|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0575105712
| 9780575105713
| 0575105712
| 3.97
| 949
| Aug 26, 2012
| Aug 26, 2012
|
really liked it
|
None
|
Notes are private!
|
1
|
May 19, 2021
|
Jan 2021
|
May 19, 2021
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0575105763
| 9780575105768
| 0575105763
| 4.06
| 767
| Nov 21, 2013
| Aug 05, 2014
|
really liked it
|
I time-traveled once. Literally, if not quite in the Hollywood sense of whirring machines and flashing lights. One day, while I was teaching, I travel
I time-traveled once. Literally, if not quite in the Hollywood sense of whirring machines and flashing lights. One day, while I was teaching, I traveled back in time about two hours. Smoothly, with no sensorial discontinuity (I wasn’t in the middle of talking or anything like that). The mechanical watch I had with me broke - which may lead the more skeptical to believe I merely lost track of time. Except my notebook, filled with detailed notes and time-stamped records of these past two hours, had traveled with me. Surprised, I queried my students if the same had happened to them. It hadn’t, and they thought I was joking. It’s an irony - I won’t say strange one because it’s obvious in hindsight - that arguably the most interesting thing that will ever happen in my life also turned out to be one of the dullest. I had to repeat those same two hours (while of course only being paid for them once), which weren’t particularly exciting the first time around. I of course tried to use my foreknowledge to improve my teaching. I already knew *exactly* where my students would stumble, the questions they would ask, the problems they would miss. But I was able to change very little. Which, if you have much experience teaching, should not be too surprising. First of all, a veteran teacher already knows the problems and ideas that different types of minds will struggle with. Changing the probability from 90% to 100% doesn’t do much. Second, teaching is not about transmitting knowledge from teacher to student, it’s about guiding the student into their own understanding. Minds are built from the inside-out. So what if I know the questions they ask? Answering them before they ask actually hurts their learning process by short-circuiting their own involvement in the process. But I digress. My primary point is that knowledge plays a much smaller role in both personal and civilization-level advancement than most people credit. To some, knowledge is literally the ONLY metric of advancement. But, short of a definition of knowledge so wide as to be universal, this simply isn’t the case. Take climate change for example. We already possess the scientific and technical know-how to reduce our carbon emissions. Solar power is already more cost-efficient than any other form of large-scale power generation. Extremely good electric and hybrid cars exist. But we lack the political and economical will, discipline, and maturity to evolve our electrical habits, both personal and communal. This third and final book in the Orthogonal trilogy is in large part about this question of knowledge’s power, especially knowledge from the future. Thanks to the special physics of the Orthogonal universe, the engineers of the Mountain develop a camera that can see light from the future. Which they shortly use to develop a messaging system able to receive messages from their future selves. Thus is the core conflict of Arrows of Time. Half of the citizens of the mountain strongly oppose such a system, for they believe it will have detrimental effects to their psychology and sense of free will [see Ted Chiang’s short story “What’s Expected of Us� for a short but incisive take on this]. The other half believe these messages from their future could prove pivotal to the survival of their mission. After all, couldn’t they receive a warning about a near-miss from a meteor strike, thus precipitating a course change that will make that near-miss (as opposed to being struck) a reality? As that last question presages, any time you deal with time travel and fore-knowledge, you’ll swiftly find yourself in the Swamp of Destiny (and free will and determinism and etc), and Egan does not shy away. Of course he doesn’t, he’s Greg Egan! In fact, he double-downs; another big chunk of the book involves a journey to a planet from the orthogonal cluster - that is a planet whose ‘arrow of time� (i.e. entropy direction) is flipped from theirs. If you’ve ever seen the film Tenet, it’s basically that, with better science and consistency. If you haven’t then strange things happen like dust from the planet gets into their spaceship BEFORE it even lands on the planet (because from the “perspective� of the planet and its dust, the ship isn’t landing� but leaving). I won’t pretend a super clear understanding of the physics explored in this book. My own personal intuition is that interaction between matter with opposing arrows of time would result in mutual annihilation, like in a matter-antimatter reaction. Indeed in some Formalisms (Feynman/Wheeler’s as opposed to the more popular Hamiltonian), anti-matter IS matter. But in this book and in more popular physics, this symmetry is rejected. Anti-matter and time-reversed matter are different. Overall, I found this third book the most satisfying and Egan-like. The first book suffers because large chunks of it must be spent exploring the mundane realities of the Orthogonal universe and the civilization that we’re following. Yalda - the protagonist of the first book - does science not because she has some end-goal or purpose but simply out of curiosity. This makes it inherently less dramatic and interesting than the scientific explorations of these latter two books, in which science must save their entire civilization or fix some more immediate problem (such as women dying in order to give birth). What’s more, the science of the first book is elementary in nature - the most basic ideas of atoms/electrons (“luxagens�) and light. Different in the Orthogonal universe and thus harder to understand but still ultimately at the high-school chemistry/physics level. Whereas the science in this last book is more cutting edge, more speculative and therefore interesting, to me at least. Even so, even though I did like this third book best, I wouldn’t change any of what I wrote in my review of the first book. The whole series is still an astounding creation, a display of genius so far beyond the achievements of most sci-fi authors as to render Egan’s books a genre of their own. But for that same reason, they’re also incredibly niche. Just look at the reviews here on GR: how many demonstrate a technical appreciation or comprehension of the Orthogonal universe? So my conclusion is much the same. Read it, if everything I’ve written sounds like something enjoyable, but also understand that the process of reading an Egan differs greatly from the process of reading most novels. You shouldn’t expect to easily and clearly understand every sentence, diagram, and idea. But you don’t need to, either. Instead, I’ve come to consider Egan a sort of Scientific Shakespeare. Just as I can appreciate the beauty and lyricism of the Bard’s writing without perfectly understanding every single line, so too can I enjoy the beauty and lyricism of Egan’s science, even when I’ve become lost, like an Alice in Scienceland. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
May 19, 2021
|
Jan 2021
|
May 19, 2021
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0575095113
| 9780575095113
| 0575095113
| 3.66
| 2,332
| Jun 21, 2011
| Sep 15, 2011
|
liked it
|
I’m fascinated by the celebrity of painting. Most children leave elementary school able to recognize names like Van Gogh or Da Vinci but are wholly un
I’m fascinated by the celebrity of painting. Most children leave elementary school able to recognize names like Van Gogh or Da Vinci but are wholly unfamiliar with other names like Faraday, Turing, Laozi, Kant, Saladin, Tolkien, or so on and so forth. Why is that? What is the obsession with Renaissance-era painters to explain this disconnect between their relatively minute historical importance and their fame? I’m sure I don’t know the answer, but in many ways it mirrors the personal experience of viewing a painting. For the average person, there’s� really not much to it. Of all aesthetic experiences, I believe painting possesses the largest disparity between the creating and viewing experiences. Take even the most famous paintings - Starry Night or the Scream or the Mona Lisa - and how long will your average person linger in front of it at a museum? A minute? Nope. For the Mona Lisa, it’s an average of 15 seconds. Ultimately, paintings don’t offer much interactivity. They don’t have much content, visual or otherwise. I doubt I’m alone in finding painting museums boring. And yet I can still appreciate these works� artistic heft, the weight of effort that went into their creation. The artist’s entire life, the thousands of paintings to finally reach masterpiece level. Those are my feelings, more or less, towards Greg Egan’s Orthogonal Trilogy. What literally god-like genius must it take to imagine a universe with physics radically different than our own, populate it with a suitable intelligent life, and then chart a course for how that life will discover and manipulate the laws of the universe around them. And Egan does that! It’s got competing theories, political factions pushing their own theories, cross-discipline paradigm shifts as a result of breakthroughs, dead end ideas� and sometimes those dead ends make a comeback to turn out to be the correct theory! It is genius. I cannot overstate that. It is genius. I’ve read sci-fi with alien species, of course, and alternate dimensions and such. But they have ALWAYS been primarily qualitative, never quantitative to any real degree. Most science fiction is really just futuristic fantasy. Greg Egan puts the science back in science fiction. BUT - and this is a big BUT - the actual experience of reading the Orthogonal trilogy is awkward and dissatisfying. At this point, I’ve read almost every novel Egan has written. Except for his out-of-print debut novel, Orthogonal trilogy are my last three. So I know well Egan’s modus operandi. Basically, he writes science thrillers: a civilization-level catastrophe occurs or looms - vacuum decay in Schild’s Ladder, a quantum rewriting virus in