Science Fiction

Good-looking infographic

In a post a couple days ago in this comm where I asked for book suggestions, Eon was one of the most often recommended ones. As a result, I went into it with pretty high expectations. To my surprise, I didn't like it all that much. I'm bad at putting my feelings down on ~~paper~~ electrons(?), but I'll try to kickstart the discussion.

Please remember, this is my personal opinion and is no more valid than how you feel about the book. If you loved it, more power to you! I'm not here to bash it, rather I'd like to find out what others liked about the book that I might have missed.

What I loved:

• The scale and setting of it. BDOs have had a soft spot in my heart since the days of Ringworld. Imagining an O'Neill cylinder that stretched forever, with links to worlds every several hundred km, was a treat to my imagination.

What missed the mark for me:

• Characterisation. I never really felt connected to any of the characters. None of them were really memorable to me. Considering how much of the story was focused on political happenings and human drama, that was a bit of a turn off.
• Exploration of the technologies / artifacts. Almost everything was introduced with little to no investigation. The exploration of Thistledown (both the city and the asteroid) was done offscreen, and all we see is one character's reaction to being carefully introduced to it all. A lot of stuff was told, not shown.
• Mysticism. The weird sudden focus at the end on ~~souls~~ Mystery, magical divining rods that only obey their master to open portals to new worlds, etc.
• Visualisation. This is probably a 'me' problem, but I just found it impossible to visualise / understand Greg's descriptions of most of the structures.
• Little to no exploration of the future civ (other than some pretty incomprehensible political exchanges) or any of the numerous other alien civs humanity has partnered with.
• Contrived situations. Why did humans have to evacuate Thistledown to move into the Way? Why, after centuries (millenia?) is there only a single city of humans? There's no shortage of resources or space. There's no reason Thistledown and the entire length between it and Axis city couldn't have been occupied, especially given travel speeds. Why is it this very moment where the Jart finally decide to get off their asses and nuke the Way? Why haven't the Naderites already colonised a thousand planets in alternate universes, given their religious beliefs?

Anyway, I'm interested in hearing other viewpoints about the book, now that you don't have to hold back about spoilers. What did you love or hate about it?

As an example, I love the Martian, and I think a lot of older books from authors like Asimov are heavily into engineering / competence porn. Other favs in this category include the standalone novel Rendezvous with Rama to leave you wishing for more, most of the Culture series for happy utopian vibes, Schlock Mercenary for humor, Dahak series for fun mindless popcorn.

Edit: I'm so happy to have found a replacement for r/books and the rest of them.

If you’re new to Synthwave, it’s a great introduction to the genre

It's about the end of the year, and I know there will all sorts of lists of the best books published this year, so this is a different question: regardless of when published, which SF books that you personally read this year did you enjoy the most. I'm also asking which you enjoyed instead of which you thought were the best, so feel free to include fluff without shame.

I'll go first. Of the 60+ books I read this year, here are the ones I liked most. No significant spoilers, not in any order.

Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky

• A project to uplift monkeys on a terraformed world, at the peak of human civilization, is sabotaged by people who don't think humans should play god. There follows a human civil war that nearly destroys civilization. A couple thousand years later, an ark ship of human remnants leaving an uninhabitable earth is heading towards that terraformed planet. This is a great book, with lots to say on intelligence, the nature of people, and both the fragility and heartiness of life.

Kiln People, David Brin

• Set a couple hundred years in the future, technology is ubiquitous that lets people make a living clay duplicate of themselves that has their memory and thoughts to the point they were created, lasts about a day, and whose memories can be reintegrated with the real person if desired. The duplicates are property, have no rights, and are used to do almost all work and to take any risks without risking the humans. A private detective and some of his duplicates gets pulled into an increasingly complex plot that could reshape society. This is a thoroughly enjoyable book, with lots of twists, and an interesting narrative as we follow copies who may or may not reintegrate with our detective.

Sleeping Giants, Sylvain Neuvel

• A little girl falls down a deep hole in the woods and lands on a gigantic, glowing, metal hand that's thousands of years old. This is a wonderful alien artifact story with some interesting twists. I really enjoyed this book. Not exactly hard SF, but checks a lot of the boxes for me, including the wonder of discovery.

The Peripheral, William Gibson

• A computer server links the late 2020s to a time 70 years later, allowing communication and telepresence between the two times. A young woman in the earlier time witnesses a murder in the later time and gets sucked into a battle between powerful people in both times. This is a great book; I think I could have recognized it as Gibson's writing even if I hadn't known it in advance. Very interesting premise, engaging characters, and fun without feeling like fluff.

