Science fiction discussion

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Irish Turtle said:
Have you guys heard of jack l chalker all this guys books are basically sissyifaction fantasies
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Vecr said:
Not all of them, sometimes there's just weird uncomfortable stuff going on with centaurs without the sissyification.
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Which books of his have this? I liked some partially fantastic book of his I read in translation, and he was in my to-read.
 
UnsufficentBoobage said:
Which books of his have this? I liked some partially fantastic book of his I read in translation, and he was in my to-read.
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Sissyifaction stuff? My memory for this stuff is bad, but the first Well of Souls book has it. I wouldn't be surprised if it was even worse in other places, but I stopped reading Chalker after that. Also has weird centaur stuff. I'm not sure if Chalker ever included it, but did you know that in old fantasy and the early D&D games centaurs had average-at-best intelligence and lots of them were retarded by human standards? Before, I tried to read the first Changewinds book but there was some weird proto-trans/lesbian stuff going on and I quit once the centaurs showed up, so I don't know how weird the series got.
 
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Asimov was a strange writer, his End of Eternity is my favourite sci-fi novel, some of his early short stories are really good too. But I strongly dislike I, Robot.

Ellison is almost always a pleasure to read.
 
Achtung Bitter said:
Asimov was a strange writer, his End of Eternity is my favourite sci-fi novel, some of his early short stories are really good too. But I strongly dislike I, Robot.

Ellison is almost always a pleasure to read.
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I've found Asimov to be someone I can enjoy and appreciate, but I can't read more an 50-100 pages of his stuff back to back.

Ellison's fine. You know who seems to be a little underappreciated nowadays? Alfred Bester.
 
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I remember going through the whole End of Eternity in a day, I literally couldn't put it down. His other books not so much.

I just can't read about robots' psyche being more pure than people.
 
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Achtung Bitter said:
I just can't read about robots' psyche being more pure than people.
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A lot of science fiction assumes that AI would first have a childlike naivety of the world. Realistically an AI would be either a human upload or trained on the internet.

Charles Stross wrote Saturn's Children, where androids were made by killing babies and scanning their brains (only needed one baby brain per line though), after which various forms of physical and sexual abuse were used to condition the android to obey humans. The protagonist, a sex bot rendered obsolete by the extinction of humans, was pretty cynical.
 
With Asimov it's just an alien attitude towards robots in general, they have zero psychological advantages or disadvantages, since they don't have any mind or psychology. Why do some people even consider exploring pieces of metal in that sense.

Anyway I do respect Asimov actually, he was an interesting person, but the way his books ranged from Nightfall to I, robot makes it difficult for me to appreciate everything written by him.
 
Betonhaus said:
A lot of science fiction assumes that AI would first have a childlike naivety of the world. Realistically an AI would be either a human upload or trained on the internet.

Charles Stross wrote Saturn's Children, where androids were made by killing babies and scanning their brains (only needed one baby brain per line though), after which various forms of physical and sexual abuse were used to condition the android to obey humans. The protagonist, a sex bot rendered obsolete by the extinction of humans, was pretty cynical.
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I should finish reading Accelerando, which is a stitch-up (fix-up?) novel, where it's basically a bunch of short stories that are more strongly connected than a short story collection. (I haven't read any other Stross.)

The first story has the protagonist receiving packages containing dead kittens with their brains removed, and it turns out that the kittens' brains are being removed, scanned and emulated on computers as a stepping stone to figuring out human uploads and artificial consciousness.
 
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Achtung Bitter said:
Anyway I do respect Asimov actually, he was an interesting person, but the way his books ranged from Nightfall to I, robot makes it difficult for me to appreciate everything written by him.
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Like most Hard SF authors his prose is awful. That's to say nothing of his bland characters. Then there's the usual SFWA baggage. Atheist Jew known for molesting minors at conventions. The funny thing is that the "Hard SF" aspect of his work is indistinguishable from fantasy.

"Asimov saw AI as a natural evolution of intelligence, potentially surpassing human capabilities."

Science optimism is one of the worst traits of foundational SF. Scientific discovery and breakthroughs are slowing to crawl. AI in its current form is an unimpressive marketing gimmick. Scientists will never understand the complexities of human consciousness.
 
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That's a bit funny, because Asimov himself stated how he's uncertain about the quality of his writing. He questioned whether he's a professional writer even.

But anyway. I agree about AI btw.
 
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Read Excession-one of the Culture books.

I was...confused to put it mildly. The plot jumps from like 12 POVs and the Mind dialogues were hard to follow. Basically some advanced artifact from another universe shows up, there are some intrigues, and the human(oid) cast are a bunch of short sighted divas being used by the Minds who are playing their own games, while running up against some hostile alien species that also wants the artifact.

