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Huh, that's a clever find. The central premise of Surface Detail is so brilliant I'm not surprised he'd been thinking about it or something related ahead of time. Unfortunately I don't think it was his best. All the bits about Hell and the war were brilliant, but he cheated by making the antagonist so thoroughly unambiguously slimy. Lededje seemed to oscillate weirdly between capable hardass and someone more like that society girl from Excession, and the third principal character didn't have anything to do at all. It was a great journey but I'm starting to wonder if the Culture's wearing thin. It all feels so safe now. As hilarious a character as the ROU was, I never once even suspected that he (or anything in his care, including Lededje) would ever be in real danger. I haven't read Use of Weapons, though. Ought to go back and do that one next, yes? General Battuta fucked around with this message at 02:45 on Feb 9, 2011 |
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Feb 9, 2011 01:01
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syphon posted:You should check out Alistair Reynolds... particularly the Revelation series. There's no FTL travel in his series either, and I think it makes for a really really interesting sci-fi setting. The crews of most spaceships are used to several hundred years passing by whenever they travel to different worlds... and there's one particular convoy that departs earth, and 3 generations go by on the ship before it actually arrives at its destination. I thought he dealt with the culture (no pun intended) of such a scenario in a very interesting manner. Seconding this. Reynolds has all sorts of flaws - janky pacing, some weird prose quirks - but everything about Revelation Space and Redemption Ark was cold and mechanistic and gothic and brutal. Tremendously atmospheric, almost the opposite of the Culture books. Plus the Ultras have ship names almost as awesome as the Minds.
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Feb 15, 2011 16:17
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I just finished Use of Weapons, right about now. Sweet Jesus. I got spoiled on the nature of the chair but not on the identity of the Chairmaker. So I went into the final stretch feeling all  and then what the gently caress Zakalwe is THAT GUYDefinitely the best Culture book. Though ironic in that it's hardly about the Culture. I found it ironic how the chair was the first and in a way most powerful manifestation of Elothemiel's ability to turn anything into a weapon; thus the title I suppose. He ultimately won the war, right? Was there any science fictional justification given for Elothemiel coming to possess his memories so vividly?
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Mar 6, 2011 22:43
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I dunno, that didn't give me trouble. Some things speak well enough when only implied.
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Mar 7, 2011 16:57
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Yeah, I would say that Blindsight and The Mote in God's Eye are the only two books I can think of purely off the top of my head that did really alien aliens without resorting to 'goo!' or 'energy field!'. Blindsight's critters may seem analogous to certain terrestrial marine organisms but it's purely superficial body-plan stuff. (Fire Upon the Deep had some pretty creative aliens but they were psychologically very human.) Banks' genius lies in making everything human anyway. General Battuta fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Sep 21, 2011 |
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Sep 21, 2011 23:46
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Barry Foster posted:I'd say even the Moties are pretty relatable. Well, some of the mediators certainly are, but as I recall it drives them insane in the long run if they emulate human psychology (the whole fyunch-click deal).
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Sep 22, 2011 00:36
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That is an excellent point and also reminded me of Stanislaw Lem (Solaris, Invincible).
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Sep 25, 2011 22:49
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MeLKoR posted:Yeah, I'm going to go with Player of Games first for the plot and Excession second for the awesome mind stuff. Don't really get all the Use of Weapons love. Use of Weapons is a really great book, but its greatness is not as fundamentally tied to the Culture milieu as the others - it's more about the main character and his journey. It's my personal favorite, I think it outstrips the others by a mile and stands alone really well, but I agree that Player of Games is a great introduction to the setting as a whole.
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Oct 12, 2011 16:53
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Hey, let's not go leaping to conclusions here! Hydrogen is only slightly less common than Matter 
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Feb 23, 2012 14:06
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Good decision Hedrigall because Consider Phlebas is at best kind of uneven. (Also has a great ending, though!)
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Feb 27, 2012 03:15
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Fragmented posted:For what it's worth i remember a drone thinking something was "As impossible as traveling through time." it one of the books, either Matter or Use of Weapons i think. Oh boy,  Maybe I'll post about this when I get to work. The short version is that each time you make a scan or backup of yourself, 'you' forks into two 'yous' who each have valid claim to be the original, but after that point it's every fork for itself.
