Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Nebakenezzer
Sep 13, 2005

The Mote in God's Eye

Seveneves (Neal Stephenson's not doing well in this thread) has the concept of a tethered city that can be raised and lowered by an in-orbit truss, I thought that was pretty neat.

The Safehold series has a really strong opening. When mankind reaches the stars, it gets annihilated by an alien species that is some sort of ur-orthodox civilization that is completely stagnant in its development but has giant amounts of ships and is good at the steller genocide thing. Mankind manage to fool this race, concealing a fleet of ships hyperspacing to an earth-like planet. They then terriform the planet into an earthlike one, start cloning humanoids, etc. Here's the thing, though: the aliens are listening for radio transmissions, so a socitey needs to be engineered to a low level of tech and staying there for at least a few hundred years. The Scientists in charge of this decide the way to do this is to set themself up as angels of Gods (if not immortal than they are very long lived thanks to future meditech) and pass God's holy writ to the people, which is a series of religious commandments. Different angels pass down different codes, and while the main goal is to discourage scientific advancement, some of the religious scripture gives the population of safehold something of a break, detailing things like agriculture, hygene, diet, some basis for equity between sexes, laws against slavery, why lead is an abomination in drinking water because it curses the population, etc.

Now what happens next: when I read the first book, I figured this was a plan to make humanity come back. Keep safehold safe until the reapers go back to sleep, then have your civilization set up essentially as a lab to emphasize fighting against superior or overwhelming power, so when humanity is ready they can return to the stars and not alert the reapers until humanity is ready to bring it. The oppressive socitey is made to break down in the long run. This is not what happens. Instead, the scientists become split over what the end goal is (permanent stasis vs. not that) a war happens, and all the angels are killed, along with a continent which was bombarded from orbit. Then, a failsafe activates: 800 years after the angel war, the mind of a dead Swedish-American woman awakes in a cyborg shell, in a subterranean fortress made when the world was first altered.. She has access to the sum total of human future tech: perfect cyborg bodies, AI servants, all the knowledge and technology of mankind. And her job is to break the permanent stasis, with the world of safehold in a late medieval/early renaissance period. After learning and observing the world for a century or so, she sees a Thirty Years War-esque religious schism forming, and backs the not-American side.

This is all quite cool, but things go downhill from there, as the entire point of the series is "wow, the Protestants are good and the Catholics are terrible." The woman makes herself a male cyborg, gets herself a Katana, starts calling herself Merlin, and sells himself as a wizard with access to hidden knowledge. Did I mention that because of electrons, she can move as fast as bullet time and has superhuman strength and speed? Because the author is so with the good guys, they are basically flawless, which as far as characters go is deadly dull. You get that weird Star Wars prequel thing where the only relatable characters are the bad guys, because as awful as they are mostly, they at least have more recognizable human motives. If you really specifically like military history or the development of technology it's still readable, but everybody else can check out.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply