It Awaits Your Experiments
rifters.com
rifters.com
If you enjoy hard to very-hard science fiction, I strongly recommend the first book of his series, Blindsight. I thoroughly loved the read and bounced right back to the beginning for a second read with the context I'd gained on the first one. It's an absolute firehose of concepts; reminded me a bit of Accelerando by Charles Stross but a little less pleased with its own geekiness. The best summary I could give would be a meditation on consciousness set against a first-contact backdrop.
And what I found particularly interesting, the afterword is about as interesting and engaging as the book.
It's such a gem of a book.
One of his older works explores the risks of software similar to LLMs but a little more advanced.
Originally, I thought it meant "very hard to understand" i.e. very technically complicated
>I thought it meant "very hard to understand"
For a mere mortal like myself, those definitions aren't mutually exclusive. I think I tried reading "Blindsight" a long time ago but never got past a few dozen pages. Maybe I should give it a try again someday.
I love sci-fi, I love challenging ideas, and I really liked the concepts explored in Blindsight - except that I learned those concepts through summaries and selective reading.
I found this INCREDIBLY FULL OF SPOILERS explanation of fundamental plot points to be helpful in confirming or summarizing some things I missed[0].
[0]: —-EXTREME SPOILER WARNING-- https://old.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/4p6zqj/understandi...
My understanding is that the central thrust is that consciousness as we know it which separates us from all other animals may not be the deciding factor in advanced vs simple cognition and a state to which evolution and development is geared as we've always assumed, but rather an evolutionary aberration that doesn't necessarily exist in other advanced life forms and may cease to exist in humanity eventually.
At first I felt a bit depressed and devalued, but then recognized that even if it was true, it made consciousness and my conscious experience even more valuable than if it were a foregone conclusion, and added that much more importance to art and religion.
Either that, I suppose, or you're a very skillful prompter. I confide you won't take the qualification too personally, recognizing that 2025 merely requires it.
I do experience the same phenomenon where I feel other people haven't actually read books. The book I've experienced this with the most is Infinite Jest. It's twofold in that people both misunderstand basic pieces of the story ("what ethnicity is Hal (arguably the book's protagonist)?" is a common mechanism by which I determine people didn't read or didn't understand the novel), and that I've never ever once online or in person seen commentary about the central "thing" the book is doing, although it's blisteringly glaringly obvious and I'm afraid everyone else just knows it and it's too obvious to state rather than being something only I noticed.
So... Anyone ever actually read IJ?
But, you know. There's a lot of social cachet in talking about whatever's trendy lately, as long as you don't make it obvious that you actually studied it among people who are only pretending in front of someone they want to impress. That may constitute defection and attract harsh punishment.
I say what I like here because I don't care what internet randos think of me, and no one with a life reads or comments on this website. I avoid such carelessness with great care in real life, at least unless I intend to give so grave an insult.
That need is most rare, but when I do find it, people often quietly introduce themselves to thank me after. In the meantime those who know me tend to find me kindly and somewhat retiring, if not at first positively shy, despite or perhaps because of my imposing size and build and carriage.
The thing is, what they see isn't a lie. That's why I value this website so highly. It offers a venue for the love of pettifogging disputation and waspish propriety that's always flawed an otherwise I think quite solidly respectable sort of character. Doing that on here, I feel no urge to do it out there. I believe the term is "harm reduction?"
Whereas soft science fiction has a futuristic setting but isn't primarily about that.
Because science first and foremost strives for comprehensibility in its discussion of strange things.
Which is exactly why we borrow it for fiction.
When we talk about science fiction that focuses heavily on ideas over more traditional narrative concerns like character and action, we talk about "high-concept" science fiction.
Er, that word does not mean what you are saying. "Antithesis" would be closer.
But saying that, I disagree: space opera isn't the opposite of hard SF. Science fantasy is. Space opera is a different sort of extreme, which makes the point that this is not an X-Y scale we're talking about here. There's no Mohs scale of hardness of SF.
It's at least a 2D area:
hard <-> soft
is at 90º to
rigorous <-> totally without rigour
Does it have a set of rules or axioms you can work out? If it has, does it apply them strictly? Does it play by its own rules, or does the author does improvise as they go along, changing the rules?