Reading a little-apparently...it was meant to be this way? That is, Banks is trying to portray what hyper advanced godlike AIs are motivated to do, and thus the more human characters are basically irrelevant-not even pawns, really, just little pet projects for the minds' amusement.
 
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Ishtar said:
Read Excession-one of the Culture books.

I was...confused to put it mildly. The plot jumps from like 12 POVs and the Mind dialogues were hard to follow. Basically some advanced artifact from another universe shows up, there are some intrigues, and the human(oid) cast are a bunch of short sighted divas being used by the Minds who are playing their own games, while running up against some hostile alien species that also wants the artifact.

Reading a little-apparently...it was meant to be this way? That is, Banks is trying to portray what hyper advanced godlike AIs are motivated to do, and thus the more human characters are basically irrelevant-not even pawns, really, just little pet projects for the minds' amusement.
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Oh yeah his books are very, very good reads and he does excellent world building, but I always feel depressed at the end.
The Player Of Games it turns out the human had been manipulated into the position that dictated the fate of an entire species
In Hydrogen Sonata people are trying to kill someone who has a lead on a major secret that impacts an entire species that is in the process of dying/moving to another plane of existence
Surface Detail has virtual heavens at war with virtual hells, and follows a woman who was trapped in hell and made into a symbol of hope in order to increase despair in hell.
Look To Windward has an assassin kill an AI and disrupt it's world, only for it to be revealed that the AI knew it was going to happen and had made arrangements.
 
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Betonhaus said:
Oh yeah his books are very, very good reads and he does excellent world building, but I always feel depressed at the end.
The Player Of Games it turns out the human had been manipulated into the position that dictated the fate of an entire species
In Hydrogen Sonata people are trying to kill someone who has a lead on a major secret that impacts an entire species that is in the process of dying/moving to another plane of existence
Surface Detail has virtual heavens at war with virtual hells, and follows a woman who was trapped in hell and made into a symbol of hope in order to increase despair in hell.
Look To Windward has an assassin kill an AI and disrupt it's world, only for it to be revealed that the AI knew it was going to happen and had made arrangements.
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I'm almost to the end of the series, and I've held off on finishing The Hydrogen Sonata because I don't want to confront the impossibility of further volumes.

Broadly speaking, I think that even as Ian crafted a "utopian" world as a counterpoint to dystopian sci-fi (did he actually say that? I need to do research, take this with a grain of salt), the discontent, pettiness, and eventual suicidality of most of his characters, human and AI alike, hints at a thesis more fundamentally misanthropic than dystopian sci-fi could ever depict: that no matter how well-off they are, creatures cognitively like us will generally be discontent, even in the most "perfect" (in the utilitarian sense) living conditions imaginable.

The Strugatskys' 'Roadside Picnic', an account of human incomprehension of the alien, and the protagonist Redrick's loss of a daughter and professional obsoletion, can end with a wish for ’HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!’ and I am left thinking, maybe Redrick and the whole world got that in the end, a sort of divine intervention where all the nasty details are swept away.

Ian thinks up a world where all the suffering has already been pushed to the peripheries, where happiness is for (almost) everyone, but petty status games continue, people throw themselves into increasingly debauched amusements or fevered searches for meaning as their lives stretch ever onwards in engineered perfection, and in the end just kill themselves out of cynicism or boredom.
 
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Honestly I'd rather read the Alex Benedict series by Jack McDevitt. It follows the story of an antiquities dealer 9,000 years in the future who keeps coming across unusual historical relics (like a plastic coffee mug) that leads to them uncovering a long forgotten secret of the past; like a lost planet with humans, a world of AIs, or the impending doom of a planet on the edge of the galaxy.

It's a much more comfy series compared to the Culture series, as in this series humans have lived and made history and continue to live in somewhat normal lives.
 
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Have any of you read Helliconia? I can't decide if I loved it or hated it.

I feel like Stephen Baxter is a good contrast to Banks, even if he is a bit hit and miss.
 
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Recently read Ubik by Phillip K Dick. I've only every read Do Androids by him. There's a lot of praise on the internet about this one, despite it never being adapted. At least if you don't count it as where Christopher Nolan gets all his ideas from. It's an action adventure story, but the plot is so deeply satirical I felt like it came off like a conflicting experience. Though that may be intentional. I dunno maybe I need to sit with it longer. Any suggestions for another PKD novel to get into?
 
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Someone recommended VALIS to me, I really didn't get it. It's put me off Dick somewhat. The impression I get is that he was more relevant if you were there at the time and it hasn't aged well.
 
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