here for some reason (probably because it is used systematically by a variety of groups that frequent HN and try to minimise its existence and impact, because "those who know stay quiet" and because it is easier to defend from manipulation if the manipulator does not understand you well).
In Liu's books, particularly the first and a little bit in Death's End, it consists of modifying the culture of the enemy so that it is more easily defeated. This is an art as old as humanity; the first formal reference to it in the modern era might be the Potemkin village, and a good introductory book on the Soviet flavour ("Active Measures") is Gen. Oleg Kalugin's biography [1] published after he defected. If you speak French, both books by the anonymous "Lt Col X" [2] (most likely to be a French intelligence officer) are also worth a read.
Taken together with the fact that the book was very successful in China (which is impossible without at least tacit government approval), it presents a possible explanation for the Great Firewall.
In the book, a key plot point is that everything you do is known instantly by the enemy - just like the NSA was shown to be able to do by Snowden. Thus, humans need to learn to hide their actions, letting just enough information leak to other humans for coordination but without tipping their hand to the very smart, omniscient, but less able to lie Trisolarians. Considering the Chinese have a reputation for speaking in parables ("riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma" - applicable to the Russians originally but I heard it many times applied to the PRC) there is a direct parallel with a facet of how the authorities and some of the population might view the current top superpower.
In short I guarantee it will be unlike anything you've read this year.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Spymaster-Thirty-two-Intelligence-Esp...
[2] http://www.amazon.fr/Missions-methodes-techniques-speciales-... - https://www.amazon.fr/Manuel-contre-manipulation-2e-revue-au...
>modifying the culture of the enemy so it is more easily defeated
>everything you do is known instantly by the enemy
Good stuff! Also, this is tickling my brain so hard; I feel like I've read one or two books or short stories that play with the second concept with very effective results, but I can't remember what they were. The later books in the Ender's Game series? Something by Neal Stephenson? Heinlen's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress? In any case, I look forward to Liu's take on it.
I do speak French, as luck would have it, so thanks for those recommendations, too. This sub-thread has mentioned several books that I haven't read but look very interesting. What a gold mine!
I find that this is a theme which runs through a number of Chiang's stories. If you haven't read it, you might find "Exhalation" interesting: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/ . You may also find it nihilst, but makes the positive, celabratory element even more explicit.
That's the part I didn't get from the story. In fact, there was a strong sense of "the future is already written so you might as well not try to get out of it". Life is short so let's just drift along whatever little we have of it passively kind of thing.
I'll keep in mind Chiang's other stories (already bought them long ago) but to be honest there are many books ahead of it on the reading list.
spoilers below
The only positive interpretation I can think of the story is a fairly complex critique of the heroine (and through that human nature) as wanting the safety of knowledge even at great personal cost (25 more years of sadness than she was supposed to have). She did have a choice: she could have forgotten how to read the language and through this regained agency in her own life (or at least hope). This is an example of the cognitive bias of picking suboptimal options because we are familiar with them. She did not pick that choice, although you could argue that knowing she did not pick that choice, she did not pick that choice (return to nihilist square one, the only square).
Asimov's The End of Eternity deals much better with time travel and information about future timelines. IMHO.
After watching Dr. Strange I read the first 5-6 comics, because I thought it was one of the few Marvel characters with some depth and interesting ideas, whose source material might be worth exploring. Alas, a goateed bad guy appears in dreams, wafting around, then getting beaten in a punch up with the hero because "magic", repeat ad infinitum. A far cry from the special interaction of Cumberbatch, Swinton and Mikkelson with a great script we saw in cinemas (I might be biased since this is the closest to a movie adaptation of Stross' Laundry Files ideas that we're likely to see in the near future).
A good writer and director can take any idea and turn it into something interesting, so I am looking forward to discovering the movie. My original comment was targeted at the story only.