Where "the rules" are real life science, physics etc., for hard SF, modulo some additional plot device, whereas for sci-fantasy it has its own rules but they're not our rules. Say, an innate ability to step into other universes (say, Amber by Roger Zelazny, or the Family Trade by Charles Stross), or using a machine (the Long Earth books by Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett).
I take this line-vs-area argument from /Red/, /Green/ and /Blue Mars/ by Kim Stanley Robinson. Those are pretty hard SF -- no FTL, no AI –- but Mars has a lot more nitrogen than it seems to and they invent life extension.
No, I meant specifically the opposing point on a globe, and chose the correct word to denote that concept. Metaphor is not error.
To the rest, knowledge of the concept of orthogonality would have saved you several paragraphs. So would exhaustively defining your terms. You've cast hard/soft as orthogonal to rigorous/fantastic and I can imagine no intuitively less coherent thesis; much work remains to make it make sense.
It has not escaped my notice that you've implicitly projected from my metaphor's three dimensions in a sphere, into two on a flat plane. I think that has so far escaped your own notice. Let's see if pointing you directly at the error helps you find the root cause.
Also, while HN's markup does not predate Markdown, it fails to emulate. Delimit with asterisks, not slashes, for emphasis.
HN is a better place without comments like this.
His Starfish book however has the most realistic, plausible, feasible, likely AI doomsday scenario though - published as it was 26 years ago and without AI being the focus for majority of the book.
But yes. Especially when you boil it down to the essentials: humans take an AI built to perform one task and press it into duty for another, much more impactful task which it was completely unsuited for.
Watts writes the smartest but also scariest science fiction. There's an aura of existential, Lovecraftean dread in all his writings that I find incredibly appealing. In the case of Sunflower, Watts is able to make the idea of floating through space for millions of years, unable to stop, into something genuinely upsetting. It's bleak, but also really well plotted.
Not too long ago, Watts published a short story set right after Blindsight, "The Colonel". It's an excellent, standalone read.
> The rest of us might think we achieve artistic immortality if our work lasts a century or three. Bök blows his nose at such puny ambitions. His work might get deciphered by Fermi aliens who finally make it to our neighborhood a billion years from now. It could be iterating right up until the sun swallows this planet whole.
I got frisson reading this. I may have to read the author's novels, his writing style is compelling.
Yeah, for free.
And indeed, his style is like this. It's really hard to put the book down.
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/coach-house-spring-group-launch-...
I was unaware of this demagogue of a bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans. It survives levels of radiation that is designed to kill all lifeforms. Wikipedia [0] lists this as a bacteria that supports panspermia -- that life originated elsewhere but spread through cosmic dust and was seeded on Earth eventually.
Fun fact: Thermococcus gammatolerans is known to be the one that tolerates the most toxic radiation.
Anyone know what this is referring to? The only instance I know of was the Surveyor 3 camera, which was supposedly Streptococcus mitis and even that situation is greatly contested.
"The sequence spells a message and codes for a protein. The protein fluoresces and contains a response. It’s not contamination or lateral transfer. It’s a poem."
There's a more verbose explanation in this interview of Bök:
https://maisonneuve.org/article/2011/06/1/sls-interviews-chr...
I can't recall if Bök gave details about his methodology, but my guess is that he brute-forced ciphers until he found a suitable one. And he’s quite good at constraint-based (Oulipo) poetry.
> I am also confused how he managed to engineer and predict the folding and functionality of a fluorescent protein (presumably by borrowing a known sequence?).
The designed protein (Protein 13) is not fluorescent. He’s expressing it as a Protein 13-mCherry[1] fusion construct.
any style of life/ is prim
¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦¦ ¦¦ ¦¦¦¦ ¦¦ ¦¦¦¦
the faery is rosy/ of glowPlausible alternative would be to have the codons or amino acids still code the other half, but have pairs of nucleotides code a 1.5 times longer poem. This would restrict you to 16 different characters, vs. 64 possible codons (minus a few stop codons).
There are around 20-22 amino acids commonly used by known life, so that already restricts you to a bit smaller alphabet than 26 letters.