Terenesia, a drought in Dichronauts, etc - and in response, science must save the day! Which essentially means the protagonists must better understand the universe because what is science but the process of understanding? His early novels - Quarantine in 1992 up to Schild’s Ladder in 2002 - take place in our universe and feature human or post-human protagonists. Incandescence in 2008 bridges his early and later novels, as it is set in our universe and one of the protagonists is post-human BUT the other is quite alien. Then his most recent novels - this Orthogonal trilogy in 2011 and Dichronauts in 2017 - not only feature non-humanoid protagonists� they’re also set in entirely different universes, with different laws of physics! Orthogonal’s physics change is small but fundamental: In our universe, in the ‘metric� of GR’s spacetime, we treat space distances as positive but time distances as negative. If you’ve ever encountered time dilation in your sci-fi or studies, then you know what this negative sign means: travelers moving at extreme speeds will age LESS than those who do NOT take detours through time. In the Orthogonal universe, time distance is ALSO positive, which means time dilation occurs in the opposite direction: the travelers will age much MORE than those who remain at home. This is, in fact, the core plot, though it takes like half of the first book (which is otherwise rather boring milieu / slice-of-life stuff) to get there: The (essentially) anti-matter half of the Orthogonal’s universe has looped back around and will soon collide with the normal matter half. In order to avert this cosmic catastrophe, the protagonists launch a generational ship travelling at extreme speeds so that its travelers can improve the state of their science, come up with some way to save the rest of the civilization, and eventually turn around and do so. So Egan’s standard MO of a science thriller, which I quite enjoy. The problem is that the small alteration of a negative to positive sign in the metric doesn’t just invert time dilation, it changes EVERYTHING. No universal light speed, so stars in the night sky are no longer pinpricks of light but rainbows. And the release of light actually INCREASES energy, so plants/crops now emit light, rather than absorb it. And so on and so forth. It changes so much that I don’t even know what it changes. For example, I’m almost done with book two at the point of writing this review, and the scientists have just about discovered Pauli’s Exclusion Principle (aka degeneracy pressure) to help explain why gravity doesn’t turn ALL solids into black holes. But I’m like� is PEP even valid anymore? And there wouldn’t really be ‘black holes� would there? There could be gravity wells that only trap SOME of the colors of light but not others. And� sigh� I really don’t have the time, energy, or expertise to explore a new physics rabbit-hole every other page. Which breaks the reading experience of a science mystery/thriller. The way thrillers - and most other genres - work is by generating expectations. Consciously or not, the reader makes guesses about what’s going to happen next and feels compelled to keep reading to discover how those guesses match up with reality. That’s part of what makes humans more intelligent than other animals - our hypothesis engine. But how can you make expectations when dealing with a universe SO UTTERLY ALIEN to our own? Like HALF of this book is science explanations, but they’re largely opaque even to a science freak like me because I have no idea which assumptions/knowledge I’m allowed to employ in understanding them. In my Diaspora review, I referenced a strange sadness, in which I considered it one of the greatest sci-fi books I’ve ever read but would recommend it to almost no one. Orthogonal is even worse. This review saddens and disquiets me. The books are an incredible work of genius. Truly, truly genius. But I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone I know, not even myself. The one optimism I have to cheer me up, though, is the thought that Egan might well go the way of van Gogh: obscure and unappreciated in his own time. But a future, more capable, more enlightened humanity will better able to understand and appreciate his accomplishment. So cheers! Here’s to hoping we overcome our own planetary catastrophe and make it that far. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
May 03, 2021
|
May 03, 2021
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0061059803
| 9780061059803
| 0061059803
| 3.50
| 1,419
| Aug 1999
| Nov 01, 2000
|
liked it
|
None
|
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Feb 26, 2021
|
Feb 26, 2021
|
Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0691127093
| 9780691127095
| 0691127093
| 3.91
| 431
| Jul 02, 2007
| Jul 22, 2007
|
it was ok
|
A Certain Ambiguity is the story of certain young man spending some time in college, feeling confused about his future prospects, torn between pragmat
A Certain Ambiguity is the story of certain young man spending some time in college, feeling confused about his future prospects, torn between pragmatism and passion. He listens to some jazz, he finds a young miss, he takes a course on Set Theory, and he reads old correspondence from mathematicians, including the court transcripts in which his grandfather argued with a Christian judge about the nature of certainty. The narrative is whatever, it’s just a vehicle to explore certain math and philosophy topics. Basically, the book has some Set Theory (the math of infinity) and also some geometry, particularly the evolution from Euclidean to non-Euclidean geometry and all the angsty uncertainty along the way. Your average human being doesn’t know a postulate from a pustule, so the book will have a limited audience. However, I - who love and teach math - am among that audience, so the math side of this book was both business and pleasure. I taught myself tensor calculus one summer, so I’ve explored certain topics of non-Euclidean geometry. But I really only did so in order to learn General Relativity. I didn’t bother with its historical development. So I quite enjoyed doing so now, and, if nothing else, knowing the history shows me how my occasional uncertainty and doubt in understanding the math were mirrored by the very creators of that math. As for the philosophy� meh. It’s all about certainty. It’s all about Rene Descartes� motivation in penning his famous, “Cogito ergo sum�: I am thinking, therefore I exist. Don’t get me wrong, this is an important topic. Before I conceded the impossibility of the task, my original review was a much lengthier mini-primer on the topic. It’s just, honestly, the topic bores me now. I’ve studied Hume’s Problem of Induction; Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem; the many forms of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle; the No-Cloning Theorem; etc. The heuristic nature of human decision making and the distinction between possibility and probability are important topics that not nearly enough people know appreciate. But, again I, personally, find it boring. Childish actually. So this facet of the book was a bit aggravating. I mean, the book’s philosophical exploration ends with the concession that absolute certainty is impossible. So� the first and easiest step on a much longer, more interesting philosophical journey. In short, The good: math. The bad: philosophy. The neutral: narrative. And never forget, God hates idiots, also. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Feb 22, 2021
|
Mar 09, 2021
|
Feb 22, 2021
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0765348780
| 9780765348784
| 0765348780
| 3.93
| 129,545
| Apr 01, 1999
| Jan 10, 2005
|
liked it
|
I would say I feel perfectly ambivalent about this novel. The good and bad balance perfectly. In fact, all of my criticisms are also all of my praises
I would say I feel perfectly ambivalent about this novel. The good and bad balance perfectly. In fact, all of my criticisms are also all of my praises, which boil down to two main points: [1] Where have all the good farm boys gone? The farm boy protagonist is so common in epic fantasy that it’s often criticized as an unoriginal cliche. However, there’s a good reason for "farm boy" protagonists, such that even illustrious JRR Tolkien used hobbits (aka short "farm boys") as his protagonists: Farmboys are unworldly and ignorant. And because they are ignorant, more knowledgeable characters (like wizards) have a good excuse to explain the rules of the fantasy universe to the farmboys, whose ignorance is a stand-in for the readers� own. Non-ignorant characters wouldn’t need such explanations. When you ask someone to call you on the phone, do you say, "Hey pull out your miniature radio device - which operates by sending electromagnetic waves to routing cell-towers - and input my unique routing address in order to transmit your voice over long distances to me?" No. When you discuss politics, do you have to explain the structure of the branches of your government or the concept of a nation-state? No. And yet an alien reading a novel set in our modern world would need such background. The phrase, "The Democratic party controls the legislative and executive branches of the US government" would be largely incomprehensible. The which party? Who believe in what? Control, in what sense? Are there other branches of government? And also so what? NONE of the PoV characters in Gardens of the Moon are "farm boys" (or girls). So core rules of the fantasy world, magic system, and political landscape are never clearly explained. How does one become a wizard and form a connection with a Warren? Are the Warrens created or merely adopted by these wizards? And what is the cost - beyond normal fatigue - of using these Warrens? How big is the Malazan Empire - is it trying to conquer the whole planet or just one continent? And how big is that continent? Also, who are the T’lan Imass? Why do they have an alliance with the Malazan Empire? Why do these T’lan Imass wish to exterminate the Jaghut? And why are there so many Gods? What are their powers exactly? What is their relationship with each other and with mortals? When did the young Gods replace the elder Gods? Etc. With so many gaps, it’s hard not to experience an emotional and intellectual disconnect from the narrative. I felt bemused much of the time, similar to how I might feel listening