Make sure you get Cyberiad and Star Diaries. I'm not sure how good the English translation is for both of these (Cyberiad uses a lot of Polish puns, while Star Diaries is really dense, language-wise, on par with Stephenson I'd say), but they are the best things Lem ever wrote.
(He seems to thrive on short form, never enjoyed his novels as much as his short stories)
Short excerpt from Cyberiad:
One day Trurl the constructor put together a machine that could create anything starting with n. When it was ready, he tried it out, ordering it to make needles, then nankeens and negligees, which it did, then nail the lot to narghiles filled with nepenthe and numerous other narcotics. The machine carried out his instructions to the letter. Still not completely sure of its ability, he had it produce, one after the other, nimbuses, noodles, nuclei, neutrons, naphtha, noses, nymphs, naiads, and natrium. This last it could not do, and Trurl, considerably irritated, demanded an explanation.
"Never heard of it," said the machine.
"What? But it's only sodium. You know, the metal, the element..."
"Sodium starts with an s, and I work only in n."
"But in Latin it's natrium."
"Look, old boy," said the machine, "if I could do everything starting with n in every possible language, I'd be a Machine That Could Do Everything in the Whole Alphabet, since any item you care to mention undoubtedly starts with n in one foreign language or another. It's not that easy. I can't go beyond what you programmed. So no sodium."
I was going to be too busy and not answer this thread, but darnit now I have to. This is a topic near and dear to my heart, or at least it was before I forgot how to read.
First off about Lem, oddly enough my ancient super conservative father had a ton of Lem books so I've read a bunch of them. They're very weird, quite creative, and sometimes quite funny. I definitely second the recommendation for the Cyberiad, since Trurl and Klaupacious (sp?) and their wacky inventor adventures were some of the most hilarious and readable. I particularly remember one about them outwitting a king who wanted the ultimate robot beast to hunt.
The Pirx the Pilot books by Lem were more serious and adventure-y but still decent.
Second off, I used to buy random bookstore scifi novels if glancing at the back cover or inside the book looked neat, and I got a book called Helix by Eric Brown. The sequel was called Helix Wars and I don't remember if it was as good, but at least for the original I remember bits and pieces about neat science fiction concepts. The biggest is the helix itself of course, basically a bunch of planets strung together in a giant helix shape, and it turns out there are ancient alien technology style maintenance corridors buried deep in the helix where you can travel to neighboring planets. Or something like that. And each planet would have unique ecosystems, and if I recall correctly some or most planets would have atmospheres that were too dense or cloudy for them to actually see through and realize they were on an enormous helix, kind of like the Star Trek thing about primitive species who aren't space ready yet.
Third and finally off, Vernor Vinge. I'm going to make another post for that since I may wax longer than I expect.
If you like more sci-fi noir, check out the Kop series. Its kind of pulpy and gritty, but the world is the real star. The stories are set on a planet where the colonists traveled there manually to start a prosperous future, but by the time they arrived and settled, tech back on Earth had advanced and the resources on the planet had become obsolete. So it became a swampy forgotten crime-infested backwater colony, where more high tech offworlders come to indulge in vices and shady dealings.
I appreciate the recommendation. Way back when I read Altered Carbon, I had asked in the reading thread if there were similar books but didn't get any suggestions. Kop will definitely be my next book read.
Make sure you get Cyberiad and Star Diaries. I'm not sure how good the English translation is for both of these (Cyberiad uses a lot of Polish puns, while Star Diaries is really dense, language-wise, on par with Stephenson I'd say), but they are the best things Lem ever wrote.
(He seems to thrive on short form, never enjoyed his novels as much as his short stories)
The witty wordplay and puns really shine when read aloud. Your excerpt was the sample, and it hooked me right way. I particularly liked this part too;
...But now heres the third command: Machine, do Nothing!
The machine sat still. Klapaucius rubbed his hands in triumph, but Trurl said:
Well, what did you expect? You asked it to do nothing, and its doing nothing.
Correction: I asked it to do Nothing, but its doing nothing.
Nothing is nothing!
Come, come. It was supposed to do Nothing, but it hasnt done anything, and therefore Ive won...
They get less witty and more existential, the further you go in (they are sorted chronologically, I think).
If you want wit, some of the earlier Ijon Tichy (Star Diaries) stories are like that. You may also try Mortal Engines.
