4 ms·

I disliked the story for the same reason I dislike a lot of modern SF (and arts generally): it is nihilist and depressing. The craftsmanship is good, although

by crdb 10y ago

I disliked the story for the same reason I dislike a lot of modern SF (and arts generally): it is nihilist and depressing. The craftsmanship is good, although not great (the split structure feels a bit forced, for example). To use one's skill like this is... sad. The grandmaster of depressing SF was PKD. Story of Your Life left me with the same feeling of hopelessness and sadness as Ubik, which itself demonstrates great craftsmanship. Despite being raised atheist, I remember reading a novelised story of Jesus' life as a teenager where Joseph told a young Jesus that no cross was ever built well because great craftsmen refused to build instruments of death. I thought of this passage whilst reading Ubik and I think of it with Story of My Life. I'll add to these two the otherwise pretty good Hyperion Cantos, for its ending, although I think the author did paint himself in a corner there. Some series are better left unfinished...

david-given 10y ago
Ooh, I have a treat for you! Peter Watts, known in the science fiction world as 'The Antidote for Optimism', has some of his novels online. I would strongly recommend his multiple award winning Blindsight: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm ...because it's fascinating first contact novel; crazy, well researched, aliens that are genuinely alien, and not quite as bleak as his other books. (Still quite bleak.) There's a sequel, Echopraxia, that is also awesome, and will introduce you to Portia Labiata, the most intelligent spider in the world. Also, space vampires.
- ricree 10y ago
  While those books are fairly good, they seem like a poor recommendation for someone sick of nihilistic sci-fi.
- crdb 10y ago
  I was going to say two recent great first contact novels (showing you can still, in our era, do first contact in an original and intelligent manner) are Cixin Liu's Three Body trilogy and Peter Watts' work. I also think many of Charlie Stross' novels fit in there. For example, what they find on the other side of the wormhole modem in Accelerando counts as a "first contact" of sorts... and it is definitely original. Clearly we're on the same page. Any other recommendations?
  - mos_basik 10y ago
    >Cixin Liu's Three Body trilogy Man... I've been trying to get started on it for months! My eye was caught by it at random in the "New" section of my local library, and then the jacket held me when it said (paraphrased) that it had basically won every Chinese SF award there is. The book was the 2nd of the series, though, and the 1st was checked out... It's been completely checked out every time I've been in a library since then, and I've been to three different ones. I guess it must be good? Your mention of it only adds fuel to the fire. At some point I'll be intentional enough about it enough to place a hold or buy them, I guess.
    - crdb 10y ago
      I think, on its own, that the story holds up to being "worth reading". The Dark Forest solution to the Fermi paradox is elegant and I was surprised (from cursory research) that Liu seems to be the first to come up with it. However the real value in the book for me was twofold: first, some insight into the way PRC folks think (some mistake it for a bad translation or criticise the way the characters are thinking as "unrealistic" - I would say instead it's often very Chinese); second, this is one of few books depicting information warfare. On the first I have not much more to say. I've lived in Asia for a while so I recognise some patterns, but I don't speak Mandarin. My understanding of PRC folks is purely based on my interaction with my friends there. Nevertheless based on this I would say that a lot of the ways in which the characters' thinking differs from that of say, those in a Vernon Vinge novel are typically Chinese. In the same vein there is the hilarious dating show Fei Cheng Wu Rao although it's hard to pick up a subtitled version (it airs on one of the Australian channels occasionally). Information warfare is rarely discussed intelligently here for some reason (probably because it is used systematically by a variety of groups that frequent HN and try to minimise its existence and impact, because "those who know stay quiet" and because it is easier to defend from manipulation if the manipulator does not understand you well). In Liu's books, particularly the first and a little bit in Death's End, it consists of modifying the