Comment by akkartik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akkartik | Hacker News Reader

"The new Power had no weapons on the ground, nothing but a comm laser. That could not even melt steel at the frigate’s range. No matter, the laser was aimed, tuned civilly on the retreating warship’s receiver. No acknowledgment. The humans knew what communication would bring. The laser light flickered here and there across the hull, lighting smoothness and inactive sensors, sliding across the ship’s ultradrive spines. Searching, probing. The Power had never bothered to sabotage the external hull, but that was no problem. Even this crude machine had thousands of robot sensors scattered across its surface, reporting status and danger, driving utility programs. Most were shut down now, the ship fleeing nearly blind. They thought by not looking that they could be safe.

"One more second and the frigate would attain interstellar safety.

"The laser flickered on a failure sensor, a sensor that reported critical changes in one of the ultradrive spines. Its interrupts could not be ignored if the star jump were to succeed. Interrupt honored. Interrupt handler running, looking out, receiving more light from the laser far below…a backdoor into the ship’s code, installed when the newborn had subverted the humans’ groundside equipment…

"…and the Power was aboard, with milliseconds to spare. Its agents—not even human equivalent on this primitive hardware—raced through the ship’s automation, shutting down, aborting. There would be no jump. Cameras in the ship’s bridge showed widening of eyes, the beginning of a scream. The humans knew, to the extent that horror can live in a fraction of a second."

http://akkartik.name/post/straumli

Have you read Rainbows End?

Yes, though I don't remember any of it 15+ years later. Do you have a (spoiler-free) reason to reread it? :)

It is about a lab engineered virus that spreads around the world. I had read it long before the pandemic.

Reading this reminds me of the enormous chasm that exists between the vast majority of overwrought poorly written science fiction like this, and the absolute best of the genre.

Merry Christmas to you too.

Vinge has won plenty of awards. Can you recommend a book that is better and not a obvious top 50 SciFi books that most of us have read already?

Reminds me of that infinite pain I felt in my soul when I resigned to the idea that Blindsight by Peter Watts could be a fantastic Scifi book, but its writing is so obtuse and impenetrable I am permanently locked out of its story.

Anyone care to recommend a dark scifi book about utterly alien lifeforms or worlds, that are more accessible to someone with average IQ?

https://youtu.be/DnF7LMkGxhY

Yeah, Blindsight is great in many ways but the aliens aren't really the centerpiece. Once they get too alien you just get noise.

As it happens, I recently inventoried my favorite aliens and eliminated the ones that were too humanized and also not understandable to people. I might be missing something obvious, but the one that sticks in my mind 2 years after I read it is:

Pandora's Star

"Fire Upon The Deep" was great until it got to the part about the dog kingdom.

I stopped reading at the dog kingdom.

A few chapters in, it felt like I had been baited with a veneer of scifi over a core of anthropomorphic medieval historical fiction. Do the dogs connect back to the AIs in a satisfying way? Should I give it a second chance? ChatGPT says

    As the story progresses, the puppies become involved in the larger
    conflict that is taking place in the galaxy, and they play a key role
    in helping the human and alien characters achieve their goals.
    The puppies' involvement with the artificial intelligences (AIs) in the
    story is a central part of the plot, and the resolution of the conflict
    between the puppies and the AIs is an important part of the story's
    resolution.

which I take as a "yes." Any humans care to weigh in?

AFAIR "no". Humans interact with both the AIs and the "dogs", and both groups of humans end up in contact with each other, but unless I'm missing something, the "dogs" don't directly interact with the AIs in any significant way (or the two threads end up interfering with each other, but more in a "they distract some of the characters" in both cases).

I don't really think of any Vernor Vinge as hard scifi that's got a core "theme" that everything has to connect to. It's rather space opera with fairly deep world building. Every chapter has certain "episodic" aspects, often exploring a single theme, and some chapters advance the broader story arc more than others. So no, the Tines don't connect to the AIs. Instead the Tines contribute to the warp and weft of the story just like the AIs. The angle in their subplot that sticks with me a decade later is the exploration of sense of self when split up between multiple bodies. And what happens to the sense of self when the number of bodies grows or shrinks.

To be fair, "A Deepness in the Sky" has a richer world than Fire. When I reread Fire a few years later I did tend to skim the Tines as well. Whereas every one of the half dozen themes in Deepness has remained compelling after multiple readings.

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