I disagree with seeing these books as bleak, or indeed anything by Banks (it could be because our definitions of bleak differ, since I agree with you on the other values). The SF part is simply a setting for his strength, which is to detail and praise human character. For example, he continuously breaks the "rules of good writing" such as having dei ex machina (or more properly, dei in machina with some exceptions like The Algebraist) conclude most books but he is an example where it is done in a way that augments the story.
In most Banks stories, characters (including the Minds, for example in Excession) are put in difficult situations made believable by well structured suspension of disbelief ("great craftsmanship"). They get out of these situations using their intelligence and demonstrating courage and a well defined hierarchy of values (including appropriate self-sacrifice for something they value higher than their life). This is philosophically the opposite of Story of My Life and Ubik. Even if the ending is a downer, even if major characters suffer enormously (I'm still marked by Surface Detail years after reading it... truly harrowing), reading Banks had me walk away with my mind augmented somehow.
That being said, on the First contact/alien civilisation front I always got the feeling that Banks' aliens species are always very human, representing different facets of human nature, including the Minds. I think it is on purpose, like Asimov in most of his work he was not setting out to represent truly alien species as Charlie Stross, Peter Watts or Cixin Liu have done but writing novels about human characters and values that happened to be framed by SF.
I don't know if you've read the ones I mentioned, but [SPOILERS AHEAD] in Consider Phlebas, every main character dies, the protagonist's species goes extinct in the process, and the epilogue essentially summarizes the whole story as accomplishing absolutely nothing; in Use of Weapons, the protagonist is revealed to have a past as a psychotic, genocidal warlord, and most of the wars he is subsequently involved with as a mercenary go badly for most involved; in Against a Dark Background, everyone except the protagonist dies, and it's fairly traumatic besides (though the unpublished epilogue, which is on the Banks web site, lifts it up a little). Another bleak one is Look to Windward, although the tone is more elegaic; the fate of that sorry anthropologist who studied giant floating aliens is one of the saddest scenes I've ever read (very much reminiscent of PKD's "Rautavaara's Case").
I agree that philosophically, he's on the positivist side of things, despite the amount of sheer death and destruction that goes on in his books. It's a trait, a sort of sarcastic, righteous rebelliousness in the face iniquity, that he shares with Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams. (Speaking of, I found Feersum Endjinn to be a highly Pratchettian novel. It's also quite different from anything else Banks wrote. It's excellent and probably underrated.)
As an example of a polar opposite, I would point to Stanislaw Lem, who seemingly had zero faith in humanity. Solaris, His Master's Voice and so on take an extremely dim view of humankind's ability to do anything except navelgaze and quibble.
It's possible to write a novel where the setting, and the story lead to dark places, and finish badly for the heroes, but without the heroes giving up on life or thinking. There are many instances in history of people standing their ground in hopeless circumstances.
In fiction, I think the best depiction of what I mean might be Letters from Iwo Jima (the movie, not the actual letters which are relatively sparse). Kuribayashi's character goes through hell consciously but his extraordinary resistance - down to refusing to banzai charge as is customary in those situations and instead patiently drawing out the fight to maximise enemy casualties, drawing out the pain for himself and his troops in the process - is a phenomenal description of character. It is specifically in Eastwood's depiction that this comes through although the real Kuribayashi was every bit the depicted one. So I do not consider the movie or the book "bleak" but incredibly awe-inspiring despite its content and ending for the protagonist.
Meanwhile, the main character in Ubik and most of PKD's novels is continuously failing to have any agency, thwarted by unknown and unbeatable forces until he just accepts his fate and stops moving. I always thought that this book in particular and PKD's work in general were close to depictions of depression, which is where the bleakness is. I'm in a rush right now so can't immediately come up with a good example but many modern works of fiction depict wonderful conditions and stories with very bleak characters incapable of appreciating their luck.
Nah man, the end of ubik was just him leveling up.
1. Perhaps all the other civilizations they've met so far communicate in a certain way (e.g. telepathy), and humans are the first intelligent species they've encountered that has the pesky requirement of audiovisual clues. They're just as busy trying to figure out how to talk to us as we are, but they're much more patient.
