Posted by bwb 8 hours ago
35 page short story and eerily reminiscent of today's world.
It was written in 1909.
Did an LLM write this? "Amazing characters" and "intriguing concepts"? This sentence says nothing.
Perdido Street Station and Kraken I really enjoyed, but I almost threw the book across the room for Embassytown once I realised.
You can see how they connected to him there too.
Permutation City especially made me see the universe and my part in it in a different light, or perhaps casting a shadow onto it. I'll never be the same person as I was before I had read it.
If you want real alien aliens, read Blindsight (Peter Watts).
Weir writes like a blogger who also writes script treatments but doesn't actually read novels. He throws plot at you every page ("ok so this happened so I need to do this next") which makes his books readable, but he has zero character development. His characters appear, react to external stimuli and solve problems, but don't change over time.
Watts's books, on the other hand, could use some of Weir's plot juice. Very cool ideas and interesting scenes, but the plots were hard to discern. I had no idea what needed to happen to resolve conflict most of the time. Echopraxia was particularly confusing. Watts did a Reddit AMA shortly after Echopraxia came out where he was put on the spot to explain fundamental plot elements.
Watts Reddit AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2enwks/iama_science_f...
Watts also gave a real-sounding lecture on vampirism, which is enjoyable if you liked that in his books: https://youtu.be/wEOUaJW05bU?si=6fTMtmf9yA8JT9at
You put that as critique, and I understand that. But for me, this was actually the strength of the story. By making the differences smaller, they are more focused, stronger, and give opportunity to explore them in depth.
Same thing I like about many of the Black Mirror stories: often they tweak, or magnify, just one parameter of our realistic, current (western) lives and then explore the differences that would bring.
Aliens are hardly ever more than a tool to get a perspective. To look at humans, societies, structures etc. They are also stories _about us_.
The Hail Mary project was actually enjoyable. Andy Weir peaked with the Martian his debut novel and this is kind of in the same style. Maybe not as good but enjoyable.
Alien aliens are always rare in sci-fi books. Although I really struggled with the octopodes in Children of Ruin, so I'm not sure if I'm ready yet.
Can someone please suggest books with novel, really alien forms of life, social structures, etc.?
Spider Robinson's "Callahan's Crosstime Saloon" series had a story towards the end that blew my tiny little teenaged mind back in the 90's.
Octavia Butler, of course. Xenogenesis.
Project Hail Mary is more... warm and fuzzy, but then one doesn't read Peter Watts for warm and fuzzy...
That being said, I found the way they were "shackled" to be ridiculous. If you've got superintelligent and superstrong predatory hominids running around, you have no reason to have them physically free even if you put the medical safeguards in place. Break their spines and sedate them when not in use!
Spoilers:
It seems weird to me that a society with other posthumans and intelligent AGI would be bowled over quite so easily by the vampires, but oh well.
Mind you, Vinge's Rainbows End is also really good and set in the near future with what may be an emerging AGI as a key character.
It's a great book, but everyone has heard of it already.
https://mnky9800n.github.io/booklist/
It uses a google spreadsheet as a database so you just need to update the spreadsheet and it adds a book to the website.
I have a life goal to read every thing written by Phillip k dick as well as every book on David Pringle’s 100 best sci-fi list. Some of the books are hard to find though. Like I’ve been searching for years for the peoples republic of Antarctica.
I would suggest the following novels if you haven’t read them yet
Gene wolfe shadow of the torturer series aka book of the new sun
A scanner darkly by pkd, this, imo, is his best book even though all his books are compelling. But I think also, yes we can build him, its amazing because it really shows off pkd ability to come up with a wild premise but that’s simply the universe the characters live in and they don’t really care about that premise they have other problems.
Herovits world by malzburg, this book is hilarious and about how you must be a terrible narcissist to believe someone should read your fiction especially science fiction
The Brian Daley series about Han Solo, these are super interesting because they were written in 1979 so before empire strikes back came out. So Daley basically only had Star Wars to go on to create a whole trilogy of novels starring Han Solo. I think these are probably my favourite Star Wars novels because they have such little constraints.