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Comment by jkingsman | Hacker News Reader

It took me a moment to realize, even after the mention of Echopraxia, that this was Peter Watts.

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.

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This may be well known, but I'm posting it because I didn't know: "very-hard" science fiction in this context means extremely plausible science fiction, as opposed to extremely speculative science fiction. The author explains how these fantastic things exist in a way which is realistic.

Originally, I thought it meant "very hard to understand" i.e. very technically complicated

>extremely plausible science fiction

>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.

Blindsight is known to be a slog for a lot of people including myself.

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.

Yes, there were definitely parts where I felt maybe I was picking up on a vibe or a hint, and later realized that was now a structural part of the story without which I would be quite lost.

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...

There are no spoilers for Blindsight at that link. All it does is describe the events of the plot.

I found it hard to read because it seems to true and hence so frightening.

I'm certified dumb as a box of rocks 19 Wonderlic and I was able to follow most of it without issue or pause. It's possible that it's a bell curve and I'm too dumb to realize I was missing things. Hard to say.

What did it leave you with on the subject of consciousness?

Spoilers:

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.

Okay gotcha gotcha. I don't know what a "Wonderlic" is but for what it's worth, up to now, you're the only other person in this entire thread I'm convinced has actually read the book.

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'd have to be a real psycho to use AI to pretend to have read books. Reading is probably one the most important parts of my existence, and yet I don't do it nearly enough.

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?

Not me!

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?"

Hard SF doesn't _need_ to be difficult to understand. Peter Watts just happens to produce books that are both.

Plausible oftentimes, I would say, but more that there are reliable, consistent systems at work that may or may not be explained, but that are definitely used. Very little "magic" or hand waving, but at the least the implication that there is an understandable system at work at some level.

To me, "hard science fiction" evokes the old school writers like Arthur C. Clarke who would explore ideas with a slide rule or a calculator when planning a story. Even if he had to use a little hand waving and some unobtainium to make Ringworld work.

Maybe the neatest part of that with Ringworld is when fans proved that the theoretical structure itself is orbitally unstable... which he then came up with explanations for and used as a major plot point in a follow-up book.

Larry Niven wrote ringworld and the follow ups, not Clarke. Clarke wrote the Rama series.

Also the mountains on ringworld Which recycle the sea bed are the outcome of some fans pointing out the problems with a static land mass, iirc.

The way I see it is that hard science is about the new science and its effects on people, so it has to make the science believable somehow.

Whereas soft science fiction has a futuristic setting but isn't primarily about that.

I would characterize "hard" sci fi as "consistent" or "coherent", not necessarily "plausible".

How about very comprehensible science fiction?

Because science first and foremost strives for comprehensibility in its discussion of strange things.

Which is exactly why we borrow it for fiction.

"Hard" refers to scientific plausibility. The antipode of "hard science fiction" is "space opera."

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.

> antipode

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.

> Er, that word does not mean what you are saying. "Antithesis" would be closer.

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.

Pointlessly rude, obscurantic, and reads like you're trying to score points while covering up a mistake.

HN is a better place without comments like this.

And El Reg was a better place in Lettice's and Orlowski's days. Are we done?

Well, I am done with your petty sniping, if that's what you mean. Well done for being this week's premier example of HN toxicity.

"Petty?" Don't tease. Make me famous or go find someone else to play with.

I think the Blindsight is the best sci-fi book for me. Absolutely gripping and novel.

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.

I agree. I read it twice, enjoyed it, and don't know why some people found it hard.

It never touched the sides.

Astonishing book which I reread regularly. Echopraxia has grown on me upon further reading - initially I focused on the seeming promise of action and plot, vs ideas and concepts.

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.

"Checkers or chess?"

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.

But, importantly, not obviously completely unsuited for. Indeed, so subtly so that it almost ended the world before anyone noticed.

The Freeze-Frame Revolution is also fantastic, along with the short stories, which collectively form the "Sunflower" cycle.

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.

I wonder how he's feeling about Chinese rooms these days.

He blogs a lot on the OP link. I would imagine he has a few words about LLMs in there.

One of his older works explores the risks of software similar to LLMs but a little more advanced.

Not at all more advanced. Only differently implemented. He thought there would be slightly more meat involved.

I would have enjoyed that book so much more if he had left out vampires. To me, that part unnecessarily ruined the "seriousness" of that book for me. Apart from that, the underlying premise of the book is quite chilling and refreshing at the same time.

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