I like reading about futures not locked into Western cultures. Ian McDonald is great about this. He's done Brazil, India, and Turkey in great detail. I love his India, full of insane high technology and AI's who act as soap opera divas, cheek to jowl with ayurvedic medicine and AI killers who hunt AI when it gets to powerful. His current series, Luna, involves families from S. America, Japan, China, etc. It's nice to see someone other than white Europeans in space.
I'm a big fan of high-concept physics told by real scientists. Stephen Baxter's xeelee sequence has a ton of crazy physics stuff in it, from folded spacetime used as a construction material to sociological barriers to cultural change to ensure wars that last ten thousand years keep chugging along.
I love science fiction because of the ideas more than anything else.
I like reading about futures not locked into Western cultures. Ian McDonald is great about this. He's done Brazil, India, and Turkey in great detail. I love his India, full of insane high technology and AI's who act as soap opera divas, cheek to jowl with ayurvedic medicine and AI killers who hunt AI when it gets to powerful. His current series, Luna, involves families from S. America, Japan, China, etc. It's nice to see someone other than white Europeans in space.
I like reading about futures not locked into Western cultures. Ian McDonald is great about this. He's done Brazil, India, and Turkey in great detail. I love his India, full of insane high technology and AI's who act as soap opera divas, cheek to jowl with ayurvedic medicine and AI killers who hunt AI when it gets to powerful. His current series, Luna, involves families from S. America, Japan, China, etc. It's nice to see someone other than white Europeans in space.
Not a specific city, but When Gravity Fails is set in a cyberpunk Middle East where cheap brain augmentations are common that can switch personalities (want to be James Bond and impress your friends?) or imbue one with new skills
Okay, Vernor Vinge. I didn't even realize he was a mathematics and computer science professor until I looked him up on Wikipedia tonight, but it makes sense. Seeing him mentioned 3+ times in the thread already makes sense, and things have been flooding back to my mind.
Admittedly I haven't read a ton of science fiction. I've read Star Wars books, Dune, Ender's Game, Zones of Thought, Helix, Altered Carbon etc. Maybe I'm just underexposed. Still, Vinge's Zones of Thought series -- A Fire Upon The Deep, A Deepness In The Sky, I haven't read the third book which I heard was a bit disappointing in comparison -- more than pretty much any fiction I've ever read, left me feeling like my brain had actually expanded and gotten smarter trying to imagine these wildly creative concepts over immensely vast time and space scales. They stuck with me for years, popping up at unexpected times. Here are some brief random ones, trying to avoid major spoilers since a lot of the joy is in the discovery while you read.
Actually alien aliens
At least two of the species were already described in the thread. Unlike the normal humanoid aliens of many movies and books, Vinge likes making aliens that are described in human terms, but which are physically very unusual. There are the no-long-term memory plants that some advanced civilization noticed and created electronic karts with memories for. The karts let them store and retrieve longterm memories, travel from place to place, and I suppose have robot arms and things like that.
There are the hivemind dog aliens who use short-distance sound communication to form a consciousness that is a combination of the individual personalities. This idea is explored further with the addition of radio. The book explores how that would feel weird: Essentially you are splitting yourself over three different mountains, you can see in all these different directions far apart, and yet you're still yourself. But if one of those communication links fails, the individual feels lost and panicky, the collective is affected, etc.
There are the spider aliens who have their own chapters about various characters. They're perfectly normal, just like the chapter is about human characters, until you start noticing little details in the writing about more than 2 legs, or about mandibles, or about some part of how they live, and then you discover they're crazy spiders. And they're on a planet that has catastrophic upheaval on a schedule (every 7 years or something?), so they essentially reset back to an early level of technology while they hibernate deep in the ground and most aboveground structures are destroyed. Then they try to kickstart manufacturing and so forth again, get power back on, and continue. Spiders with hibernation areas that aren't good enough may die if the periodic storms etc. are especially severe. Humans find this really weird planet and start discovering things about the spiders, of course.
Zones of thought
As mentioned earlier in the thread, one of the most creative ways to get around the "well that's physically impossible" problem is the concept of zones in this series. Earth and everywhere around it are in a "slow zone", where people can't exceed the speed of light, computers can only operate so fast, etc. The further out humans travel, the more the laws of physics change, the faster they can travel, the better computers work, and so forth. Certain engine types are invented that can exceed the speed of light and only work in the middle or outer zones. Otherworldly advanced intelligences, A.I. etc. only exist in the extreme outer unknown zones.
This ties into the start of one of the novels in that some humans decide to explore a planet with an old ruin near the outer limits of the middle galactic zone, if I recall correctly. Ancient alien ruins, what could go wrong, etc. They start finding what seem to be schematics or blueprints, and they start building networks and computers. They work well. They work REALLY well. In fact, as they keep following the instructions and analyzing these things, they start realizing that the networks and computers are operating at more than their theoretical limits. They are actually faster than is possible. That is when they realize that maybe they don't understand how everything works out here, and maybe they shouldn't have blindly just built this stuff, BUT LET'S JUST KEEP GOING ANYWAY because only a few scientists are concerned about this, and then of course everything goes downhill quite quickly.
Enormous scale
About the zones mentioned previously, there are "storms" and the zones can shift. If you're near a boundary and can't adjust in time, you can end up stranding yourself in a slow zone. Suddenly your advanced ship automation stops working. Your ultra fast engine stops working. I think at least one major character ended up in this situation, and you can imagine yourself in it -- stranded in the middle of nowhere, literal lightyears away from anything at all. Alone, your only option is to set autopilot, cross your fingers, and cryofreeze yourself. If you somehow end up found in the distant future, or wake up because the cryo failed, everything you knew may be long gone, and you will be in a totally alien place. You will look up, and the stars will be different here.
The books also touch on how human societies could actually function on galactic scales. There's a family of people who become successful traders, and their leaders start planning how they can expand more than humans are traditionally limited. Of course you can't do a phone call when signals take decades to reach the other side, so they start planning galactic family reunions. They have some sort of reliable way to track time passing, and every 10-20-50 years or whatever, everyone knows they're supposed to reconvene at a certain agreed spot. The traders and/or representatives then fly their spaceships in, everyone catches up, everyone syncs up their computers, technological knowledge, yada yada, and they plan the next empire step. They've also genetically engineered themselves to be especially hardy in almost permanent space travel.
There's the concept of distributed knowledge databases that the traders have, and the job of "software archeologist" has become extremely valuable. This resonated with me personally because I've probably had to do this sort of thing on a small scale. The idea is that if you keep building up knowledge and technology, and then building on older pieces of code, and then building bigger things with those building blocks, there comes a point where people don't remember what the original small pieces did, where they came from, whether they're safe in all cases, whether there is an issue because of the Unix epoch starting point (this is actually referenced in the books if I recall correctly, and it makes even more sense to learn that the author was a CS professor), and so on. Software archeologists have the experience to dig into this ancient mess and figure out what can be useful, modified, and put together with other things safely.
Humans as tools
One of the main villain societies uses something called Focus as a massive aid to their advancement and success in conquering other societies. Basically, they have something like a reverse MRI machine that can manipulate human brains on an extremely precise level. They take talented people and block off parts of their brains, focusing them on their one specialty to the exclusion of virtually everything else.
They basically become complex and delicate tools. They have basic feeding needs and I guess some rest, and there are maintainer technicians to tune the brains, keep the focused humans from causing problems, etc. This whole concept is of course repulsive slavery to all outsiders, but the villains justify it by saying that a ton of human progress in general comes from people "with no lives" -- scientists and inventors who are so focused on their passion that they even forget to eat and sleep, that sort of thing. Your wife is a very talented translator of alien languages. Well, imagine if that was ALL she ever thought about? She'll be a super translator, how useful to society as a whole, you should be happy for her if you loved her. And then there's exploration of trying to rescue people from this state, or hijack the brain with smells that trigger memories because of how strong that part of the brain is, etc.
Some of the neatest moments are spoilery because again, the joy is in the discovery and reveal, so please highlight with caution.
I thought the reveal was really neat about the meaning of A Deepness In The Sky:
I would guess "deepness in the sky" meant something about deep space or whatever. Eventually you learn that when the spiders hibernate deep in the ground, they call each such location a "deepness", which makes sense. And eventually when they learn about humans and space travel, the technologically advanced and forward-thinking spiders finally discover that a new option is open to them: Instead of being faced with inevitable death and the loss of most of their science and technology, they can finally live on with their family and continue forward progress in space. In the sky. A spacecraft is, in effect, a deepness in the sky.