Another possibility for expansion would be to take advantage of the genetic code’s degeneracy/redundancy and reprogram it to allow non-canonical amino acids in certain synonymous codons.
I have to read it a couple more times to savor this. What a delight!
> "To quote Bök himself: ... It needs no oxygen to live."
And I assumed that this means that it's anaerobic.
Out of curiosity I went to Wikipedia to read up about this bug (1)
And it says:
> It is an obligate aerobic chemoorganoheterotroph, i.e., it uses oxygen to derive energy from organic compounds in its environment.
Are they both correct? Can anyone clarify?
"Deinococcus radiodurans is an exceptionally radiation-resistant microorganism capable of surviving acute exposures to ionizing radiation doses of 15,000 Gy and previously described as having a strictly aerobic respiratory metabolism. Under strict anaerobic conditions, D. radiodurans R1 reduced Fe(III)-nitrilotriacetic acid coupled to the oxidation of lactate to CO(2) and acetate but was unable to link this process to growth."
The abstract goes on to describe the metabolism in a bit more detail.
Also see https://ars.electronica.art/aeblog/en/2018/05/30/im-humanity...
Peter Watts' Rifters books (hence the domain),
are however full of memorable compelling ideas,
totally un-recommendable,
because they are also unedited indulgences by the author in his own sadomasochistic fantasies of sexual violence (specifically, to women), and they are in effect sexual torture-porn.
Desjardins' character isn't written for the reader to get off on. But I see exactly why a reader who didn't expect to do so would rather blame the author than recognize the mirror into which he's been surprised to find himself looking. The projection is trivially obvious and the lack of insight that allows it to be aired this way in public should be embarrassing.
I don't recommend the Rifters trilogy either - in this more or less emulating its own author, these days - nor have I bothered rereading it in by now well over a decade. It was interesting, I'm glad I read it, but what was there to be found I have long since taken away, and even when Watts comes up on the topic of his later work, his earlier doesn't really even occur to me. It's something I read most of 20 years ago that held my interest for a while with some of its ideas about artificial and archaic life and some of its character drama, but - no real critique, this, I read a lot of things - otherwise just didn't make all that much of an impression.
Typically the fashion in which that manifests is that I simply do not start any conversations on the topic, because it never occurs to me to do so. I'm not here to psychoanalyze the commenter who chose otherwise this evening. But if that were me, it would be interesting to me to reflect on why I had chosen to start the conversation I did, in a context where its subject was not at all relevant beyond a trivial coincidence of authorship.
It does annoy me when the work is misunderstood in this way, because the technique in use is subtle. Watts doesn't show you what Desjardins does, so that a pervert would get off on it - indeed nearly none of the infamous torture scenes is actually very explicit at all, the gory details left mostly in implication, because Watts is interested not in what Desjardins does to his victims but why he does it. That's why he spends his time showing you how Desjardins thinks, instead. It would be interesting to me to talk about that, because I think it successfully depicts something essential about the nature of sadism, which is worth understanding if for no other reason than in self-defense.
Certainly it would offer more interest than evident in the matter of the discussion thus far. That people commonly mistake moralistic vacuity for substantive discussion I do recognize and acknowledge, but I believe I will never for the life of me grasp the appeal.
As in another example of otherwise memorable and contemporary scifi, _Accelerando_,
the BDSM slash sex & violence slash misogyny tropes are utterly unnecessary to the plot.
They're an indulgence, and they narrow the prospective audience to those unbothered by, or excited by, such things. Everyone else deserves fair warning.
It's obvious you have a strong investment in blaming everyone else for your own unsettled and, plainly, deeply disquieted emotions on this topic. I wouldn't expect to see that change now and if I'd been inclined to take it personally, I would not have engaged in the first place. I hope you eventually figure out whatever it is that's troubling you so badly around this. In the meantime, kindly repay me the courtesy of engaging no further here.
Watts has (jokingly) used that phrase himself to describe Behemoth.
I wouldn't describe the entire series as torture-porn just for that, personally, though I would agree that the work would be better if they were removed or at least toned way down.
Otoh science guided by art is good.