culture of the enemy so that it is more easily defeated. This is an art as old as humanity; the first formal reference to it in the modern era might be the Potemkin village, and a good introductory book on the Soviet flavour ("Active Measures") is Gen. Oleg Kalugin's biography [1] published after he defected. If you speak French, both books by the anonymous "Lt Col X" [2] (most likely to be a French intelligence officer) are also worth a read. Taken together with the fact that the book was very successful in China (which is impossible without at least tacit government approval), it presents a possible explanation for the Great Firewall. In the book, a key plot point is that everything you do is known instantly by the enemy - just like the NSA was shown to be able to do by Snowden. Thus, humans need to learn to hide their actions, letting just enough information leak to other humans for coordination but without tipping their hand to the very smart, omniscient, but less able to lie Trisolarians. Considering the Chinese have a reputation for speaking in parables ("riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma" - applicable to the Russians originally but I heard it many times applied to the PRC) there is a direct parallel with a facet of how the authorities and some of the population might view the current top superpower. In short I guarantee it will be unlike anything you've read this year. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Spymaster-Thirty-two-Intelligence-Espionage-Against/dp/0465014453 https://www.amazon.com/Spymaster-Thirty-two-Intelligence-Esp... [2] http://www.amazon.fr/Missions-methodes-techniques-speciales-services/dp/1482745518/ http://www.amazon.fr/Missions-methodes-techniques-speciales-... - https://www.amazon.fr/Manuel-contre-manipulation-2e-revue-augmentee/dp/1505427800/ https://www.amazon.fr/Manuel-contre-manipulation-2e-revue-au...
llasram 10y ago
I had a pretty different reaction to "Story of Your Life." I can maybe see the description of "nihilist," but only in the sense of "positive nihilism" -- nothing outside of conscious life defines value, so it's up to us to define it and find it ourselves. The fact that life ends doesn't make it less valuable: it just frames the urgency of finding meaning within the small window we have. I find that this is a theme which runs through a number of Chiang's stories. If you haven't read it, you might find "Exhalation" interesting: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/ http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/ . You may also find it nihilst, but makes the positive, celabratory element even more explicit.
- crdb 10y ago
  > so it's up to us to define it and find it ourselves That's the part I didn't get from the story. In fact, there was a strong sense of "the future is already written so you might as well not try to get out of it". Life is short so let's just drift along whatever little we have of it passively kind of thing. I'll keep in mind Chiang's other stories (already bought them long ago) but to be honest there are many books ahead of it on the reading list. spoilers below The only positive interpretation I can think of the story is a fairly complex critique of the heroine (and through that human nature) as wanting the safety of knowledge even at great personal cost (25 more years of sadness than she was supposed to have). She did have a choice: she could have forgotten how to read the language and through this regained agency in her own life (or at least hope). This is an example of the cognitive bias of picking suboptimal options because we are familiar with them. She did not pick that choice, although you could argue that knowing she did not pick that choice, she did not pick that choice (return to nihilist square one, the only square). Asimov's The End of Eternity deals much better with time travel and information about future timelines. IMHO.
oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
I'm unfamiliar with the original story, but watched the film yesterday. I was very impressed. Intelligent, emotional, sensitive - I certainly didn't come away thinking of it as nihilist and depressing, quite the opposite.
- crdb 10y ago