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Mar 23, 2012 14:12
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Pope Guilty posted:What? That's inane. A perfect duplicate of me is not me. It's another being in another body with identical chemical makeup and physical state. Yes you would. The same process that would occur here (reconstruction of the template from new matter) occurs naturally over the course of your life. The notional transporter here simply accelerates that process from years to moments. As long as the pattern of information is preserved, it's you. (Bear in mind that any copying or transcription process immediately creates two forks which begin to diverge when the process is complete and the causal connection severed.) If you're religious of course you may feel differently, but the physics is unequivocal and doesn't really leave any room for philosophical wiggling. e: One useful way to think about this is to consider a machine which replaces one atom in your body with an identical new atom, in the same place. This clearly does not kill you or make you a new person. Now consider a machine which does the same with two atoms, then three, then four, and so on until it has replaced every atom in your body. There's no way to draw a line and say 'oh, it's not ME any more', just as long as the structure remains the same. Nothing of who or what you are is stored in individual atoms, just in the arrangement of them. General Battuta fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Mar 24, 2012 |
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Mar 24, 2012 04:50
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Pope Guilty posted:I'm not arguing that you can have two copies of the same person, two bodies of identical makeup and arrangement. I'm arguing that the two copies would not share a consciousness but instead be possessed of an identical consciousness state that would rapidly diverge. This is completely true, but what you need to remember is that each fork is genuinely 'you'. If one fork is killed, that fork is absolutely dead, but the original person who was duplicated is still alive, in the sense that the person you were five years ago is still alive today - since the other fork has equal claim to being that person. Let's go back a bit to unpack and examine an objection you had, and hopefully help clarify it for you. quote:Bifurcation implies splitting a thing into two, whereas the hypotheticals we've been throwing around involve creating a second thing in the image of the first. All the hypothetical we've been throwing around - for example, being instantaneously disintegrated by a teleporter, then reassembled from the pattern of information - are identical to the processes that your body undergoes in your day-to-day life. I'll try to illustrate with some thought experiments, if you're willing to work with me. But it's important that this be a dialogue, not a point-by-point rebuttal contest. Shall I go ahead? I also want to make sure you're asking the right question, because it looks like you're stumbling on a common obstacle - failing to specify what 'you' is in the thought experiment. For example, in the following: quote:So you'd be okay with being shot in the face if a duplicate body were created and activated for you, then? Since the duplicate wouldn't know the difference? That depends. Are you asking about 'you' just before I have myself duplicated by a duplication machine, or 'you', one of the two forks produced after the duplication? In the former case, I'm not happy with it, since I am certain I am going to die but also certain I am going to live. In the latter case - no, I don't want to be shot! I'll die! General Battuta fucked around with this message at 14:44 on Mar 24, 2012 |
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Mar 24, 2012 14:38
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Pope Guilty posted:My whole point in all of this is that having a backup is completely irrelevant to the dead person; it doesn't let you wake up again after being killed. You don't benefit in the least from it, unless you get off on the idea of there being a duplicate of you walking around after you die. But of course, you only get that benefit until you die, whereupon there's no you to benefit from anymore. The backup is indeed irrelevant to the dead person, but it's relevant to the person who made the backup. Person A goes in for a backup, producing Forks B and C. Fork B is hit by a car and killed on the way out of the clinic and dies, thinking 'wow, gently caress, that backup sure isn't going to do me, Person A, any good'. Fork C says 'wow, that sucks. Lucky I, Person A, am still alive!' When you make the backup, you're forking yourself in twain, each of which is genuinely you and each of which has a shot at living. But after the backup scan is complete, it's every fork for itself. A useful physical thought experiment is this: your body is divided in half (including the brain), and each missing half is then reconstructed by nanomachines. Which one is now you, and contains your 'real' consciousness? It's impossible to say. But it's also clear that the death of one of the two half-clones won't lead to its survival in the other. In the context of the Culture, making a backup of your mind-state before a risky mission will guarantee your survival, but it won't prevent your death. We're so used to thinking of these two as a zero-sum binary that it's hard to think around it. There's an interesting gray area in terms of recent backups, though: if I have a backup from a minute ago, and then I die and the backup is downloaded into a new body, is that different from a minute's memory loss? Can we see that as equivalent to just rolling back a minute? Neurosis posted:Well, I'm glad I'm not the only one bothered by the lack of continuity of consciousness in some sci-fi immortality conceptions. A lot of them seem to treat external continuity as being the same as internal - Richard Morgan's Kovacs books are probably the worst offender, where everyone has a very cavalier attitude to swapping bodies or dying. The Golden Age's noumenal recorders also come to