to a lecture on a topic beyond my comprehension. What’s my response in such a situation? I can really only say, "Okay." I have to take the information on its face. I can’t really develop or explore the ideas on my own. Obviously that’s the negative side of the coin. What’s the positive side? Underexplained is much better than overexplained. Overexplained novels are boring and stultifying and even a little bit insulting. Here, we get mystery and intrigue and an almost archaeological sense of uncovering new details of an exotic civilization. [2] Buddhist monks make bad characters> I often claim (because it’s true) that the core structure of every novel is [A] characters have desires [B] obstacles prevent consummation of those desires [C] characters attempt to overcome those obstacles. In every genre, every story, that is the structure of the plot. So if you want to assess the quality of a plot, you can do so by thinking in terms of the desires. How interesting are they? How powerful? Are the obstacles natural or are they melodramatic contrivances? Must the characters grow or change in order to overcome the obstacles? I’ve written about this in many previous reviews too - my Signal-to-Noise review and Borne review come to mind. This latter review in particular is worth mentioning because Gardens of the Moon and Borne suffer from the same sparsity of desire (though Borne is much worse). In this novel, nearly every character’s desires are either unclear or undeveloped. Take Krupp the mage, for example. I haven’t the slightest clue why he’s doing anything he’s doing. Why does he care about the well-being of the city? What’s it to him? It’s difficult to root for - or despise - characters without access to their motivations. On the other hand, consider Whiskeyjack and his squadron. Their desires do eventually open up to include more complex ones like loyalty, camaraderie, and libertarianism, but that’s really only at the very end. For the majority of the novel, as far as the reader can tell, it’s basically survival. They’re just trying not to die. Which, somewhat counterintuitively, tends to be a boring desire. It’s passive, for one. Survival is a REACTION to dangers, rather than a pursuit of some want. It’s also the status quo, the default state of existence: don’t die. So it’s not really an ‘inciting� desire and therefore fails to provide impetus for the plot. Why’d the story start here, during this campaign? Why not in the previous war? Lastly, the survival desire is not a particularly humanistic desire. When faced with extinction, humans are at their least human and their most bestial. They’re like rats. And the desires of rats do not interest me, unless those rats also wish to be gourmet chefs. Again, I’ve discussed the negative side of the coin. What’s the positive? Well, at least these desires aren’t melodramatic, contrived, or didactic. Most of the characters come across as genuine. And, in fact, I tend to consider obfuscated desire - less interiority - a cornerstone of masculine style, a style I find quite rare and appealing if it fits the context. Certainly a story in large part about war and soldiering is a proper context for such a style. So what does it all add up to? 2.5 stars of perfect ambivalence. Which isn’t really good enough to warrant a 10+ book journey. At least not to me, not currently. I found myself comparing it to, say, Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive which has just as much mystery and lore and authenticity and scope� but also with POWERFUL emotions, powerful desires. Why should I be satisfied with merely having my cake, when other series and writers let me eat it too? ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Feb 03, 2021
|
Feb 26, 2021
|
Feb 03, 2021
|
Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1939905214
| 9781939905215
| 1939905214
| 3.87
| 37,047
| Jun 30, 2016
| Jun 30, 2016
|
it was ok
|
Before the pandemic, I was in the library. Not just A library. THE library. The penultimate library, a cathedral of leather and wood, with nooks and c
Before the pandemic, I was in the library. Not just A library. THE library. The penultimate library, a cathedral of leather and wood, with nooks and crannies in every dimension and endless rows and stacks of tomes and a silence otherwise so complete I could hear the dust humming in the warmth of sun-shafts. In this library, I encountered a review of The Fisherman that was the most wonderful review I have ever read. It was as if the reviewer had discovered a door to the heart of the universe and this review was an opening of that door. It was a spiritual experience, with metaphysics and philosophy and Gods and Monsters, both elder and ordinary. But it wasn’t all fancy schmancy. It had humor, too, albeit a black humor befitting the nature of this book. And just the right amount of spice of personality and humanity and voice. This reviewer was a human-being, a real person, not just some plot-synopsis spewing automaton. And the words, oh, the words! Eldritch and arcane, of course, but also, at times, plain and commonplace. The high and the low, the pure and the profane, combined, together, revealing the illusion of their disparity. Which isn’t to say this was a glowing review. By no means. The review was wonderful, but it didn’t state The Fisherman was wonderful. The review used this metaphor to describe the book, in which this ONE image - an image of a black-magic fisherman casting his lures in a dark ocean of souls and a great Leviathan trapped by a thousand hooks - was the book’s entire heart, its seed, its reason for being written. A great image, a great core. But everything else was constructed around that image and was not great. And the reviewer’s disdain for the book’s Frame Narrative! You know of what I speak? In which the reader isn’t even reading the story but reading someone’s post-hoc telling of the story. Well the Fisherman does that AND ONE MORE. Half of the book is a frame narrative WITHIN A FRAME NARRATIVE! And oh this reviewer’s delicious disdain, so thick you could cut it into slices and serve it for a devil’s birthday. Ah, I wish you could just read that review itself. Really, I do. Or that I could recreate it for you. That would be so wonderful. Quite wonderful. But you can’t and I won’t. The end. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jan 28, 2021
|
Jan 28, 2021
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 4.06
| 12,776
| 1950
| Aug 12, 1992
|
really liked it
|
To quote the man himself, Raymond Chandler’s stories are like alcohol, which is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second intimate, the third rou
To quote the man himself, Raymond Chandler’s stories are like alcohol, which is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second intimate, the third routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off. I’ve read enough that I’ve reached a point where reading Raymond Chandler is like returning to a neighborhood bar you’ve haunted every Friday for more years than is worth counting. You don’t expect magic. You don’t expect excitement or novelty. In fact, it is the familiarity and routine that draw you back. All the little details - the stain on the bar that has taken up permanent residence, say, or the regular who sits at the end of the bar and drinks exactly one and a half beers before leaving - imbue the place with a personal character, such that your mind has begun to consider it an actual friend. Chandler’s style, which I once found sharp and exciting, is now old hat, and his plot structures are similar enough to please even the most tyrannical home-owner’s association. It’s all a bit like owning ten slightly different copies of a treasure map that lead to the same treasure. But then, I don’t expect magic or novelty or excitement. The pleasure of reading is still there. It’s just different. The small changes in style and plot become tremendously exciting. Like if that beer-and-a-half regular brought a lady friend one evening. A new patron wouldn’t even notice it. Wouldn’t know why it mattered. But us regulars would understand its significance. And Chandler’s Philip Marlowe remains largely unparalleled, mostly because so many imitation anti-heroes miss the point. It’s not his toughness, his perception, or his sarcastic wit that make the character. It’s the rare - but consistent - acts of kindness. Despite all the venality and vice of the world, he manages to keep one hand - one pinky, even - above the muck. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jan 27, 2021
|
Jan 27, 2021
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||||
| 0061057274
| 0061057274
| 3.86
| 2,730
| 1995
| Feb 1998
|
really liked it
|
I love the idea that we live in a simulation. Problem is, it’s hard to have a meaningful discussion about it. Experience has taught me that when I wri