  I haven't watched it yet. It's months away, I think January release here. Other commenters say the plot has been substantially changed. After watching Dr. Strange I read the first 5-6 comics, because I thought it was one of the few Marvel characters with some depth and interesting ideas, whose source material might be worth exploring. Alas, a goateed bad guy appears in dreams, wafting around, then getting beaten in a punch up with the hero because "magic", repeat ad infinitum. A far cry from the special interaction of Cumberbatch, Swinton and Mikkelson with a great script we saw in cinemas (I might be biased since this is the closest to a movie adaptation of Stross' Laundry Files ideas that we're likely to see in the near future). A good writer and director can take any idea and turn it into something interesting, so I am looking forward to discovering the movie. My original comment was targeted at the story only.
sc4th1s 10y ago
Ubik as sad or hopeless? Nah man, the end of ubik was just him leveling up.
lobster_johnson 10y ago
Have you read any Iain M. Banks? While his books are often bleak ("Use of Weapons" and "Consider Phlebas" and "Against a Dark Background" in particular), and he has a fondness for dark humour and irony (both dramatic and linguistic), they never wander into nihilist territory, and are firmly on the side of humanism and progressiveness in general. He is (or was) also usually a great craftsman.
- crdb 10y ago
  Yes, I've read almost all his books, there's still a couple sitting on my Kindle. I disagree with seeing these books as bleak, or indeed anything by Banks (it could be because our definitions of bleak differ, since I agree with you on the other values). The SF part is simply a setting for his strength, which is to detail and praise human character. For example, he continuously breaks the "rules of good writing" such as having dei ex machina (or more properly, dei in machina with some exceptions like The Algebraist) conclude most books but he is an example where it is done in a way that augments the story. In most Banks stories, characters (including the Minds, for example in Excession) are put in difficult situations made believable by well structured suspension of disbelief ("great craftsmanship"). They get out of these situations using their intelligence and demonstrating courage and a well defined hierarchy of values (including appropriate self-sacrifice for something they value higher than their life). This is philosophically the opposite of Story of My Life and Ubik. Even if the ending is a downer, even if major characters suffer enormously (I'm still marked by Surface Detail years after reading it... truly harrowing), reading Banks had me walk away with my mind augmented somehow. That being said, on the First contact/alien civilisation front I always got the feeling that Banks' aliens species are always very human, representing different facets of human nature, including the Minds. I think it is on purpose, like Asimov in most of his work he was not setting out to represent truly alien species as Charlie Stross, Peter Watts or Cixin Liu have done but writing novels about human characters and values that happened to be framed by SF.
  - lobster_johnson 10y ago
    Glad you like them, although I'm surprised — "bleak" doesn't even begin to describe some of the stuff in Banks' novels. I don't know if you've read the ones I mentioned, but [SPOILERS AHEAD] in Consider Phlebas, every main character dies, the protagonist's species goes extinct in the process, and the epilogue essentially summarizes the whole story as accomplishing absolutely nothing; in Use of Weapons, the protagonist is revealed to have a past as a psychotic, genocidal warlord, and most of the wars he is subsequently involved with as a mercenary go badly for most involved; in Against a Dark Background, everyone except the protagonist dies, and it's fairly traumatic besides (though the unpublished epilogue, which is on the Banks web site, lifts it up a little). Another bleak one is Look to Windward, although the tone is more elegaic; the fate of that sorry anthropologist who studied giant floating aliens is one of the saddest scenes I've ever read (very much reminiscent of PKD's "Rautavaara's Case"). I agree that philosophically, he's on the positivist side of things, despite the amount of sheer death and destruction that goes on in his books. It's a trait, a sort of sarcastic, righteous rebelliousness in the face iniquity, that he shares with Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams. (Speaking of, I found Feersum Endjinn to be a highly Pratchettian novel. It's also quite different from anything else Banks wrote. It's excellent and probably underrated.) As an example of a polar opposite, I would point to Stanislaw Lem, who seemingly had zero faith in humanity. Solaris, His Master's Voice and so on take an extremely dim view of humankind's ability to do anything except navelgaze and quibble.