mind. Personally I wouldn't keep a backup. The stacks in the Kovacs books actually provide continuity rather than permitting forks. Out-of-body backups are forks, however. TouretteDog posted:So in your replace-N-atoms machine, from an 'externalist' perspective, you're absolutely right ("a difference that makes no difference is no difference"); from an 'internalist' perspective, I'm less convinced (and I think you've very cleverly slipped a false dichotomy in there; just because we have a very clear intuition on one extreme (N=1, 2, or 3) leading into a very large and poorly defined gray area (N>3 and < 100% of total), it doesn't mean that the limit is therefore proven). If you replaced every atom in my brain simultaneously, I think there's a very good chance that the internal monologue that I think of as 'me' might end -- a fade to black in my own Cartesian theater, just to abuse a phrase -- and be replaced by an indistinguishable copy. I don't know enough about the neurological basis of subjective experience to really be certain. That's interesting. I don't think I share your intuition, and I can't find a way to think myself into it. Atoms have very defined, known properties: number of protons and neutrons, charge, et cetera. We can quite confidently say that two atoms of the same type with the same charge are interchangeable. Why would a 'total atom swap' change anything about the brain, or have any relevance to consciousness? It seems that if you recognize that the mind is simply the product of material processes in the brain, you must accept that the total atom swap has no effect on consciousness. Very good post, though, thank you for making it. You're better at elucidating these ideas than I am. e: I guess what I'm saying here is that I'm confident that if there's a 'stuff' to consciousness, a minimum necessary level of structure, it's encoded in the arrangement of neurons, not the arrangement of atoms. General Battuta fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Mar 25, 2012 |
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Mar 25, 2012 18:23
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TouretteDog posted:If we make an instant copy of you three feet to the left of where you are, then both of you have identical memories up to the point of copying, and your copy's experience of being 'you' is as valid as yours. I think we both agree on that. With regards to the 'total atom swap, plus three feet displacement' experiment, I'm with Llamadeus. I don't think you would notice anything whatsoever internally, except for the fact that you're now standing three feet away. quote:Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but you and General Battuta seem to be suggesting that if we don't wait five seconds but instead destroy the original before (or even at the same instant as) we create the copy, then in some sense the subjective experience of the original somehow now doesn't end, or it does end but that the distinction between the two sets is now somehow rendered absolutely, even ontologically irrelevant to everyone -- including the original that we just killed -- simply due to fact that we never had the two existing simultaneously. The latter leading me to think that people somehow don't consider their subjective experience particularly relevant to the topic of their identity. Which strikes me as odd. I'm going to try to turn the logic of this situation on its head. I agree with you that, intuitively, it seems quite odd to say the following: "If the transporter beam disintegrates me and does nothing else, I am dead. If the transporter beam disintegrates me and then rebuilds me three feet to the left, I am alive and nothing has changed. If the transporter beam scans me but doesn't disintegrate me, rebuilds a copy of me three feet to the left (leaving me behind), and then three seconds later I am shotgunned in the face, I am dead." In other words, we're trying to tackle the problem of why we don't feel like the transporter beam kills us if it disintegrates us and then rebuilds a perfect copy, but we do feel murdered if the beam leaves the original behind - and there's no reason it shouldn't! So the crux of the matter, as I see it - and correct me if I'm wrong - is: why is instant disintegration somehow intuitively less fatal than disintegration after a five second lapse? And I think it's this: the instant teleportation scenario is what happens to us every instant. Our mindstate in any given moment destroys the previous mindstate. We are, in a sense, constantly undergoing the instant-teleportation variant. But we never share our head with ourselves from five seconds ago, and then watch that self be wiped away. I think the problem isn't that the teleporter murders you and builds a copy; it's that it forces you to confront that you're constantly murdering yourself and building a copy. The mind never forks; no previous mindstate ever causally disconnects from the current mindstate and develops on its own. quote:A substantial number of non-main-characters that get re-vented have many of their personal relationships fall apart shortly thereafter, I'd always taken it as him hinting that the copy wasn't quite the same as the real thing, that losing the shared experiences and thus changing the relationships really was changing the identity. That's a very interesting reading. Hadn't considered it. Murgos posted:Magician thought experiment That's very cool. Here's a variant: you go up on stage and the magician claims he's going to duplicate you. He blindfolds you, spins you around, and pronounces his duplication spell. When he takes the blindfold off, you're looking at a copy of yourself. How do you know, looking back, if you're the copy or the original? Some people insist vehemently that they must always be the original, because there's no physical way for them to be teleported into a new body. But after the fact, the only way for them to check the consistency of this statement is to examine their memories...which were also duplicated. It gets even fuzzier if the magician claims he can cleave you in half and then reconstruct the missing half. Who's who? Man this poo poo is fun.
