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Vernii posted:The Revelation Space books had a lot of mindfuck moments. In particular, it's a series in which not only does FTL travel not exist but every attempt to experiment with it ends disastrously by wiping the people attempting it from the timeline. The only way to piece together that an accident even happened is leftover residual evidence from the old timeline and figuring out ways in which the new timeline isn't quite right. That quite fun, as it matches up with physics showing that all forms of FTL are effectively a time machine, and how any kind of time travel eventually leads to massive problems. I guess once you have a time machine the time line becomes unstable until sooner or later someone winds up travelling back far enough to prevent time machine technology ever coming about (probably by virtue of any FTL capable ship being capable of wiping out an entire planet by velocity alone). Maybe the civilisation lasts for a subjective time of trillions of years, but it getting time wiped is inevitable and once it happened it's like they never existed at all. Man, that is mind blowing. 
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Apr 11, 2021 09:25
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Gangringo posted:For actual content I really enjoyed a scene in one of the Culture novels where the ship is showing a person what they think is a real-time view of a fight it is having with another ship but then the ship says something like "and this part coming up is the best" That's Surface Detail. The central schism in that book is good, war over the existence of virtual hells to simulate dead assholes from your species. The cool little detail is that virtual hells still require physical hardware to run, so of course an enterprising guy winds up cornering the hell market and owns 70% of all hells.
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Apr 26, 2021 07:59
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I see no possible problems with an automated doomsday device. Especially one you need to react to never before seen technology from a much more advanced enemy.
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Jun 1, 2021 18:48
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indigi posted:the human system is perfect (???) The human system failed. So would have any automated system. The Trisolarans were throwing intelligent protons at Earth. There would simply be no way to automate a defence when you couldn't predict what an attack looked like (nevermind the eventual false positive). Earth was doomed from the start. Their advanced technology wasn't even their greatest advantage. They were capable of a resolve far greater than mankind. When Earth was discovered the entire planets resources were dedicated to a one shot hundreds year long plan to conquer it. When we had a gun to their head, all they needed to do was wait for the hand to waiver, regardless of how long it took.
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Jun 1, 2021 20:18
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indigi posted:that's why you give the trigger to a robot, whose hand will not waver When every computer system is wide open to the sophons? Crazy.
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Jun 1, 2021 20:46
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indigi posted:just put it in an anti-sophon box. this isn't difficult When the sophons have prevented the development of anti-sophon technology?!
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Jun 1, 2021 20:51
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frogge posted:Just watched Stargate SG-1's episode, "A Matter of Time" and they handle time dilation from a black hole really well. That episode sells "overwhelming natural disaster" pretty well imo. Starts with the team looking at a still picture of one of the red shirt teams that hasn't come back from a routine mission. But the still picture is a live feed. They zoom in on the corner of the picture one of the men is looking at. Goddamn black hole is heading for the planet and the team are so highly time dilated they are in ultra slow motion. There's no possibility of rescue, so they decide to close the link rather than trying to observe the black hole for science ("watching good men die in slow motion" says O'Neil). But they can't. Turns out gravity is transmitted through the wormhole, so the Stargate is dilated as well and is closing so slowly the whole Earth is going to be pulled through this 5 meter hole as the black hole gets closer. As the episode goes on time dilation gets more extreme, and people who leave the compound for days come back to the command team for whom nearly no time has passed at all. Great concept, great episode. Proper disaster movie quality going on.
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Jun 2, 2021 08:40
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I mean, wouldn't he just disappear forever into a work camp if he came out swinging against the CCP? I feel like we have to factor that into account.
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Jun 19, 2021 22:24
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MadDogMike posted:The whole “Dark Forest” theme is kind of messed up. Every alien race is a bunch of genocidal assholes and the only hope is to hide or kill them first? That’s xenophobic as gently caress, not to mention kinda suspect how it reads if you transfer it to real world racial politics and a lot of other particular philosophies that accept zero-sum as the only possible interactions. Also, as I’ve noted elsewhere it only works if the darkness part of it covers the murderer; if as is more likely a genocidal attack is likely to be not only visible to non-targets but traceable back (i.e. look which way the relativistic kill attack came from or similar), that approach is a good way for any xenophobes to get killed themselves. The Dark Forest theory long predates the Dark Forest book. It just forms a central theme. We wouldn't even be blinking if an American had written a book with that premise.
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Jun 21, 2021 21:01
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Fivemarks posted:Yes we would. If Someone brought up The Killing Star, I'd raise a fuss about how it's central premise is inherently xenophobic and depressingly cynical. I talk about how E.E Doc Smith and H. Beam Piper both have terrible ideas that they put in their works and how it ruins them. This isn't sinophobia- this is disliking regressive and xenophobic politics and outlooks regardless of the source. It's not that you're wrong about the author, but this is the same arguement we see from freeze peach defenders. Lots of noise about how in theory they would rush to defend a Marxist, yet strangely only ever seen to defend fascism. I'm happy to go over Bad Politics Authors, but in the context of rising and virulent sinophobia it's a bad look that it's only the 3BP guy getting savaged.
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Jun 23, 2021 10:39
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Chocobo posted:Trying to slog through the Rendezvous with Rama sequels (which I actually didn't realize were written by Gentry Lee and not Arthur C Clarke) and it is the most painful reading I've ever done. It's horrifically dated. The characters and language just keep getting more and more vile. I thought I was reading something from the 50's, but then looked it up and it was written in the 90's. Mind blown. The genius of Rendezvous (and Fiasco, by Lem) is that the protagonists are just discovering what are probably entirely prosaic structures for the aliens. There's an element of mystery and puzzle box, but the novel gives the impression that there are completely sensible explainations for everything that we can sort of get a feel for, but not fully understand. Contrast with new Battlestar Galactica which just piles up the mystery box but it's obvious just puzzles with no real answers for the sake of it. I can respect Clarke for selling off the series and living large on the profits. Ideally that would have involved less underage prostitutes though.
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Jun 26, 2021 19:55
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ptkfvk posted:Rama is the first time i remember being awed at a book. just so many cool things happening so often. one of the things i love about Iain Banks or Vernor Vinge is the ability to describe huge events in such awesome detail. The fall of Relay in fire upon the deep and the chase through the realms of thought. Or the various huge happenings in Culture books. The Megaships crashing into the icebergs in Phelbas was very cool. Religion in Dune is just sufficiently advanced social science. You will believe a series of tropes that provide any Bene Gesserit operative a convenient set of levers when required.
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Jun 30, 2021 18:47
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I think the Borg were undoubtedly a much stronger concept pre-First Contact, but the thing is once you did Best of Both Worlds you had reached a point where that original concept had basically tapped out as direct antagonists. You could do a Hue episode, where they were a background threat, but ultimately without a "face" they were never going to be able to get enough additional characterisation to compete with the drama that even a bog standard Shakespeare quoting ham can bring as the villain of the week. The Queen is a necessary evil to maintain parity with that in the long term.
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Jul 26, 2021 22:26
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Sisko and Picard teaming up to fight the Borg sounds like a fun buddy movie. Ahab buddies? In this exact situation only, Picard is the angry and overly aggressive captain. No-one would believe a word of Siskos debrief.
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Jul 29, 2021 11:17
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