Hacker News Reader

Comment by roscoebeezie | Hacker News Reader

I reading the article I think the ships from The Expanse were aptly named

I sometimes wonder how far is Musk from naming something Voice of the Whirlwind.

Why would he be very far from that? Also, I haven't read the book but from the synapsis it doesn't seem particularly disruptive.

He already has ships named Of Course I Still Love You, Just Read the Instructions, A Shortfall of Gravitas. If anything, I'd expect him to name a ship No More Mr Nice Guy or Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints, or for that matter, the Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath

Musk has his moments, but I don't think he's building spaceships kitted out for war just yet.

Well, now - that probably depends on what you think War is.

War on a scale that deserves a ship name from the Culture is as yet out of reach for humanity. Didn't the "Mistake Not ..." (or one of its siblings) slice a star in half at one point? There's also a point in Excession where one of the Minds notes that a point blank supernova is not really problematic for ships of its class.

Musk was re using ships from Iain Banks’ Culture series where ships are sentient.

Voice Of The Whirlwind is from The Expanse series, where a human colony finds ancient aliens tech and builds a class of warship called the Magnetar-class shops. They use an intense magnetic weapon to literally dissociate an Earth station as a show of force.

I've read one book in that series, "Surface Detail", and really enjoyed it. I tried reading the first one in the series and got bored... any others in the series you can strongly recommend? Player of Games maybe?

My opinion: The Player of Games was kind of lousy. It sounds like you haven't read Consider Phlebas, which is the first book in the series (at least according to Audible). That was pretty good.

I'll give consider phlebas another shot. Thanks.

Depends on what you like. I remember Consider Phlebas as a series of vignettes, while Player of Games is a coherent story. I like the coherent stories and also think Excession is quite good.

Yes , consider Phlebas is more like a series of episodes with a connecting arc. The goals are stated at the beginning

You might try Use of Weapons. If nothing else, it might change your views on a certain class of furniture.

Excession is also really nice.

Banks is credited with good warship names, but it was Eoin Colfer who came up with "Business End", which knocks them all into a cocked hat.

I think musk is much more likely to name something the full name of the "mistake not..."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com