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Mar 26, 2012 01:00
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Pope Guilty posted:I'm completely baffled that people seem to be suggesting the existence of a continuity of consciousness (which is seriously the only thing that could ever matter, unless you're so profoundly screwed up that you're completely casual about being murdered) between different brains with no physical continuity between them. I guess if you want to invoke souls you could assert that there's some sort of transfer or magical sympathy or something, but otherwise you've got to explain how the consciousness jumps from one piece of meat to another while sticking only to physics, which is... difficult. How do the two brains share no physical continuity? In the case of a Star Trek transporter, for example, there is clear physical continuity. The state of the atoms in the brain is recorded and then imposed on new atoms. A causal connection exists. I feel as if you're arguing against a point nobody is making: that if you get your mind state backed up, then walk outside and die after your scan concludes, the-you-who-dies wakes up in a new body. Nobody has argued this, and I find it hard to believe you could read the discussion and think that somebody has. What has been stated is that if you walk into a Culture clinic and get your mind state backed up, you will fork into two individuals who immediately begin to diverge, one of whom may die while the other lives. If you push this mindstate backup closer and closer to the moment of death - perhaps even to the moment of death, as andrew smash mentioned - you move deeper and deeper into a gray area that asks us to evaluate the difference between brief retrograde amnesia and death. General Battuta fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Mar 26, 2012 |
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Mar 26, 2012 01:46
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TouretteDog posted:I'd rather say that you don't feel like the beam is killing you if you're disintegrated and recreated simultaneously Why, though? What if the teleporter takes only half of your body, and then rebuilds the other half for each half? Has your continuity been disrupted? Are you now half-dead? (I know you're not fond of this argument-by-fractions, but I think it's a compelling question.) What if instead of being teleported you were simply placed in stasis for a few moments? Wouldn't that be an equivalent lapse in the chemistry of the body that you describe as producing the narrative subjective experience? I'm not responding to the rest of your post not because I think it's not worth responding to but because I think this above point is the one that drives our differences.
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Mar 26, 2012 02:04
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Whether it's instant or five-second delay disintegration, they both seem to very clearly result in the death of the original and consequent loss of continuity to me.
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I think the problem is that Pope Guilty thinks we're arguing that if you scan your mind state, then go out (without any implants or live link in your head) and get shot, you're going to magically appear in a new body when your mind state is downloaded and 're-sleeved'. Or, alternatively, that if you're William Riker and you die you're going to suddenly appear in the body of Thomas Riker. And I agree, that would be magical and acausal, because there's no causal connection between Fork A (who's dead now) and Fork B for information to propagate along. If that's not what Pope Guilty thinks then I don't even know. General Battuta fucked around with this message at 02:36 on Mar 26, 2012 |
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Mar 26, 2012 02:33
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Pope Guilty posted:There is no physical continuity because you're tearing the original brain apart and replicating it. Tearing the brain apart kills the person. From my standpoint it's completely irrelevant what happens after that. Nothing matters whatsoever, because you're dead. Everything else is a bizarre dodge around that. Why does tearing the brain apart kill the person? This may sound like a really stupid  question, but I think it's the heart of the matter (no pun intended). Surely the reason tearing the brain apart kills the person is because it leads to an irreversible loss of information, isn't it? It snaps the causal connections between state n-1 and state n; the brain can't render the next frame in the mindstate because it's no longer there.Your brain is routinely, if very slowly, torn apart and rebuilt, yet you aren't dead. Why is that? I apologize for playing Socrates, but surely the ship of Theseus problem has a clear and relevant answer here. Additionally: what do you think about the stasis thought experiment? Does freezing the body in stasis irretrievably kill the original brain and mind? What do you think about the bifurcation thought experiment? If the brain is split in half, and each half reconstructed into a full brain from stored information by nanomachines or a transporter, have you been irretrievably killed, or irretrievably halved? What if we just replace every other neuron? quote:Your brain and body create your consciousness. It is intrinsically the product of the meat that gives rise to it. Any other position requires magic. Surely you recognize that what you call the 'brain and body' is just a structure, that the matter which makes up that structure is in constant flux and all that's preserved is the information content it encodes? There are no special atoms containing special quanta of you that we could somehow place in a particle accelerator and say 'oh, wow, these came from Pope Guilty'. They're atoms like any other. Again: ship of Theseus. General Battuta fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Mar 26, 2012 |
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Mar 26, 2012 02:57
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Pope Guilty posted:Tearing the brain apart destroys the structure which creates the mind. Fair enough, but if the brain then gets its poo poo back together and no information is lost, isn't the mind then also recreated? Put differently: if the structure creates the mind, and the structure is repaired, why wouldn't the mind be repaired too? I guess I'm just not following this idea that if the brain stops existing for a little while then it's lights out forever, and even if the brain is later put back together it's not really you, it's just a copy. My intuition is that the particular structure of neurons in the mind is all that gives rise to consciousness, and if you have that structure recorded, you have the consciousness recorded. quote:I think you died when your brain was cut in half, and then two duplicates were constructed. Why did I die? What was lost when my brain was cut in half? How do you know some arbitrarily powerful alien hasn't committed this act upon half of your brain? General Battuta fucked around with this message at 03:28 on Mar 26, 2012 |
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Mar 26, 2012 03:26
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Pope Guilty posted:I'm perfectly willing to say that yeah, you've re-created the consciousness, but I'm less willing to suggest that the same person opens their eyes after. I'm honestly not sure. Seems fair. I'll admit I have a lot of intuitive trouble with these thought experiments I spout so readily. It's very, very hard to get past the simple intuition that if I'm disintegrated, that's all she wrote; my brain doesn't care that some outside force has recorded it and will later rebuild it. I'm intellectually confident in my intellectual conclusions, but I'd still be pretty nervous getting into a teleporter. Ceebees posted:All abord for the continuing adventures of the GSV Oh My God, They're Still Arguing About Mindstates. ROU Your Wife Will gently caress Your Backup
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Mar 26, 2012 03:30
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Diogines posted:People seem to rave over them and the premise is VERY cool, but that book is just... terrible. Don't give up on the whole series. Consider Phlebas is kind of the odd one out and sort of weird at that. If you're looking for the most accessible intro, Player of Games; if you're looking for the artsiest book, Use of Weapons.
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Apr 3, 2012 01:32
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Diogines posted:Wow!  Why? Because there are big space structures? I can't think of two writers I'd call more different.
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Apr 4, 2012 00:19
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Red Crown posted:It feels like kind of a failing to me - delusional optimism is the kind of thing that gets you selected out of the gene pool. Actually, there's some evidence this isn't true. Overconfidence may be an adaptive trait.
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Apr 17, 2012 15:28
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Krinkle posted:I just read my first Banks book, Consider Phlebas. I didn't recognize it as a reference to The Waste Land, so first of all I was wondering what the heck a Phlebas was, a planet, a character, a concept... Who knows! It was frustrating waiting for the title to be explained and it never was. Player of Games is a much happier book, I would definitely recommend reading it - not just because it's a more enjoyable read, but because it'll help cheer up your perception of the whole Culture universe.
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May 25, 2012 12:37
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Barry Foster posted:I'd agree with this. Matter basically strikes me as Banks doing a sci-fi version of Don Quixote, and just as Sancho Panza is the best of that book, Choubris Holse is the best part of Matter. Matter is slightly subversive in that it seems to be making an argument for the insignificance of the human in the face of the vast history and political scope of the Culture galaxy. What's-his-face the betrayer general is set up as a really compelling, loathsome villain, and for most of the book we're occupied with a vain prince's quest to unseat him, and his younger brother's journey out of childhood naivete. But in the end they're all devoured - comped, as Matter would say - by this ancient machine war that renders their struggles totally irrelevant.
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Jun 26, 2012 15:01
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It was a really uneven book with frustrating pacing but a fair bit of cool stuff. I liked the pessimistic setting, which felt a lot bigger and more dangerous than the Culture.
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Jun 28, 2012 15:55
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While the Affront are pretty jovial and hilarious on-screen, I think it's worth remembering that they're a species of sadistic rapists with a penchant for the species-wide moral equivalent of genital mutilation (worse, I guess). I'm sure they have their own moral standards and all but much like the Culture I'm little inclined to respect them. They're great characters, but part of that greatness is the seductive bonhomie of their jovially psychopathic screen presence counterposed against the fact that they're severely hosed up. I'm not totally sure what it says about that guy from Excession that he wanted to be one of them.