And a big spoiler reveal about Phan near the end of Deepness:
There's this crazy old bumbling incompetent trader guy who is always bragging about his military exploits, enormous travels, wild adventures etc. The villains let him hang around and be unmolested because he's amusing and his stories are obviously fake. In the end, it turns out that most everything he said was true. At face value, he sort of sells out the humans by letting the villains discover some nanotech-ish technology, and they pour over the schematics with great care assuming there's some trick, but they can't find anything. They start using these little particle systems because they're great for monitoring all over a space station etc. It turns out that the old guy is a software archeologist, knows an ancient backdoor, probably programmed it himself, and it requires arranging the particles on yourself (e.g. in your ear) in a certain orientation and doing some sort of physical motion that's unlikely to happen accidentally. This basically unlocks a debug mode where he can sense things through walls, monitor everyone, block the villains, and overthrow them.
Space Elevators. There's just something in the aesthetic, and the mechanics of having an actual spaceport that's the main point of contact for a planet work way too well.
Century-Spanning master plans by dead guys.
Gundam 00 \ Foundation being the best examples.
No, seriously. It's about everything you're asking for, and then some. Push through some of the wonky chinese-to-english translation and you'll be Blown away.
(Maybe you've already read it, it's too good of a fit)
Space Elevators. There's just something in the aesthetic, and the mechanics of having an actual spaceport that's the main point of contact for a planet work way too well.
Century-Spanning master plans by dead guys.
Gundam 00 \ Foundation being the best examples.
Read Three Body Problem.
Now.
Thank me later.
No, seriously. It's about everything you're asking for, and then some. Push through some of the wonky chinese-to-english translation and you'll be Blown away.
(Maybe you've already read it, it's too good of a fit)
Altered Carbon's "sleeves" are really cool too. It's a concept done often in other works, but exploring the darker, seedier ways such a technology could be used for, rather than a more optimistic view, made for some compelling world-building.
This one is my favorite.
Really blew my mind reading Altered Carbon and the idea of sleeves and having backups, uplinks, etc.
Also thought the concept of uploading someones conscience into a program for specific goals was very interesting.
I think there's a torture program being used at one point if I remember correctly (read the books a while ago).
weirdly one of my favorites is something i cant actually think of many examples of, but hey maybe yall can help with that.
Far-far future stories. when the plot takes its characters much to far into the future, like millions of years from now, where civilizations are long since gone, the stars have exhausted themselves and planets have crumbled. it creates an environment, hell a general context that is just so completely alien and difficult that i cant help but be completely fascinated by it.
so yeah, if anyone can think of good examples of that kinda thing i would love to hear it.
weirdly one of my favorites is something i cant actually think of many examples of, but hey maybe yall can help with that.
Far-far future stories. when the plot takes its characters much to far into the future, like millions of years from now, where civilizations are long since gone, the stars have exhausted themselves and planets have crumbled. it creates an environment, hell a general context that is just so completely alien and difficult that i cant help but be completely fascinated by it.
so yeah, if anyone can think of good examples of that kinda thing i would love to hear it.
weirdly one of my favorites is something i cant actually think of many examples of, but hey maybe yall can help with that.
Far-far future stories. when the plot takes its characters much to far into the future, like millions of years from now, where civilizations are long since gone, the stars have exhausted themselves and planets have crumbled. it creates an environment, hell a general context that is just so completely alien and difficult that i cant help but be completely fascinated by it.
so yeah, if anyone can think of good examples of that kinda thing i would love to hear it.
Samuel R. Delany kind perfected an alien culture by creating such an austere depictions of language, sexuality, and family constructs. He also had really neat depiction of what would now be the internet, complete with googling information for instant knowledge and the void and impact caused by not being able to obtain knowledge through the web (he even called it the web in 1984).
Making the familiar foreign really brings impact to alien landscapes.
I like the concept of intelligent species with multiple-stage life cycles.
I don't really know of many stories that use this concept, though. The only one I can think of is the book "piggies" from Ender's Game. A description of their lifecycle is apparently a spoiler, so I'll tag it:
they start life as unintelligent grub-like creatures living in the bark of a tree. After leaving the tree, they become intelligent, talking human-like creatures. Finally, after death, they become super-intelligent, telepathic tree-like creatures.
Unfortuantely, the actual plot of the book didn't interest me at all, so I haven't read the book.
Also, I'd love to see stories about intelligent species with huge variations in body type between individuals, like ants on earth, or colonial organisms like pyrosomes or portugese man o' wars.