by crdb 10y ago

david-given 10y ago

Ooh, I have a treat for you! Peter Watts, known in the science fiction world as 'The Antidote for Optimism', has some of his novels online. I would strongly recommend his multiple award winning Blindsight: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm ...because it's fascinating first contact novel; crazy, well researched, aliens that are genuinely alien, and not quite as bleak as his other books. (Still quite bleak.) There's a sequel, Echopraxia, that is also awesome, and will introduce you to Portia Labiata, the most intelligent spider in the world. Also, space vampires.

ricree 10y ago
While those books are fairly good, they seem like a poor recommendation for someone sick of nihilistic sci-fi.
crdb 10y ago
I was going to say two recent great first contact novels (showing you can still, in our era, do first contact in an original and intelligent manner) are Cixin Liu's Three Body trilogy and Peter Watts' work. I also think many of Charlie Stross' novels fit in there. For example, what they find on the other side of the wormhole modem in Accelerando counts as a "first contact" of sorts... and it is definitely original. Clearly we're on the same page. Any other recommendations?
- mos_basik 10y ago
  >Cixin Liu's Three Body trilogy Man... I've been trying to get started on it for months! My eye was caught by it at random in the "New" section of my local library, and then the jacket held me when it said (paraphrased) that it had basically won every Chinese SF award there is. The book was the 2nd of the series, though, and the 1st was checked out... It's been completely checked out every time I've been in a library since then, and I've been to three different ones. I guess it must be good? Your mention of it only adds fuel to the fire. At some point I'll be intentional enough about it enough to place a hold or buy them, I guess.
  - crdb 10y ago
    I think, on its own, that the story holds up to being "worth reading". The Dark Forest solution to the Fermi paradox is elegant and I was surprised (from cursory research) that Liu seems to be the first to come up with it. However the real value in the book for me was twofold: first, some insight into the way PRC folks think (some mistake it for a bad translation or criticise the way the characters are thinking as "unrealistic" - I would say instead it's often very Chinese); second, this is one of few books depicting information warfare. On the first I have not much more to say. I've lived in Asia for a while so I recognise some patterns, but I don't speak Mandarin. My understanding of PRC folks is purely based on my interaction with my friends there. Nevertheless based on this I would say that a lot of the ways in which the characters' thinking differs from that of say, those in a Vernon Vinge novel are typically Chinese. In the same vein there is the hilarious dating show Fei Cheng Wu Rao although it's hard to pick up a subtitled version (it airs on one of the Australian channels occasionally). Information warfare is rarely discussed intelligently here for some reason (probably because it is used systematically by a variety of groups that frequent HN and try to minimise its existence and impact, because "those who know stay quiet" and because it is easier to defend from manipulation if the manipulator does not understand you well). In Liu's books, particularly the first and a little bit in Death's End, it consists of modifying the culture of the enemy so that it is more easily defeated. This is an art as old as humanity; the first formal reference to it in the modern era might be the Potemkin village, and a good introductory book on the Soviet flavour ("Active Measures") is Gen. Oleg Kalugin's biography [1] published after he defected. If you speak French, both books by the anonymous "Lt Col X" [2] (most likely to be a French intelligence officer) are also worth a read. Taken together with the fact that the book was very successful in China (which is impossible without at least tacit government approval), it presents a possible explanation for the Great Firewall. In the book, a key plot point is that everything you do is known instantly by the enemy - just like the NSA was shown to be able to do by Snowden. Thus, humans need to learn to hide their actions, letting just enough information leak to other humans for coordination but without tipping their hand to the very smart, omniscient, but less able to lie Trisolarians. Considering the Chinese have a reputation for speaking in parables ("riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma" - applicable to the Russians originally but I heard it many times applied to the PRC) there is a direct parallel with a facet of how the authorities and some of the population might view the current top superpower. In short I guarantee it will be unlike anything you've read this year. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Spymaster-Thirty-two-Intelligence-Espionage-Against/dp/0465014453 https://www.amazon.com/Spymaster-Thirty-two-Intelligence-Esp... [2] http://www.amazon.fr/Missions-methodes-techniques-speciales-services/dp/1482745518/ http://www.amazon.fr/Missions-methodes-techniques-speciales-... - https://www.amazon.fr/Manuel-contre-manipulation-2e-revue-augmentee/dp/1505427800/ https://www.amazon.fr/Manuel-contre-manipulation-2e-revue-au...

llasram 10y ago

I had a pretty different reaction to "Story of Your Life." I can maybe see the description of "nihilist," but only in the sense of "positive nihilism" -- nothing outside of conscious life defines value, so it's up to us to define it and find it ourselves. The fact that life ends doesn't make it less valuable: it just frames the urgency of finding meaning within the small window we have. I find that this is a theme which runs through a number of Chiang's stories. If you haven't read it, you might find "Exhalation" interesting: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/ http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/ . You may also find it nihilst, but makes the positive, celabratory element even more explicit.

crdb 10y ago
> so it's up to us to define it and find it ourselves That's the part I didn't get from the story. In fact, there was a strong sense of "the future is already written so you might as well not try to get out of it". Life is short so let's just drift along whatever little we have of it passively kind of thing. I'll keep in mind Chiang's other stories (already bought them long ago) but to be honest there are many books ahead of it on the reading list. spoilers below The only positive interpretation I can think of the story is a fairly complex critique of the heroine (and through that human nature) as wanting the safety of knowledge even at great personal cost (25 more years of sadness than she was supposed to have). She did have a choice: she could have forgotten how to read the language and through this regained agency in her own life (or at least hope). This is an example of the cognitive bias of picking suboptimal options because we are familiar with them. She did not pick that choice, although you could argue that knowing she did not pick that choice, she did not pick that choice (return to nihilist square one, the only square). Asimov's The End of Eternity deals much better with time travel and information about future timelines. IMHO.

