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Reading this reminds me of the enormous chasm that exists between the vast majority of overwrought poorly written science fiction like this, and the absolute be
by CPLX 4y ago
Reading this reminds me of the enormous chasm that exists between the vast majority of overwrought poorly written science fiction like this, and the absolute best of the genre.
- akkartik 4y agoMerry Christmas to you too.
- gitfan86 4y agoVinge has won plenty of awards. Can you recommend a book that is better and not a obvious top 50 SciFi books that most of us have read already?
- sph 4y agoReminds me of that infinite pain I felt in my soul when I resigned to the idea that Blindsight by Peter Watts could be a fantastic Scifi book, but its writing is so obtuse and impenetrable I am permanently locked out of its story. Anyone care to recommend a dark scifi book about utterly alien lifeforms or worlds, that are more accessible to someone with average IQ? https://youtu.be/DnF7LMkGxhY https://youtu.be/DnF7LMkGxhY
- akkartik 4y agoYeah, Blindsight is great in many ways but the aliens aren't really the centerpiece. Once they get too alien you just get noise. As it happens, I recently inventoried my favorite aliens and eliminated the ones that were too humanized and also not understandable to people. I might be missing something obvious, but the one that sticks in my mind 2 years after I read it is: Pandora's Star
- narrator 4y ago"Fire Upon The Deep" was great until it got to the part about the dog kingdom.
- jjoonathan 4y agoI stopped reading at the dog kingdom. A few chapters in, it felt like I had been baited with a veneer of scifi over a core of anthropomorphic medieval historical fiction. Do the dogs connect back to the AIs in a satisfying way? Should I give it a second chance? ChatGPT says As the story progresses, the puppies become involved in the larger conflict that is taking place in the galaxy, and they play a key role in helping the human and alien characters achieve their goals. The puppies' involvement with the artificial intelligences (AIs) in the story is a central part of the plot, and the resolution of the conflict between the puppies and the AIs is an important part of the story's resolution. which I take as a "yes." Any humans care to weigh in?
- gnomewascool 4y agoAFAIR "no". Humans interact with both the AIs and the "dogs", and both groups of humans end up in contact with each other, but unless I'm missing something, the "dogs" don't directly interact with the AIs in any significant way (or the two threads end up interfering with each other, but more in a "they distract some of the characters" in both cases).
- akkartik 4y agoI don't really think of any Vernor Vinge as hard scifi that's got a core "theme" that everything has to connect to. It's rather space opera with fairly deep world building. Every chapter has certain "episodic" aspects, often exploring a single theme, and some chapters advance the broader story arc more than others. So no, the Tines don't connect to the AIs. Instead the Tines contribute to the warp and weft of the story just like the AIs. The angle in their subplot that sticks with me a decade later is the exploration of sense of self when split up between multiple bodies. And what happens to the sense of self when the number of bodies grows or shrinks. To be fair, "A Deepness in the Sky" has a richer world than Fire. When I reread Fire a few years later I did tend to skim the Tines as well. Whereas every one of the half dozen themes in Deepness has remained compelling after multiple readings.