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin

• A coalition of human planets has sent the first envoy to an icy world where the people are gender neutral and sterile most of the time, but once a month become male or female (essentially randomly) and fertile. This is a classic, written in 1969, and my second reading - the first being in the late 80s. Le Guin creates an amazingly rich world, even with its harsh, frozen landscape. The characters grow to understand how gender impacts their cultures, and the biases they didn't know they had. It's also aged remarkably well for an SF book written 55 years ago. There's nothing about it that feels outdated.

A couple notes:

• If I hadn't stuck to my own "enjoyed" constraint, the list might have looked different. For instance, Perdido Street Station, by Meiville, is a really great book, but there's so much misery and sadness that it's hard to say I "enjoyed" it.

• I hesitated to put The Left Hand Of Darkness on the list, simply because Le Guin is so widely recognized as a great master, and the book one of her greatest, that it seemed unfair. In the end, it seemed unfair to exclude it for such an artificial reason.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/23529955

Just an interesting image to see scrolling past IMO and another relatively recent one

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/JrDXrm

Based on curated lists from BookBub, Crime Reads, Book Riot and more, suggestions from readers on Goodreads, Quora and Reddit, and recommendations from authors like Jasper Fforde, Sharon Shinn and David Brin, here is a roundup of the 81 best sci-fi crime novels ever written.

I'm constraining the laws of sentience in my own science fiction universe. I'm conceptualizing and not wording a polished version.

The principals of sentience

• one must never act to harm self or other sentients
• one must practice tit for tat with a tenth extra measure of forgiveness
• sentients disarm and uplift all subsentients to mitigate self harm
• sentience is a measure of behavior only applicable on millennial scales

These ideas lead me to question: where exactly does the Hippocratic principal of "first do no harm" fail us as humans and lead to the mass murder orgies of war?

I'm reading them in the author's recommended reading order and I'm currently up to The Vor Game. While the first Cordelia books are decent the Miles books are real page turners so far. So if you were put off by the cheesy looking covers like me, give them a go!

I just started reading Neuromancer, and finished the first two chapters. Can someone encourage me to keep on reading? It’s just so… disorienting. Very quick scene changes, hard to follow dialogues (who is actually talking?), too much jargon (I have read up on some, to get the gist), … I just feel lost, and doubt I will enjoy it at some point.

I like various degrees of scifi, and many people recommended the book (and the ones following it). I also fought through some harder chapters in Trisolaris, Children of Memory, The Expanse books, CS Lewis‘ Space Trilogy, … but Neuromancer is on awholenother level.

Is it just me? Did anyone else have a hard time with it? Does it get better? Is it worth it?

Pantheon season 1 is being added to Netflix tomorrow, but season 2 is not (and might never be). Both seasons are on Prime Video but it is region-locked, though I'm not sure which regions it is available in.

Pantheon is a fantastic sci-fi show with really smart themes that has been completely screwed over by streaming services. The writing is incredible and contains some very intelligent satire and critiques of big tech corporations, and even dips its toes into geopolitics (not even kidding, the Israel-Palestine conflict becomes a plot point in season 2, and this was written prior to Oct. 7).

If you want to watch the series in its entirety then piracy is a must for the vast majority. Needless to say, I highly recommend watching.

I really enjoyed reading it a couple years ago. Takes place mostly in about 2023, trying to accurately predict what life would be like 30 years after it was written.

I mean, we could speculate and explore the strange future and stuff. Just without that tired trope of "well, science and technology progressed a bunch and then we got this really great machine".

I mean there's gotta be another way. Examples?

So there's a question I've been having for a while now: Why is Ubki, from Philip K Dick so popular ? I've read it, and was pretty disappointed. The scenario starts pretty well, but becomes very obvious amongst the rest of the book, there's little no to connection between the scenes, everything seems to have no relation, the final characters (Ella and Joe) are barely introduced, the resolution (Ubki's provenance) is barely explained, ...

Overall, I feel like I've read a really good scenario idea from a great author, but it feels like a missed opportunity; I’m left feeling unsatisfied.

I just finished this incredibly interesting book and will leave the description from my book service below.

"Worst Case Scenario" by T J Newman

"#1 internationally bestselling author T.J. Newman is back with Worst Case Scenario. When a pilot suffers a heart attack at 35,000 feet, a commercial airliner filled with passengers crashes into a nuclear power plant in the small town of Waketa, Minnesota, which becomes ground zero for a catastrophic national crisis with global implications. The International Nuclear Event Scale tracks nuclear disasters. It has seven levels. Level 7 is a Major Accident, with only two on record: Fukushima and Chernobyl. There has never been a Level 8. Until now. In this heart-stopping thriller, ordinary people--power plant employees, firefighters, teachers, families, neighbors, and friends-- are thrust into an extraordinary situation as they face the ultimate test of their lives. It will take the combined courage, ingenuity, and determination of a brave few to save not only their community and loved ones, but the fate of humanity at large."