You might try Banks' The Algebraist. It features a super long-lived gas giant species that goes through several different physical changes over time. Their society in general is fun to read about considering how different it is to ours due to their extreme longevity (and the fact that they live exclusively in friggin' gas giants).
I know it's a game and all, but some of the lore in Destiny is quite good. Especially the Book of Sorrows.
Essentially a big lore dump on the final boss of a huge dungeon, it deals with how he came to be millions of years ago. Or actually, she. It's very cool to read about very alien creatures from their point of view. The way they talk and think is handled quite well, even though they are humanoid in many ways. They basically live on the remains of a small planet which has crashed into the surface of a huge gas giant.
The main character is female at the start of the story, and gradually changes sex over the course of the plot. Her race itself, while powerful and advanced, alter themselves by ingesting parasitic worms which make the host immortal - at the cost of constantly having to feed by killing. Over the course of millions of years, it's implied that they have exterminated thousands of advanced civilizations to feed the parasites' undying hunger. It's also hinted at that the parasite worms are actually gods.
This leads to some interesting alterations to their biology, and basically makes them a completely new race that's symbiotic with the worm. They eventually become so powerful that they can create new realities and dimensions at will.
It's sad that a lot of this stuff is just hidden away outside the game, and it's not something most players are likely to ever read.
Listening to the intro of Lem's Memoirs Found In A Bathtub, and I now have to ask if there are any other works that do the whole "ancient archaeology for modern times" angle for an entire story or framing device. Ammer-Ka, dok-ments, li-brees...it's simultaneously hilarious and thought-provoking
I like it when the aliens find humans a little bit odd/scary. There's a bit of this in Mass Effect, where our diversity and adaptational capabilities catch the galactic community off guard, which is probably taken mostly from the Uplift series, which ME owes a lot to overall. My favorite in this vein is a Harry Turtledove short story called "The Road Not Taken" in which a race of vicious bear-like warriors invade Earth,
but it turns out that they're not only Ewok-sized but their weapons tech is basically matchlock rifles, barely Revolutionary War-era. They're utterly demolished by modern weaponry, and many are taken prisoner. It turns out that the secret to gravity manipulation and thus interstellar travel is obnoxiously simple, and most civilizations discover it right around the time they figure out gunpowder, and weapons tech tends to take a backseat to exploration. In fact our teddy bear friends are unusual for their conquest-driven culture. But for some reason humans never figured the gravity drive out, and meanwhile our weapon tech has advanced to levels no one in the galactic community has ever seen before. The end of the story has the leaders of the bear aliens realizing the humans can easily reverse engineer their gravitational drives and the rest of the galaxy is essentially defenseless against us...
Not sure actually. I guess right now I'd be more interested in stuff that uses interesting aspects of actual astronomy -- ideas for alien planets that could plausibly exist according to what we currently know. One example while be eyeball planets -- these are "earth-like" planets where one side always faces the sun, so one side is really hot in perpetual daylight and the other side is in perpetual freezing darkness, but in the "twilight" zone there may exist an area where an earth-like environment is possible. Has there ever been any sci-fi story that has these?
For a decent pair of novels that includes both a tidally locked world AND multiple universes, I recommend "Proxima" and "Ultima" by Stephen Baxter. They're good books but his earlier stuff is even better, touching on many concepts discussed earlier in this thread.
Pretty simple, but I love helmets that transform onto the user. I had a whole bunch of gifs saved, but lost most of them. But, here's what I'm talking about:
I love those dystopian settings you find in novels like the Silo Series by Hugh Howey and Jeff Vandermeers Souther Reach trilogy. Not to mention movies like Snowpiercer and Karim Hussains Ascension.
I know it's a game and all, but some of the lore in Destiny is quite good. Especially the Book of Sorrows.
Essentially a big lore dump on the final boss of a huge dungeon, it deals with how he came to be millions of years ago. Or actually, she. It's very cool to read about very alien creatures from their point of view. The way they talk and think is handled quite well, even though they are humanoid in many ways. They basically live on the remains of a small planet which has crashed into the surface of a huge gas giant.
The main character is female at the start of the story, and gradually changes sex over the course of the plot. Her race itself, while powerful and advanced, alter themselves by ingesting parasitic worms which make the host immortal - at the cost of constantly having to feed by killing. Over the course of millions of years, it's implied that they have exterminated thousands of advanced civilizations to feed the parasites' undying hunger. It's also hinted at that the parasite worms are actually gods.