I love the idea that we live in a simulation. Problem is, it’s hard to have a meaningful discussion about it. Experience has taught me that when I write/say, “our universe is a simulation,� other people’s minds go to a much different (and sillier) place than mine. They tend to picture a giant row of supercomputers - or maybe even a planetary computer - and think, “Ah, our universe is being run as software on something like that.� And to be completely fair, it’s kinda like, well what else does it mean that our universe is a simulation? But when I use that phrase, what I really mean is something like, “If I were to design a simulated universe to achieve some aim, it would look remarkably similar to ours.� For example: 1] Classical computer architecture use several data highways (called a ‘bus�) that handle data transfer between the computer’s different parts. For example, the FSB (Front-side Bus) controls data transfer between the CPU and the memory. It’s extremely important that all these elements maintain synchronicity with each other. While the CPU and memory can (and do) run faster than the FSB, the bus-speed is the speed limit of any data transfer between the two. The universe also has a speed limit of information transfer between different systems: the speed of light. Which is important, just as it is with the system bus. A universe without a constant speed for information transfer would have serious problems with synchronicity and causality. 2] Graphical rendering engines all have various techniques to deal with changing Level-Of-Detail (LOD). For example, if the camera/player is close to trees, those trees might be rendered in full detail with a million polygons. If, however, the trees are very far away, they might be rendered as a “billboard� - a 2d picture - with no geometry whatsoever. Engines do this in order to lessen computational workloads. If the trees are so far away that the player can’t even tell the difference between a simple billboard and fully rendered geometry� then why tax the system with unnecessary rendering? Likewise, one of the enduring problems of quantum mechanics is that the universe appears to obey different rules at different scales, and we struggle to understand this quantum-classical boundary. Why is it that electrons obey quantum superposition - they exist in multiple locations simultaneously - but that macroscopic objects, like a computer screen or a table, do not? Well, if you start from the assumption that the universe is a simulation, such a boundary makes perfect sense in terms of LOD. If the universe follows a path of maximal computational efficiency (either because it was designed that way or because extrema are naturally more stable), you would want to render objects only at an observable LOD. It would be far too computationally intensive to fully render every quantum particle in the universe. Indeed, at that point, you don’t really have a “simulation.� You just have� the universe. Instead, you would just render at the LOD to match the perspective of some set of privileged observers. 3] Computer systems have a maximum rendering thoroughput. For example, the new PS5 has a teraflop rating of 10.28. That means it can perform 10.28 trillion math operations per second. So let’s say you’re playing a game and you’re doing something graphically simple, like sitting in a large plain room. The geometry, effects, etc might demand only .17 trillion operations per frame. Since the PS5 can do 10.28 trillion per second, it’s able to render about 60 frames per second. But suppose you filled your virtual room with objects and explosions and wild physics. Now the various rendering systems demand 1.3 trillion operations per frame. By the same calculation, the PS5 can only render 10 frames per second. In other words, time is relative between you - sitting outside the tv/computer system - and the simulated scene within the computer. The more complex the scene, the greater the time dilation. That is similar to how time works in our universe too. If you compare a clock near an area with a high energy density, such as a neutron star or a black hole or even the Earth, with a clock near an area with low energy density, you’ll find that clocks in high density areas run more slowly. And so on and so forth. But, um, yeah, I should probably get to the actual book review: You’ll note, throughout the above discussion, I was rather God-agnostic. Accepting the universe as a simulation has minimal relation to religion. It might speak to the Intelligent Designer’s method - or it might just be that stability and computational efficiency naturally go hand-in-hand. Regardless, in Distress, the universe SHOULD be thought of in terms of informational topology, designed by and driven toward an Omega Point. The Omega Point, if you’re ignorant of the term, takes a view opposite of the Deist’s: God did not create the universe so much as the universe creates God. In Distress, this Omega Point is the first being to grasp a coherent, consistent Theory of Everything, a physics theory that unifies all scales. That’s basically the setting: a journalist goes to a newly grown island-nation (created by stolen biotechnology) in order to cover a physics conference in which some prominent physicists present and discuss their new Theories of Everything. What follows is a lot of religious, scientific, and political shenanigans. Honestly, I found that core narrative and core sci-fi conceit relatively lackluster. Not terrible but not up to Egan’s best. I sometimes talk about Egan novels having a “super Egan mode� in which he fully embraces his book’s main sci-fi conceit and goes wild. Never happens here. But - moreso than any other Egan novel - this book has some of my favorite discussions. I’ve always maintained that Egan, despite being a hard sci-fi writer, has great insight into humanity, and this novel demonstrates it. One of my favorite discussions involves a news-story the journalist covers, about a group of adults with mild autism, who wish to undergo brain surgery to make themselves MORE autistic. There’s just great line after great line in the whole discussion: What’s the most patronizing thing you can offer to do for people you disagree with, or don’t understand? […] Heal them.and What’s the most intellectually lazy way you can think of, to try to win an argument? […] To say your opponent lacks humanity.and Once there was a burgeoning ego, a growing sense of self in the foreground of every action, how was it prevented from overshadowing everything else? […] The answer is, evolution invented intimacy. Intimacy makes it possible to attach some, or all, of the compelling qualities associated with the ego - the model of the self - to models of other people. A pleasure reinforced by sex, but not restricted to the act, like orgasm. And not even restricted to sexual partners, in humans. Intimacy is just the belief - rewarded by the brain - that you know the people you live in almost the same fashion as you know yourself. My other favorite discussion occurs between the protagonist and a friend, worth quoting in its entirety: He said, “No one grows up. That’s one of the sickest lies they ever tell you. People change. People compromise. People get stranded in situations they don’t want to be in� and they make the best of it. But don’t try to tell me it’s some kind of � glorious preordained ascent into emotional maturity. It’s not.� I don’t necessarily agree with all that, but the pragmatic and moral consequences of the conflict between acceptance and rebellion are something I’ve pondered a long time. Ever since I studied Nietzsche’s “will to power,� practically a direct refutation of Stoicism. Which is to say, I read in order to learn, to have my thoughts provoked, if not titillated. And in that respect, Distress has served this reader well. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jan 06, 2021
|
Jan 06, 2021
|
Mass Market Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| B0DWTQM8GW
| 4.27
| 103,643
| May 07, 2019
| May 07, 2019
|
it was amazing
|
Story-for-story, Ted Chiang is the most award-winning sci-fi writer of all time. No one else even comes close. Part of it is due to his simple, yet el Story-for-story, Ted Chiang is the most award-winning sci-fi writer of all time. No one else even comes close. Part of it is due to his simple, yet elegant writing style. Another part is due to his ability to take complex ideas and reframe them in a way that makes them easier to enjoy and understand. But I think his most important trait is that he doesn’t moralize. He has no interest in telling the reader WHAT conclusion to draw. Rather, his stories are arenas of thought, in which you are invited to challenge your thinking and draw your own conclusions. Like a good magician, Chiang provides the wonder but not the explanation. What follows are meant for post-reading ponderance. The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate One part Arabian Nights, another part Canterbury Tales, a third part Back to The Future made for such a delightful cocktail. Time travel stories that concern themselves with the actual logic and causality of time travel invariably arrive at the same conclusion: Maintaining coherence in the face of backwards time travel requires the past to be immutable and destiny to be fixed. Such is the case here in Merchant and Alchemist’s Gate. As the Alchemist says, “Coincidence and intention are two sides of a tapestry, my lord. You may find one more agreeable to look at, but you cannot say one is true and the other is false.� But Chiang (via the Merchant) makes the interesting point that even if you cannot alter the past, you can nevertheless alter your understanding of it. We have a tendency to learn from experience but to then place that experience in stasis in our memory. Yet, days or decades hence, we might revisit our memories and experiences and revise our understanding of them. Indeed, failure to do so is to risk ossification. I am reminded of perhaps the most important lesson I ever learned from literature, from Anne Rice’s Interview of a Vampire: How many vampires do you think have the stamina for immortality? They have the most dismal notions of immortality to begin with. For in becoming immortal they want all the forms of their life to be fixed as they are and incorruptible: carriages made in the same dependable fashion, clothing of the cut which suited their prime, men attired and speaking in the manner they have always understood and valued. When, in fact, all things change except the vampire himself; everything except the vampire is subject to constant corruption and distortion. Soon, with an inflexible mind, and often even with the most flexible mind, this immortality becomes a penitential sentence in a madhouse of figures and forms that are hopelessly unintelligible and without value.To become fixated upon the past, to never revise your understanding of it but to instead worship at the Janusian altar of nostalgia and regret, is to voluntarily incarcerate yourself into such a madhouse. Exhalation One day I was bored, so I invented , connecting people running cars in parking lots to Fermi's Paradox. 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is such an ugly name for what is, basically, the core flow of the universe: order goes to chaos. You can create local pockets of order, but you can only do so by stealing from another reservoir of order. In our case, that reservoir is mostly the sun. Eventually, though, there will be no more reservoirs and the Universe will know Heat Death. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to realize it’s a mistake to limit the 2nd Law to only large-scale non-intelligent systems. It can provide great insight into human affairs. The daily struggle to maintain a sense of peace, the cycle of fallen civilizations, climate change, Fermi’s paradox - it’s all related to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Unfortunately, the 2nd Law is wrapped up in all these technical terms - entropy, free energy, heat - that can make it hard to understand. That’s the genius of Exhalation: by reframing the 2nd Law in terms of air and air pressure, with a universe trapped in an air-tight dome, populated by robots whose brains are powered by air, Chiang grants novelty and clarity to the idea. The story ends on an optimistic note, as our robot-scientist narrator makes peace with the doom of his civilization. It’s a feeling that we are all going to become increasingly familiar with, as climate change continues to ramp up in the face of our ineffectual response. Many of us will liken it to the acceptance of our own individual deaths - we all know our time here is limited. This is just that, on the civilization level. The religious will, of course, embrace their doomsday prophecies and find comfort in those self-deceptions. Others will rage against the dying of the light, finding value and purpose in the struggle, even if it is futile. There is so much more to Exhalation, of course. The scientist dissecting his own brain to discover the secrets of the universe is a fun metaphor. And the realization that our “self� is not the brain or the body but rather a transient electro-chemical pattern contained within. And that line equating the Big Bang to a great initial Exhalation. Wonderful, wonderful. What's Expected of Us This very short story asks the question, “Is a belief in free will necessary for the functioning of society?� It’s not a philosophical question but rather a psychological one. Chiang answers this question with a massive YES. In the story, people are demonstrated the non-existence of free will with a simple device: a button that lights up BEFORE you press it. And try as they might, there’s no way around it. People can never fool it. Over-time this degrades everyone’s sense of responsibility and agency, such that large swathes of the population enter an apathetic malaise. The story’s solution - which comes in the form of a message from the future - is simply “pretend.� That’s where the story falls apart for me. It’s so Western-centric, embracing a strongly individualistic worldview in which every person is an island, ultimately isolated in the universe/ocean. But there is another solution, encoded in the famous Zen koan "What is the sound of a one-handed clap?": stop thinking of yourself as entirely separate from the world and universe around you. A button that lights up before I press it would prove no problem for me because I don’t consider that button as entirely separate from me. Yes, of course, I have a body distinguishable from that button - but it’s not so sharply different in terms of things like free will, determinism, electric and magnetic fields, flows of knowledge and entropy, the weft and weave of the Universe. So my view wouldn't simply be that I am pushing a button; rather, by doing so, I am freely participating in the pre-pushing powering of the light. That I am unable to push the button without also participating in the pre-pushing powering of the light represents no more a loss of my free will than does the fact that I cannot randomly decide to ignore gravity and leap into space. If you’re interested, I write in much greater depth about this view of free will in the bottom third of my Echopraxia review. Lifecycle of Software Objects In one of sci-fi’s most famous memes, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy involves a super AI whose answer to the question, “What is the meaning of life?� is the number �42.� But we might substitute that �42� with something like “to be happy� with minimal loss of vagueness. Douglas Adams didn’t do that because it’s too subtly absurd - too many people wouldn’t get the joke. I bring this up because I’m pretty sure our interactions with future AI will be similar: “Dear Oracle Super AI, how do we save the world from climate change?� CALCULATING� BEEP BOOP BEEP. ANSWER: “Stop using fossil fuels.� Oh, right. We already knew that. In fact, we already know the answers to most societal ills. It’s not the knowledge we lack. It’s the collective will and/or flexibility and/or selflessness to actually put that knowledge into practice. In a way, that’s what the Lifecycle of Software Objects is all about: how to create the holy grail of AI: a generalized human-esque intelligence. But as this story gets into� we don’t actually want that, do we? We want a generalized intelligence that is NOT human-esque, so we don’t have to give it human rights. We want one we can put to work in factories and banks and so on, without having to treat it as a human employee. We want intelligent slaves who won't object to their slavery. And if we did want a human-esque generalized AI? Well, why? We already have a human-esque generalized intelligence... humans, lol. If this more subtle, realistic approach to AI is new to you, you'll probably like this story more than I did. Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny Don’t take this story literally. That’s true of every Ted Chiang story, which are rich in allegory and metaphor, so I don’t know why I was so dead-set on reading this one literally. But I did, and I missed the point. In this story, a Victorian semi-mad scientist creates a mechanical automaton to serve as his child’s nanny. Years later, the son ends up doing something similar. But the story isn’t meant as a machine-version of Tarzan. Rather, it’s exploring the idea that the environment in which children are raised tends to become their preference. That’s where that old joke that people tend to marry their mother/father comes from. Or, less humorously, why so many children raised by abusive parents can end up with abusive partners too. More particularly to this topic, it asks us to consider the fact that today’s children are, at least in part, being raised by the “machines� of screens and social media. What will that mean for their future? Even before the pandemic, face-to-face interaction was already dwindling. I had a long running joke with my girlfriend that every time we went out to eat, you could always find a family or a set of friends who basically never interacted but instead looked at their phones for the entire meal. I only see this becoming increasingly common and emphasized. Lament it, if you will, but I’ve always believed in turning my face to the future and not the past. You can find cause for optimism in this change, if you want to. Truth of Fact, Truth of Feeling This is one of my favorite stories in the collection, probably because it explores the role language and writing play in our human experience. And writing is a serious hobby of mine. Not just with these book reviews; I’ve also written two novels, probably about 30 short stories, countless essays. I even had a “writing apprentice,� who is now getting her masters in writing and working on her first book. So, yeah, big fan. I love that writing allows the writer to condense a lot of work and thought into an extremely rich piece of language. Like a precious gem. Or a depleted uranium round. There’s an impressive contrast between the time to create and the time to consume. A poem that might’ve taken 30 hours to construct can take less than a minute to read. Which is different than other uses of language, like conversation. For me, spoken conversation can be a pleasurable social activity but I tend to find it intellectually dissatisfying. But getting to the story: Truth-truth is a split narrative, one of which follows a native from a tribe with a strong oral tradition as he learns his letters from a Christian missionary� and how this learning changes him. That’s the part centered on language. The other (main) narrative is set in a future in which most people video-blog every moment of their lives. A journalist, who is a tech skeptic, decides to review a new update that allows easy instantaneous searching and access of this live-blogged history. “Siri, show me my 9th birthday.� Bam, done. Taken on its own, the main narrative is banal - the journalist discovers just how subjective and unreliable his memories are. Old news. I hope. But, combined, the two narratives provide sharp insight into our perception and usage of modern technology. Personally, I can be dismissive of those people who feel the need to post their every thought and experience on social media. Especially when they’re not even honest about it - when they edit those experiences to make them seem better than they are. This whole phenomenon has created a social media castle-in-the-sky that so very few of us will ever actually inhabit. That said, this story made me realize that, really, it’s old news too. Social media may have accelerated the trend, but written language itself often functions similarly. Cause written language is also a technology - we don’t always think of it as one but it certainly is. And it, too, alters our relationship with reality. Take this book review, for example. It’s highly edited. See in that second paragraph where I put, “So, yeah, big fan.� Wasn’t there in the first draft. I often edit in conversational beats like that in order to make my reviews more approachable. Couldn’t have done that if it were spoken language. And I think I’ll end the review here. Run out of steam, I’m afraid, so thoughts on the last three will simply have to remain a mystery. But I hope I’ve given anyone reading this some extra food for thought. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Dec 31, 2020
|
Nov 17, 2020
|
ebook
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0553418629
| 9780553418620
| 0553418629
| 4.08
| 68,412
| Jun 16, 2015
| Mar 15, 2016
|
really liked it
|
When I was studying poetry, I attended a good number of poetry readings. Some were given by seasoned poets; others, by fresh MFA grads. The two experi
