Pretty awesome book.
Would be cool if someone could recommend sci-fi that equally good.
Would be cool if someone could recommend sci-fi that equally good.
So Egan's stories are basically a mathy whodunit -- start from first (fictional) principles and eventually solve some universe-scale question or crisis. His characters are basically walking textbooks meant for info dumping / FAQing the derivations.
In that light, some similar stories I've found are...
- Dragon's Egg (Robert Forward)
- Of Ants and Dinosaurs (Liu Cixin, 3 body problem author)
- The Andromeda Strain (Crichton, more medsci than math)
- Schilds Ladder, Diaspora (other Egan stuff)
I've also tried some of the more common hard scifi recommendations like Reynolds and Stephenson, but I personally don't enjoy the dialogue / scenes meant for character development. I guess it's because the stories usually take a human-scale perspective instead of taking a what-if to its reality-bending extreme like Egan does.
In all seriousness, I thought I had seen it in a list of "top hard sci-fi books" awhile back and a quick Kagi search seems to imply that a lot of people seem consider it hard sci-fi for whatever reason.
Maybe this means there's still a chance for me.
Regardless Blindsight is a good book and definitely has interesting concepts and good writing throughout.
I really like hard SF and will never again read by this author.
> Standard internet Watts warning that the Rift novels have random sexual torture just in case you prefer to avoid that
in thread next to this one is not really surprising me
Also, not really sure is Blindsight actually hard SF. It seems to be soft one at most with a lot getting close to magic with SF styling.
Was the ending actually bad? like badly written or bad for the characters? Personally I thought the ending was good. It felt inevitable and also positive. Humanity got to keep living and the main character reached some type of personal growth.
Anyway heres the section from the notes and references that you must not have read about the "creatures capable of movement - not noticeable by the human brain"
For example, the invisibility trick of that young, dumb scrambler— the one who restricted its movement to the gaps in Human vision— occured to me while reading about something called inattentional blindness. A Russian guy called Yarbus was the first to figure out the whole saccadal glitch in Human vision, back in the nineteen sixties15. Since then, a variety of researchers have made objects pop in and out of the visual field unnoticed, conducted conversations with hapless subjects who never realised that their conversational partner had changed halfway through the interview, and generally proven that the Human brain just fails to notice an awful lot of what's going on around it16, 17, 18. Check out the demos at the website of the Visual Cognition Lab at the University of Illinois19 and you'll see what I mean. This really is rather mind-blowing, people. There could be Scientologists walking among us right now and if they moved just right, we'd never even see them.
It explores a similar premise of a post-singularity future (though the mechanism is superintelligence rather than cellular automata/mind uploading), but rather than imagining exactly how we‘d get there, it tries to imagine what human flourishing would look like in a world of perfect abundance!
I’m very far from a prude, but JFC. Its clearly the authors vehicle to play out his fantasies, masquerading as a scientific-fi novel.
To me, this was not unnecessary, but quite fundamental to the story. Everyone was trapped by the AI who would not let anyone come to harm without their permission anyway, and nobody could die. Various people tried to push back against these constraints in creative but disturbing ways.
But nothing at all was served by us reading about how deftly the main characters 13 year old daughter blew him until he was hard enough to ride. Or the main characters musings about their two (very underage) children having sex and how he was totally ok with it. Or the long section about the wife urging him to impregnate his daughter. Or the other dozen weird-ass things in that chapter.
There’s several more examples like this in the book.
The author is not exactly the first to explore potential consequences of effective immortality, but they are one of the few who was seemingly unable to do it without repeatedly getting to multi-page, graphic, and violent, sex scenes.
Like, if one feels the need for that kind of thing, William S Burroughs and Tom Wolfe already beat that one to death decades ago.
As another example more relevant to this crowd, Altered Carbon covered the exact same subject matter, and did so without needing to write smut for teenage boys.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed it as something very different to the usual sci fi fare.
I also liked Altered Carbon, although I found it read more like a hyper violent blockbuster action movie than a novel. Other than they both use ressurection as a plot device, they are very different stories. The violence in it I actually find more gratuitous than in Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect.
I enjoyed Prime Intellect, but I enjoyed it like a mindless action film or a trashy beach book, and I’d never actually recommend it to anyone.
1. Accelerando by Charles Stross - for THE Scope.
2. Quantum Thief by Hanny Rajaniemi - for the similarly high entry threshold and rewarding experience when you cross it.
3. Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds - for a fascinating vision of future human societies.
I'd be happy to find more books like these.
I enjoyed quantum thief but somehow I have yet to go beyond the first book.
- “The Fall Revolution” tetralogy by Ken MacLeod: “The Star Fraction”, “The Stone Canal”, “The Cassini Division”, and “The Sky Road”
- “Void Star” by Zachary Mason
- “Singularity Sky” by Charles Stross
- “The Freeze-Frame Revolution” by Peter Watts
- “Perfekcyjna niedoskonałość” by Jacek Dukaj
- “A Fire Upon the Deep” and “A Deepness in the Sky” by Vernor Vinge
- “The Golden Oecumene” trilogy by John C. Wright: “The Golden Age”, “The Phoenix Exultant”, and “The Golden Transcendence”
- “Gnomon” by Nick Harkaway
- the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks
You could consider „Diaspora“ by the same author a good sequel a couple of thousands of years into the future where humanity is but a faint memory called „dream apes“ as living fossils in this story.
Thanks!
Dream apes are the descendants of an extreme primitivist subculture, the "statics" the protagonists visit at the beginning are baseline humans.
Sol Quy with monthly short stories: https://solquy.substack.com/p/111123-the-gunslinger
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Time” series is fantastic.
Vernor Vinge can be a bit variable, but I would start with “A Fire Upon the Deep”
https://borretti.me/fiction/eog581
>A linguist, a chemist, and a comparative psychologist explore the ruins of a dead superintelligence.
Thanks!
Ubik by Philip K Dick
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
Recursion by Blake Crouch
Highly recommended
In my non-scientific assessment, it's better than GoodReads.
The first season of the show was good but very different than the book.
Book takashi was an envoy super spy person with immense training that stuck with him through sleeves. Tv takashi is like a rebel/terrorist who just got some training and has personality.
In the book, it was fruitless to fight against the government because what’s the point? The tv show seems to want to make a more simple rebels vs big brother.
Still cool, but I think changed the flavor quite a bit.
Second season, of course, is rubbish and I wouldn’t recommend watching it to anyone. It’s suspiciously horrible given how good the first was.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/169549-the-personal-as-ever...