This leads to some interesting alterations to their biology, and basically makes them a completely new race that's symbiotic with the worm. They eventually become so powerful that they can create new realities and dimensions at will.
It's sad that a lot of this stuff is just hidden away outside the game, and it's not something most players are likely to ever read.
This is why I am kinda disappointed by the Leviathan Raid in Destiny 2. We have this cosmically large creature/machine and it seems like the Raid only took place on a small place on its head?
While we're here, has anyone ever read end of universe fiction they can share? I've always found the fact and inevitability of entropic heat death profoundly facinating, yet I've never really read anything that really gets into it. The closest I can even think of that dealt with something like it was probably the original Dark Souls game.
I always loved the flippant ways the Farcaster (portal) network was used in the Hyperion series. Like there's the Grand Concourse, a shopping street that spans loads of worlds with portals at either end of each stretch, to give the illusion of one endless street. Or rich people would have houses where every room was actually on a different planet for the spectacular views, with the doors really being portals.
Fall of Hyperion spoiler:
Interesting consequences when the system is destroyed too. Like families that were in adjacent rooms one minute suddenly being hundreds of light years apart with little prospect of ever seeing each other again.
Probably time travel. Especially when it exists in a singular linethat is, when someone in the future travels to the past, but in the past that person was already there doing what they did they thought they were doing by traveling to the past from the future.
I like the concept of intelligent species with multiple-stage life cycles.
I don't really know of many stories that use this concept, though. The only one I can think of is the book "piggies" from Ender's Game. A description of their lifecycle is apparently a spoiler, so I'll tag it:
they start life as unintelligent grub-like creatures living in the bark of a tree. After leaving the tree, they become intelligent, talking human-like creatures. Finally, after death, they become super-intelligent, telepathic tree-like creatures.
Unfortuantely, the actual plot of the book didn't interest me at all, so I haven't read the book.
Also, I'd love to see stories about intelligent species with huge variations in body type between individuals, like ants on earth, or colonial organisms like pyrosomes or portugese man o' wars.
It goes further than that, if you're not worried about spoilers
The piggies "evolved' their special life cycle due to the extremely aggressive and adaptive disease that is everywhere on Lusitania. This the reason why the planet has such little biodiversity. The virus was put on the planet by an unknown alien race called the descolada's in order to prepare it for their occupation in the future, most notably by oxygenating the atmosphere through the growth of trees
I remember seeing this old mostly illustrated book that depicts a long-term timeline of humanity and earth where in the near future, colonists leave on generation ships, and meanwhile earth gradually goes to shit, and millions of years later the colonists return to earth essentially having evolved into aliens, seemingly unaware that this was even their planet of origin, domesticate the post-apocalyptic creatures that had evolved out of the old humanity, strip the planet of its remaining resources and move on.
weirdly one of my favorites is something i cant actually think of many examples of, but hey maybe yall can help with that.
Far-far future stories. when the plot takes its characters much to far into the future, like millions of years from now, where civilizations are long since gone, the stars have exhausted themselves and planets have crumbled. it creates an environment, hell a general context that is just so completely alien and difficult that i cant help but be completely fascinated by it.
so yeah, if anyone can think of good examples of that kinda thing i would love to hear it.
Remembrance of Earth's Past for you too, but book 3 - Death's End.
It can work as a standalone, but it's a worthy ride throughout Three Body Problem and especially Dark Forest.
I didn't expect so many people actually liked completely alien contexts which push the boundaries of our very philosophy.
Remembrance of Earth's Past for you too, but book 3 - Death's End.
It can work as a standalone, but it's a worthy ride throughout Three Body Problem and especially Dark Forest.
I didn't expect so many people actually liked completely alien contexts which push the boundaries of our very philosophy.
Truly alien aliens are some of the coolest thing about sci-fi. Its like a more philosophical/scientific approach to cosmic horror. Yes, these things may be too beyond or different for us to comprehend or communicate...lets try anyway and approach it scientifically
I like stuff about AI and the definition of life. Stuff like the story of SOMA, or the Geth backstory in Mass Effect, or even some of the themes in Deus Ex.
The natural conclusion to increasingly advanced technology and AI is a machine that is indistinguishable from a human. So do you consider it a form of life when it reaches that point? Does it have rights?
Conversely, I like the sci-fi that explores technology that's advanced enough to upload human minds into digital form. At that point, people can exist entirely in digital space and be deleted, copied, and so on. It blurs the line between what counts as a living human and what's just a collection of data.