When I was studying poetry, I attended a good number of poetry readings. Some were given by seasoned poets; others, by fresh MFA grads. The two experiences are wildly different, as large a contrast as visiting DisneyWorld is from visiting the county fair. And it is the latter ones I came to prefer. The veterans� readings were performative: they already knew where to pause, where to emphasize, where to stop and look at the audience. Maybe not consciously but it was there, ingrained from practice. By contrast, the novices� readings were exploratory. They were much more likely to stumble over words, to jumble their cadences, to alter their tempo mid-poem. As if they were testing out their options, trying to discover which one was best. Attending such a reading felt as if I were an active member of some lyrical expedition to map out a poetical future. I bring this up because Mount Char, as a debut novel, feels much the same. I can’t specifically point to any line or character or chapter and claim, “Hey this is less polished than you might find from a more experienced author.� And yet the Library of Mount Char has a roughness to it, a thrilling sense of authorial exploration. The characters aren’t fake, but they don’t quite feel natural either. The book extends a good 25% beyond where most other novels would end. And so on. None of which is a criticism. The author was clearly not following a personal formula, but creating it. And it has a fresh plot too. Mount Char focuses on a set of adopted siblings who are training to be gods, under the tutelage of the head god himself. Not a god in the traditional sense, though. More in the sense of a run-away superintelligence, in that he acquired that knowledge that allowed him to get better at acquiring knowledge which made him better still at acquiring knowledge, a pattern that continued until he reached a state of omniscience but not omni-attention. That’s a subtle but important distinction, which I think explains why some readers describe this book as difficult or confusing. Dealing with omniscience makes it tricky to track who knows what and when do they know it. Ultimately, though, the plot and the novel structure shouldn't be too difficult to follow. The Library at Mount Char is neither post-modern, nor particularly philosophical. It's a good ol' fashioned revenge story, and like all solid revenge stories, has a nice twist or two. My one unadulterated complaint is the pitifully small scope of the setting. It’s completely dissonant with the plot’s scope. We’re talking god of the universe stuff here, yet 90% of the novel is set in a tiny suburban neighborhood. It does help add to the novel’s, um, novelty, but gives it a satirical vibe I’m not sure the author actually intended. Final conclusion: You’ll probably like it. Unless you’re a religious fundamentalist. In which case you probably won’t like it. But that’ll just leave you more time to read your holy book. Hey, win, win. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Nov 11, 2020
|
Nov 11, 2020
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| B0DNBNW41G
| unknown
| 3.56
| 763
| Jul 11, 2017
| Jul 04, 2017
|
liked it
|
Dichronauts’s back cover has the perfect blurb: “Impressively bizarre� Egan may have out-Eganed himself with this one.� Yeah, pretty much. Dichronauts
Dichronauts’s back cover has the perfect blurb: “Impressively bizarre� Egan may have out-Eganed himself with this one.� Yeah, pretty much. Dichronauts gives us a world in which water flowing uphill is not even its most bizarre feature. Nor that the world is an infinite hyperboloid. Nor that light cannot travel in certain directions. Nope. For me, the most bizarre feature of Dichronaut’s world is that its denizens cannot safely rotate. It’s all so bizarre, in fact, that if you want to become a Dichronaut, you really need to first read Egan’s . I got roughly half of the way through the book without doing so. And I felt incredibly dumb that entire time. Now that feeling is rare enough for me that I can enjoy it, but the book was still better once it was more comprehensible. So let me also provide my own primer: So our universe has 3 (macro) dimensions of space and 1 (macro) dimension of time. To create Dichronauts’s world, Egan swapped one of these, so that it has 2 space-like dimensions and 2 time-like dimensions. Hence, the DICHRON - “two time� - of the title. The result, as you probably cannot imagine (but can calculate), is a world with many strange features. For example, you’ll find that light does not radiate spherically (that is, in all directions). Instead, we must subtract out two “dark cones� from our sphere, representing places light CANNOT travel from a given source. Thus, sunlight only allows the characters in Dichronauts to see east and west. In fact, they can really only see in one direction but are able to “tilt� their heads (I always pictured it as a full 180 degree backwards tilt, like something from a horror film) to see in the opposite direction. So in this world, people are BORN as “eastward-facing� or “westward-facing.� Really. Born into permanent facing directions. Because that’s another strange feature of replacing one space-like dimension with one time-like dimension: rotating “into� the time-like dimension is quite problematic. Note: In Dichronauts’s cardinal directions, east/west and up/down are the space-like dimensions, while north/south is the new time-like dimension. So objects/characters can only manage partial, incremental rotations to the north/south. This leads us to the second meaning of the title, the DI__NAUTS, “two travelers.� Because of the dark cones and this lack of rotation, every “person� is actually made up of two creatures: the large Walker, who possesses East/West vision, and a lizard-esque symbiote, the Sider, who lives burrowed into the Walker’s skull and possesses North/South sonar, via two “pingers.� Because, yes, while LIGHT cannot travel north/south, sound waves are mechanical waves and do not have to adhere to the forced speed of light. Thus they actually can travel north/south. So that’s the people, and that’s why they are the way they are. One major conflict of the novel is that some Walkers really dislike this relationship with the Siders. The two main characters - Seth the Walker and Theo the Sider - spend the majority of the novel as surveyors, so you’ll also need a good grasp of the terrain these people inhabit. Start here with this picture, their “planet:� [image] It is NOT a sphere orbiting a star. Rather it’s an infinite, hollow hyperboloid, which is orbited by a star. This picture is also inaccurate in one important way: it depicts a fixed, unchanging orbit of the star. But in the novel, the star’s orbit is actually tilting, which causes the habitable zone to be slowly moving, thus requiring a constant migration of the book’s peoples. Okay, all that was just providing background, but here’s the real question: How’s the reading experience? Honestly, it’s dissatisfying. And I don’t want to write something like, “The imagination is great, but the human/character elements of the story are lacking� because I don’t think that’s it. You’ll find reviewers writing stuff like that on every hard sci-fi book ever written because it’s a convenient cliche to explain an apparent disconnect with the story. But I’ve never found Egan to struggle with capturing the human element. Rather, here’s an experience to which most people can relate: I get really grumpy when I’m doing some sort of challenging technical work - building furniture whose pieces don’t fit well, for example. Whenever someone tries to interact with me when I’m in such a state, I get snappish and terse. I wouldn’t say there’s anything wrong with the “human element� part of me there. It’s just that, distressed and distracted by a technical problem, I don’t really want to have a conversation or other social experience. That’s how I feel about Dichronauts: it has frustrating technical problems that can distract from the plot / character relationships. For example, this book talks a lot about water and rivers and such. It’s one of the core parts of the setting, that Seth and Theo’s city migrates along a river that is drying up. But water does not exist in this book’s world. Egan says so himself. But because he’s using all these familiar words, these ideas FEEL like they should be familiar. Except then he throws in some of this world’s exotic geometry and suddenly these “rivers� are flowing uphill - or just outright shooting straight up into the air and coming back down as rain. The disconnect creates an unpleasant friction in the mind, this attempt to reconcile what should be familiar with what is clearly unfamiliar and exotic. In other cases, scenes are practically impossible to grasp without having done the mathematical work (or reading Egan’s primer). For example, there’s an early scene in which the main character and his fellow surveyor students use the “grain� of the dirt to help determine their orientation. It will make no sense because on OUR planet in OUR universe, dirt has no particular grain. The notion is simply ludicrous. Dirt particles are just chaos. They don’t NATURALLY line up. But in Dichronauts’s world - because of the restrictions on rotation - they do. I call these “problems,� but I don’t really mean them as criticisms. What was Egan to do? Use a neologism instead of “water� and “river�? Would that have improved the clarity? In a few instances, yes the wording is bad. He uses the phrase “absolute summer� to describe parts of the "planet" so close to the sun (because of the weird geometry) that they receive lethal doses of heat and radiation. But it’s not seasonal, so why not call it “absolute desert� or something like that? Overall, though, I doubt there’s much he can do. This is just a ludicrously ambitious setting. That's my real criticism: it's TOO ambitious. And it doesn’t help there are substantial problems with Egan’s Physics work that make me question much of his conclusions. For example, photons aren’t just used for visible light - they mediate the entire electromagnetic force. So if there’s ‘dark cones� caused by light sources� there will be ‘dark cones� for electrons and protons, causing strange geometry restrictions within atoms and molecules. And how about entropy, the “arrow of time�? How does that work with two time dimensions? I have some criticisms about the story too, which ends prematurely without having resolved some of the larger themes and conflicts. But those criticisms are trivial by comparison with the overall awkwardness of the setting and how it’s presented. Ultimately this is one of those books that I’m glad exists. As an act of ambitious creation, it’s great. It’s just� not a great read. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Nov 09, 2020
|
Nov 09, 2020
|
Unknown Binding
| |||||||||||||||
| 184416148X
| 9781844161485
| 184416148X
| 3.75
| 1,143
| Nov 2004
| Nov 01, 2004
|
it was ok
|
See my review for Uriel Ventris, Volume 1, which contains Dead Sky, Black Sun.