oneeyedpigeon 10y ago

I'm unfamiliar with the original story, but watched the film yesterday. I was very impressed. Intelligent, emotional, sensitive - I certainly didn't come away thinking of it as nihilist and depressing, quite the opposite.

crdb 10y ago
I haven't watched it yet. It's months away, I think January release here. Other commenters say the plot has been substantially changed. After watching Dr. Strange I read the first 5-6 comics, because I thought it was one of the few Marvel characters with some depth and interesting ideas, whose source material might be worth exploring. Alas, a goateed bad guy appears in dreams, wafting around, then getting beaten in a punch up with the hero because "magic", repeat ad infinitum. A far cry from the special interaction of Cumberbatch, Swinton and Mikkelson with a great script we saw in cinemas (I might be biased since this is the closest to a movie adaptation of Stross' Laundry Files ideas that we're likely to see in the near future). A good writer and director can take any idea and turn it into something interesting, so I am looking forward to discovering the movie. My original comment was targeted at the story only.

sc4th1s 10y ago

Ubik as sad or hopeless? Nah man, the end of ubik was just him leveling up.

lobster_johnson 10y ago

Have you read any Iain M. Banks? While his books are often bleak ("Use of Weapons" and "Consider Phlebas" and "Against a Dark Background" in particular), and he has a fondness for dark humour and irony (both dramatic and linguistic), they never wander into nihilist territory, and are firmly on the side of humanism and progressiveness in general. He is (or was) also usually a great craftsman.

crdb 10y ago
Yes, I've read almost all his books, there's still a couple sitting on my Kindle. I disagree with seeing these books as bleak, or indeed anything by Banks (it could be because our definitions of bleak differ, since I agree with you on the other values). The SF part is simply a setting for his strength, which is to detail and praise human character. For example, he continuously breaks the "rules of good writing" such as having dei ex machina (or more properly, dei in machina with some exceptions like The Algebraist) conclude most books but he is an example where it is done in a way that augments the story. In most Banks stories, characters (including the Minds, for example in Excession) are put in difficult situations made believable by well structured suspension of disbelief ("great craftsmanship"). They get out of these situations using their intelligence and demonstrating courage and a well defined hierarchy of values (including appropriate self-sacrifice for something they value higher than their life). This is philosophically the opposite of Story of My Life and Ubik. Even if the ending is a downer, even if major characters suffer enormously (I'm still marked by Surface Detail years after reading it... truly harrowing), reading Banks had me walk away with my mind augmented somehow. That being said, on the First contact/alien civilisation front I always got the feeling that Banks' aliens species are always very human, representing different facets of human nature, including the Minds. I think it is on purpose, like Asimov in most of his work he was not setting out to represent truly alien species as Charlie Stross, Peter Watts or Cixin Liu have done but writing novels about human characters and values that happened to be framed by SF.
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  Glad you like them, although I'm surprised — "bleak" doesn't even begin to describe some of the stuff in Banks' novels. I don't know if you've read the ones I mentioned, but [SPOILERS AHEAD] in Consider Phlebas, every main character dies, the protagonist's species goes extinct in the process, and the epilogue essentially summarizes the whole story as accomplishing absolutely nothing; in Use of Weapons, the protagonist is revealed to have a past as a psychotic, genocidal warlord, and most of the wars he is subsequently involved with as a mercenary go badly for most involved; in Against a Dark Background, everyone except the protagonist dies, and it's fairly traumatic besides (though the unpublished epilogue, which is on the Banks web site, lifts it up a little). Another bleak one is Look to Windward, although the tone is more elegaic; the fate of that sorry anthropologist who studied giant floating aliens is one of the saddest scenes I've ever read (very much reminiscent of PKD's "Rautavaara's Case"). I agree that philosophically, he's on the positivist side of things, despite the amount of sheer death and destruction that goes on in his books. It's a trait, a sort of sarcastic, righteous rebelliousness in the face iniquity, that he shares with Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams. (Speaking of, I found Feersum Endjinn to be a highly Pratchettian novel. It's also quite different from anything else Banks wrote. It's excellent and probably underrated.) As an example of a polar opposite, I would point to Stanislaw Lem, who seemingly had zero faith in humanity. Solaris, His Master's Voice and so on take an extremely dim view of humankind's ability to do anything except navelgaze and quibble.