I always loved the flippant ways the Farcaster (portal) network was used in the Hyperion series. Like there's the Grand Concourse, a shopping street that spans loads of worlds with portals at either end of each stretch, to give the illusion of one endless street. Or rich people would have houses where every room was actually on a different planet for the spectacular views, with the doors really being portals.
Fall of Hyperion spoiler:
Interesting consequences when the system is destroyed too. Like families that were in adjacent rooms one minute suddenly being hundreds of light years apart with little prospect of ever seeing each other again.
I loved this aspect of it too - overall tech in the web was kind of disappoint, with the Ousters having way cooler stuff. Comet farms, floating rivers to canoe on through space, 1-micron thick suits of living organisms? Was awesome. Wish we'd had more time with them in both series.
Culture Minds, godlike machines who oversee/administrate a post-scarcity spacefaring society, satisfying every need and desire of their human and alien wardsall while partaking of new frontiers of existence in a complex of fantastical simulated universes that they call Infinite Fun Space.
For more on this, read Excession by Ian M. Banks. Better yet, read the whole Culture series (minus Inversions) in release order.
I love fantasy stories with two different worlds/universes that interact in some way.
Primary example would be The Abhorsen Trilogy (Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen) by Garth Nixmy favorite part of all these books are the interactions between Ancelstierre and The Old Kingdom.
I love fantasy stories with two different worlds/universes that interact in some way.
Primary example would be The Abhorsen Trilogy (Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen) by Garth Nixmy favorite part of all these books are the interactions between Ancelstierre and The Old Kingdom.
Unorthodox first contact like Arrival, where the aliens are truly alien and just figuring out to communicate and understand their psychology is a struggle
Which is why I'm so excited to have discovered Stanislaw Lem today. Eden, Fiasco, and His Master's Voice sound perfect in how they tackle those ideas.
Mieville's world building and ideas are just amazing. I started Perdido Street Station recently, and I'm itching to get to The Scar and Embassytown
Give Jeff Vandermeer a look as well if you like Mieville's stuff
City of Saints and Madmen
Shriek
Finch
All about the fungal city of Ambergris and how odd it is
Then go read Veniss Underground which is about what happens when biotech goes mad for a few thousand years
Then go read Borne which is about what happens when biotech goes mad and scientists decide to create a gigantic ten storey tall flying bear that thinks on a cosmic scale
Then read the Annihilation trilogy which is about a truly alien invasion, or maybe it isn't.
Memory manipulation and generally just upgrading the human brain with tech and the effects it would have on social interactions is always interesting to me.
I'm sure there are more prominent examples, but I really liked it in Kireon Gillen's Mercury Heat.
Memory manipulation and generally just upgrading the human brain with tech and the effects it would have on social interactions is always interesting to me.
I'm sure there are more prominent examples, but I really liked it in Kireon Gillen's Mercury Heat.
I like how Deus Ex: HR and MD touched on this with the CASIE aug. In terms of its uses in everyday life, it's easily the most broken aug in the game. It's one of the things the game doesn't draw too much attention to, but has all sorts of implications when you think about it.
I also like how the game has certain characters that are knowledgeable or augmented enough themselves to call you out when you try to use it. They go "oh fuck off with that shit", and it's always surprising when it happens because you're so used to having it as a free "I win this discussion" card against most characters in the game.
They get less witty and more existential, the further you go in (they are sorted chronologically, I think).
If you want wit, some of the earlier Ijon Tichy (Star Diaries) stories are like that. You may also try Mortal Engines.
I love fantasy stories with two different worlds/universes that interact in some way.
Primary example would be The Abhorsen Trilogy (Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen) by Garth Nixmy favorite part of all these books are the interactions between Ancelstierre and The Old Kingdom.
To me it's alt-science. Like the concept that all the climatologists are fabricating global warming to pad their wallets. NASA discovers a new planet with an ambient temperature of 30 degrees a dozen light years away? Cool. NASA measures a rise in temperature of a fraction of a degree on Earth? Not possible.
Actually hold-up: What are some stories that explore the question of how the first permanent human habitats away from Earth are governed, or who governs them? Like, at what point do space and Martian colonies declare independence from Earth?
Another one I'd like to be shown more examples of, though I guess this one isn't strictly sci-fi: The concept of new states and nations arising in the generations and centuries after an apocalypse.