See my review for Uriel Ventris, Volume 1, which contains Dead Sky, Black Sun.
...more
|
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Oct 25, 2020
|
Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1844160009
| 9781844160006
| 1844160009
| 3.84
| 1,274
| Mar 13, 2003
| Jan 01, 2003
|
liked it
|
See my review for Uriel Ventris, Volume 1, which contains Warriors of Ultramar.
See my review for Uriel Ventris, Volume 1, which contains Warriors of Ultramar.
...more
|
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Oct 25, 2020
|
Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0743442997
| 9780743442992
| 0743442997
| 3.75
| 1,922
| 2002
| Feb 26, 2002
|
liked it
|
See my review for Uriel Ventris, Volume 1, which contains Nightbringer.
See my review for Uriel Ventris, Volume 1, which contains Nightbringer.
...more
|
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
not set
not set
|
Oct 25, 2020
|
Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1785723219
| 9781785723216
| B01NCMGCF9
| 4.23
| 352
| unknown
| Nov 15, 2015
|
liked it
|
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Oct 25, 2020
|
Kindle Edition
| |||||||||||||||
| 1784968544
| 9781784968540
| 1784968544
| 4.23
| 352
| unknown
| Jan 08, 2019
|
liked it
|
In the Empire of Man in the WH40K universe, there’s two tiers of soldiers: the elite Space Marines - and everyone else. Space Marines are genetically-m In the Empire of Man in the WH40K universe, there’s two tiers of soldiers: the elite Space Marines - and everyone else. Space Marines are genetically-modified, trained-from-birth super soldiers encased in power-armor and loaded to the gills with cybernetics. Their weapon of choice is the bolter, essentially an automatic grenade launcher. And they sometimes wield a sword because why not?! Swords are cool. Despite the similarities of their creation, Space Marines are not one monolithic force, oh no. They’re organized into Chapters (a good analogy would be a Roman Legion), whose battle tactics and overall philosophy can vary wildly. Seriously, there are hundreds if not thousands of different Chapters. The most righteous, jingoistic Chapter of them all are the Ultramarines. Praise the Emperor this, praise the Emperor that, and, oh, beware the Corruption of Chaos! Catechisms for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Well, these books follow Uriel Ventris, a Captain of the Ultramarines. This hefty tome, in fact, comprises three different books, each featuring a different setting and different foe. The first book, Nightbringer, follows Uriel Ventris in his first major campaign as Captain and features Dark Eldar - basically sci-fi dark elves with a splash of Giger - as well as the Nightbringer (whoever that may be�) and your usual coterie of corrupt humans. It’s that last inclusion that elevates this first book above the others. I’m sure I’m not revealing anything you don’t already know when I say that human beings practice extreme levels of species prejudice. Only humans have souls, not animals. Only humans have free will, not animals. The vast majority of human beings will only start caring about the mass extinction event we’re currently causing when human beings start to suffer. Obviously there are exceptions but point is, human beings find human affairs most interesting and worthy of attention. That’s why in The Walking Dead, the actual walking dead merely serve as a backdrop for human conflict. Same here in Nightbringer. Yeah there’s aliens, there’s Old Gods� but the human politics and human conflicts serve as the core of the story. And the story is better for it. By contrast, the second book Warriors of Ultramar features Uriel Ventris leading a solar system defense against an invasion of Tyranids who are, basically, the Zerg (or vice versa): a Hive Mind species who use rapid and extreme genetic modification to creature ORGANIC weapons and soldiers. Here, though, human politics and conflicts do NOT serve as the core of the story. Not to say there isn’t some. It’s just not the main conflict. And the story is less compelling as a result. The last book, Dead Sky, Black Sun, involves the exodus of Uriel Ventris (and his best friend Pasanius) to a Chaos-infested HELLPLANET. Its endless descriptions of torture and body horror and such reminded me of that movie Event Horizon, as well as the original Quake games. Dead Sky, Black Sun was, by far, my least favorite book and, for the foreseeable future (indeed, perhaps forever) the last WH40K book that I’ll read. All of these books are action-packed with dialogue won’t win any awards but feels natural to the characters and description that helps expand the impressive WH40K milieu. It’s just� for this type of story, writing is not the best medium. I loathe the phrase, “A picture is worth a thousand words� but it’s the perfect critique of these books. Dead Sky, Black Sun, for example, contains A LOT of description� and yet I could tell you vastly more about the environs of Quake 2, a game I haven’t played in decades. Video games, film, animation - these are all much better media for telling these types of stories, in which objective description takes precedence over subjective description. In fact, that’s something a lot of authors don’t seem to grasp: good description should always be a form of characterization. An author is never going to out-describe a video game or a film. Ever. But what a novel can do that a film or video game can’t is customize the perception on the basis of the character. In a film or a video game, a tree is a tree. But in a novel, a druid or an industrialist or a peasant will look at a tree and describe it in vastly different terms. That’s huge. That’s what makes novels so great at exploring diverse mindsets and building empathy. The Chronicles of Uriel Ventris is not going to be strengthening your empathy muscles. So, yeah, it’s not capital-L Literature, but then OBVIOUSLY it isn’t. So it might seem churlish of me to make this criticism of the book. And I might agree - except I’ve also read the Eisenhorn trilogy from WH40K. Which also isn’t capital-L Literature but is nevertheless vastly superior to these because they remain FIRMLY centered on human conflict and FIRMLY anchored within the perspective of Eisenhorn himself. Every description is flavored by his own unique personality. So those books have all the action, all that fun WH40K lore and flavor� but they never lose sight of the human element either. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Oct 25, 2020
|
Oct 25, 2020
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0575081627
| 9780575081628
| 0575081627
| 3.67
| 2,236
| 2008
| May 15, 2008
|
really liked it
|