2. Perhaps their preferred method of space exploration and conquest is to wait until the indigenous species figures out how to communicate with them. Only then will they accept the indigenous species as worthy of participating in the Galactic Republic or whatever. If they wait a certain amount of time and we still can't talk to them, they'll either abandon us, exterminate us, or try again in another million years.
3. Perhaps their ship is in distress and stranded on Earth, with their Universal Translator broken and the aliens all cooped up in one room that still contains their atmosphere.
Gur nyvraf ner sne qvssrerag sebz hf, jvgu n aba-cubargvp ynathntr gung vaibyirf "abayvarne haqrefgnaqvat bs gvzr". V chg gung va dhbgrf orpnhfr gur rssrpgf ner qrzbafgengrq va gur svyz, ohg vgf vapbzcyrgryl haqrefgbbq, ol obgu gur punenpgref naq zlfrys (gur nhqvrapr), cebonoyl vagragvbanyyl. Fhssvpr gb fnl, jvgubhg n tenfc bs gur shgher, gnyxvat gb gur nyvraf vf qvssvphyg. Gur havirefr gur svyz vf va vf qrgrezvavfgvp, fb lbh unir gb or noyr gb haqrefgnaq fbzr cneg bs gur shgher fgngr bs gur havirefr gb zbir sebz gur cnfg fgngr gb gur cerfrag fgngr.
If that doesn't make sense, go see the movie. ;)
2) Was no one else bothered by his "Pioneer" faux pas? He's obviously extremely advanced, scientifically -- light years beyond my level -- and yet, he erroneously states that Pioneer 10 is the furthest human object in interstellar space ... which stopped being true when Voyager 1 passed it back in the 1990s ... and, strictly speaking, Pioneer hasn't even reached interstellar space, yet.
I know it shouldn't bother me as much as it does ... but of all the science he talks about in this post, this is the one thing I know about -- and he got it wrong, so now I have doubts about everything else he said.
Language is bloody hard.
With a completely novel language there is virtually no technique to train AI to know the language.
The amount of things an alien would have to know to understand what happened here is immense.
Correlating an arbitrary set of points on splashy drippy smears, and eureka! It's a symbol for the global landing sites across seven continents?
Yeah right. That leap in counter-intuitive conceptualization is on the level of bat shark repellant, or Roland Emerich's super computer viruses for alien spaceships, as used by Wil Smith and Jeff Goldblum.
Those ink spatters look like droplets sprayed by an airbrush, with no control exerted, leaving a disorganized sprawl of drip marks. Why the clustered focus of points in one area over another?
Cognitive dissonance and hand wavey science. But movies are movies.
Your complaint strikes me like complaining that kanji calligraphy (for example: https://i.imgur.com/wHdqJIF.jpg) obviously can't mean anything because it's just splashy ink marks.
A circle is an elegant way to encapsulate a lot of information in a compact symbol. These aliens could be really good at detecting angles. If their eyes have cones polarized at different angles, shapes placed at different points on the circle could appear to be written in different colors to them. That would be just as natural as words written in a line are to us. Fascinating stuff.
It's a pretty good movie, i can recommend watching it.
A (unfortunately) deleted scene explains this; our computers are based on reverse-engineered alien technology. We're both effectively running the same architecture.
My pet theory was that the invaders had no concept of computational security - the first movie makes it clear that they're telepaths, and a telepathic society might not have any need for software-based access restrictions. They might not even have the concept of locks. So any transmissions they had would be unencrypted, and would probably consist of a header that says something like "execute the following X bytes of code: <payload>", which any system would accept and attempt to execute.
With an architecture like that, reverse-engineering it would be much easier than trying to get through encryption and access-control based system (although you'd still have to figure out how the executables work.) But hey, David was a genius.
I have to say Jeff Goldblum is way more convincing as a hyperintelligent but nerdy romantic lead than whoever they cast in Arrival.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ens%C5%8D
(Not too similar to how they were described in the story.)