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Jul 3, 2012 14:53
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I am OK posted:Why? For once sci-fi explored fairly complex, interesting, morally ambiguous characters whose bad decisions parts of you could relate to and sympathise with. I would say that most of us are capable of being cold in the face of kindness and that most of us have made some horrifically bad decisions that we've never come to terms with. It's just that the culture framework amplifies the results of this to a much larger scale. I agree with all your general feelings about genre writing, but I don't think Excession is the best showcase of Banks' talents in these areas, nor is it nearly the best science fiction novel to tackle these themes. It does have some great character work, though.
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Jul 11, 2012 07:36
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But the ships name themselves, Mr. Banks! 
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Jul 11, 2012 15:48
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WastedJoker posted:I prefer Alastair Reynolds because his books are easier to follow from a story perspective rather than Banks' seemingly obtuse meandering which only comes together in the final chapters. Reynolds gets by almost entirely on atmosphere and mood, though. Banks can actually write characters and subtext and everything else that's needed to hold up as Real Literature. Don't get me wrong, I've really enjoyed a lot of Reynolds' work - less so lately, but still - and while I have no problem with you preferring him to Banks, I don't think he's nearly as accomplished a writer. He excels at one thing, the creepy cold slightly detached techno-Gothic story of unease, but he's got no range.
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Sep 17, 2012 18:50
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Those On My Left posted:I've also read Excession, but I was too young and don't remember it now. I'll have to revisit it at some point. For now, though, I'm making my way through Use of Weapons. I'm maybe a quarter of the way into it. I'm finding the individual chapters quite rich and satisfying on their own, but I'm having difficulty making sense of how they fit together. I think part of the problem might be that I'm doing it as an audiobook. I'm going to pick up the paperback and see if it's easier to follow. Use of Weapons all comes together at the very end and I envy you being able to experience that for the first time.
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Mar 3, 2013 23:58
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drat, that was A Really Good Post.
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Mar 14, 2013 00:57
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Wolfechu posted:I can't say how sad this makes me. I can't even think of a similar announcement that actually made me cry. This one certainly bloody did. Me too. 
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Apr 3, 2013 16:51
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Those On My Left posted:Oh sorry, I didn't realise that the author's impending death meant you could ruin the books for anyone who came here to commiserate (I mean they've been out for a while, if you haven't read them then gently caress your ability to read them unspoiled). Come on man, not now. Heck, you've read more of Banks than me.
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Apr 5, 2013 01:57
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My impression in general has been that the Asher Polity books are like Banks if Banks were a fascist.
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Apr 6, 2013 19:36
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Lex Talionis posted:Glen Cook's The Dragon Never Sleeps came out in 1988, just a year after Consider Phlebas and two years before Use of Weapons, yet if it had come out in 1998, I would be here saying it owes an immense debt to Banks' Culture universe in general and Use of Weapons in particular. It's a wide screen space opera with strange AI ships, an immense human civilization whose decadent core is surrounded by a surprisingly ferocious military, and centers on the question of whether that military's actions, and therefore the actions of those who fight for and against it, are ethical. Seems like printing The Dragon Never Sleeps may be a publisher-killer
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Apr 7, 2013 03:11
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WeAreTheRomans posted:Charles Stross vacillates back and forth between embarassing and near-Banks-level awesome. China Mieville is great, if you consider him sci-fi. And that guy that did Altered Carbon. But yeah that's about it Definitely not true (and definitely tilted heavily male - not your fault, but for some reason the men in the field seem to get a lot more exposure). There is a lot of really excellent talent out there right now, though a lot of it pops up more often in short form than long form. In terms of long form authors, CJ Cherryh is still alive and Connie Willis is producing, though I haven't read her more recent work. Alastair Reynolds, when he's good, is arguably a more interesting author than Charles Stross. In short fiction Ted Chiang is a marvel.
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Apr 8, 2013 23:30
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Banks never wrote thrillers.
General Battuta fucked around with this message at 23:15 on May 23, 2013 |
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May 23, 2013 23:04
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I didn't think Anathem actually got into any particularly deep philosophy, but it's a really great primer on basic logic and interesting topics in pure math. Also your first step for any genre book on the philosophy of consciousness should be Blindsight, the definitive Science Fiction About Consciousness.
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Jun 1, 2013 06:52
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