Un momento, por favor, while I analyze this book’s Brain Melt Rating (BMR) using my Brain Melt-O-Meter: [image] [by ] Ah, yes... carry the 0 Un momento, por favor, while I analyze this book’s Brain Melt Rating (BMR) using my Brain Melt-O-Meter: [image] [by ] Ah, yes... carry the 0... move the decimal place... apply the Lorentzian transformation... calculate the Rhiemannian connection... and the covariant derivative... and, ah yes, a Tensor field, wonderful wonderful�! ...Which gives Incandescence a BMR of FOUR, out of a possible FIVE. It’s not five because it's not an ACTUAL textbook on orbital mechanics and relativity. Of all the hard sci-fi books I’ve read, Incandescence takes the cake as the hardest. But only half is like that. As is all the rage these days, Greg Egan wrote this book as a split PoV narrative: The first point of view is that of Rakesh, and it features the Standard Egan Far Future Milieu, as seen in his other books like Schild’s Ladder and Diaspora. In these far future settings, you can expect the following futuristic delights: Everyone is immortal, at least in the physical sense. At worst, a person’s temporary physical body is destroyed and a new one is created using a data backup as template. Indeed, there’s no such thing as hunger or privation of any kind. You can chop the bottom 80% of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs right off. Furthermore, VR-scapes are both common and largely indistinguishable from reality. As a whole, our engineering mastery of **CURRENTLY KNOWN PHYSICS** is essentially complete. I’m a big fan of this milieu because it allows us to explore more novel conflicts than those seen in the vast majority of historical and contemporary stories. Egan’s character conflicts tend to be extremely high level self-actualization conflicts, while external conflicts usually take the form of mysteries of the universe. In this land of plenty, the vices of greed, lust, and tribalism have no real bite. I also like the optimism of the milieu. It’s not just that no one goes hungry or dies traumatically. Nor even that it’s portraying a future I haven’t the slightest confidence humanity will survive long enough to reach. It’s the entire vision of it all, the staggeringly creative glimpse of what MIGHT BE. For example, in one chapter Rakesh and his alien companion are hunting for a certain star, so they spend a couple thousand years making hundred-year leaps at the speed of light. This epic millenia long journey takes up about a paragraph. Imagine that, to have such freedom to undertake such an investigation. Anyway, that’s Rakesh’s PoV: a space archaeological journey, in which a post-human and his alien companion make their way into the hitherto-restricted inner space/bulge of the Milky Way, in search of long lost, extremely distant genetic cousins. It’s pretty neat and not at all difficult to understand. The second PoV is that of one such distant genetic cousin, Roi, a small crab-like alien who lives in a primitive civilization on an asteroid orbiting a black hole and subsisting on the energy contained within its accretion disk. [image] Roi's half of the story is all about science saving the day. In particular, it’s about these crab-people rediscovering orbital mechanics, differential geometry, and relativity, in an attempt to understand their world and hopefully avoid its destruction. It’s also pretty neat, but it is DIAMOND level of hard science. Here’s a demonstrative excerpt:
That isn’t just me picking one random difficult quote. That is the ENTIRE HALF OF THE BOOK, okay? What Egan set out to do here was to write a book that showed how an alien civilization might discover laws of physics, like SR's light-speed as the universal speed limit. Not just in summary, either, but in thorough, explicit detail. He describes the experiments, the terminology, and the machinery of calculation. I can’t stress this enough: it is basically a novelized summary of the basic ideas of Kepler, Newton, and Einstein. It is hard science. Really. If you don’t know anything about physics and don’t care to know anything about physics, I cannot imagine you will enjoy Incandescence. (Also don't do as I did and read this every night just before going to sleep, when your mind is at its weakest). On the other hand, very few sci-fi novels out there do what Incandescence does. It is extremely rare to find a human-being capable of both writing novels and understanding advanced mathematics. It is even more rare for said human being to actually write a novel that makes use of such mathematical thinking because such a novel’s appeal will be limited in the extreme. So understand that Incandescence is a rare vintage that will delight those who understand and want what they are getting but whose unique flavors will fall afoul of your typical sci-fi palate. * SOME (basic) HARD SCIENCE HELP TO GET YOU STARTED: Roi's people use their own specialized jargon for spatial directions, which is fair but can get distracting. But basically: sard-garm; shomal-junub; and rarb-sharq are your three pairs of spatial dimensions. Sard-garm is basically longitude; shomal-junub is basically latitude; and rarb-sharq is basically altitude. Or just realize they represent -+ x, y, and z. I originally considered Roi's asteroid akin to a moon or planet, in that the most important source of gravity relative to their perspective is the gravity from the moon/planet itself. This is not the case. Instead, it's best to consider the asteroid as akin to a space station (or an asteroid, derp). For any person on these celestial bodies, the gravity of the asteroid itself is unimportant relative to the gravity caused by the larger object around which the asteroid is orbiting So the 'null line' represents an arc from this larger orbit (and thus any object will be in 'weightless' free-fall at the null line). Later in the novel, they switch from symbolic solving to numerical methods. This is necessary since they're calculating a two or three-body problem, which is basically impossible to solve symbolically. ALSO SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!: Many readers state these PoVs never actually link up. Even though Rakesh’s crab-people are orbiting a neutron star and Roi’s crab-people are orbiting a black hole, this is not true. Roi’s PoV is millions of years before Rakesh’s. Roi and her people eventually become the ‘Aloof.� The last chapter strongly hints at that fate. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Aug 31, 2020
|
Aug 31, 2020
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1849709661
| 9781849709668
| 1849709661
| 4.25
| 6,894
| Jul 30, 2002
| Sep 15, 2015
|
really liked it
|
None
|
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Aug 20, 2020
|
Aug 20, 2020
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1849709629
| 9781849709620
| 1849709629
| 4.22
| 8,166
| Dec 27, 2001
| Aug 11, 2015
|
really liked it
|
None
|
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Aug 20, 2020
|
Aug 20, 2020
|
Paperback
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
| 3.97
|
really liked it
|
Jan 2021
|
May 19, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.06
|
really liked it
|
Jan 2021
|
May 19, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.66
|
liked it
|
May 03, 2021
|
May 03, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.50
|
liked it
|
Feb 26, 2021
|
Feb 26, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.91
|
it was ok
|
Mar 09, 2021
|
Feb 22, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.93
|
liked it
|
Feb 26, 2021
|
Feb 03, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.87
|
it was ok
|
Jan 28, 2021
|
Jan 28, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.06
|
really liked it
|
Jan 27, 2021
|
Jan 27, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.86
|
really liked it
|
Jan 06, 2021
|
Jan 06, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.27
|
it was amazing
|
Dec 31, 2020
|
Nov 17, 2020
|
|||||
|
| 4.08
|
really liked it
|
Nov 11, 2020
|
Nov 11, 2020
|
|||||
|
| 3.56
|
liked it
|
Nov 09, 2020
|
Nov 09, 2020
|
|||||
|
| 3.75
|
it was ok
|
not set
|
Oct 25, 2020
|
|||||
|
| 3.84
|
liked it
|
not set
|
Oct 25, 2020
|
|||||
|
| 3.75
|
liked it
|
not set
not set
|
Oct 25, 2020
|
|||||
|
| 4.23
|
liked it
|
not set
|
Oct 25, 2020
|
|||||
|
| 4.23
|
liked it
|
Oct 25, 2020
|
Oct 25, 2020
|
|||||
|
| 3.67
|
really liked it
|
Aug 31, 2020
|
Aug 31, 2020
|
|||||
|
| 4.25
|
really liked it
|
Aug 20, 2020
|
Aug 20, 2020
|
|||||
|
| 4.22
|
really liked it
|
Aug 20, 2020
|
Aug 20, 2020
|
Loading...
