3 ms·

In Altered Carbon, criminal punishment was making that criminal "sleep" (well, destroying his body, keep his memory/conciousness and resleeve him later) for man

In Altered Carbon, criminal punishment was making that criminal "sleep" (well, destroying his body, keep his memory/conciousness and resleeve him later) for many decades, waking up at a time where he knows no one, and his knowledge was totally outdated. Putting someone into stasis for long would fit into that idea of punishment, and should be a crime by itself, who cares if your wife is alive or dead if she won't be there for the rest of your life anyway? The bubbles in Vinge's story send people to a future they don't know, and that may be hostile or deserted (I think he wrote a sequel with that idea).

hinkley 4y ago
In Marooned in Spacetime we have a set of people who hoped for a better Tomorrow and some rich tourist types who wanted to see what happens in the future come out of stasis to find the Earth deserted. No war, no plague, no apocalypse, just fucked off. They bubble forward a bit, just in case everyone took a timeout (maybe a toxin was released and there’s a cave full of bubbles waiting for the earth to repair, who knows), but only a few new people show up. Not even enough to repopulate the species. The weird thing is that your status is determined by where you left from not how rich you are. A powerful family skips forward and finds themselves lower status than a group of lower-upper class people with what amounts to top of the line camping gear, which is so much newer than the family’s gear that everything it can do it does better than theirs. There’s one reclusive person who basically has a space ship. She has been away from humans so long she is barely human (relatable) anymore. She goes out to check other solar systems and finds nothing there either. The implication is that either we gave up or we ascended somehow, but since they can only travel forward there’s no way to know. They missed the boat.
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  I think about this book really often, especially the 9,000 year old woman. Really amazing imagery.

hinkley 4y ago

In Marooned in Spacetime we have a set of people who hoped for a better Tomorrow and some rich tourist types who wanted to see what happens in the future come out of stasis to find the Earth deserted. No war, no plague, no apocalypse, just fucked off. They bubble forward a bit, just in case everyone took a timeout (maybe a toxin was released and there’s a cave full of bubbles waiting for the earth to repair, who knows), but only a few new people show up. Not even enough to repopulate the species. The weird thing is that your status is determined by where you left from not how rich you are. A powerful family skips forward and finds themselves lower status than a group of lower-upper class people with what amounts to top of the line camping gear, which is so much newer than the family’s gear that everything it can do it does better than theirs. There’s one reclusive person who basically has a space ship. She has been away from humans so long she is barely human (relatable) anymore. She goes out to check other solar systems and finds nothing there either. The implication is that either we gave up or we ascended somehow, but since they can only travel forward there’s no way to know. They missed the boat.

doctor_eval 4y ago
I think about this book really often, especially the 9,000 year old woman. Really amazing imagery.