MICHAEL's comments (member since Mar 04, 2008)

MICHAEL's comments from the SciFi and Fantasy Book Club group.

I tried to look at the shelf page for sci-fantasy for maybe a better idea, but no one likes the shelfname "sci-fantasy"!

The first book that came to my mind was Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturer. At around 300 pages its not too long, but it is part 1 of a 4 part series (since i read them in an anthology, i can't remember where the first book ended, but it has been like 9 years). Weirdly, I found Wolfe's writing very engrossing, but also really tough to read at the same time.

Too good to be properly considered "space opera" (which to me conveys a certain essential cheesiness:-) but definitely a damn good read.


this is the one with the talking dolphins right? :D

so we're gonna be giving this page a little more prominence in the future, but heres a site-wide list of space-opera shelved books:

http://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/6088...

A Fire Upon The Deep? i dunno if that counts as opera too much

i'd choose one of his solo books

I think the internet in general is very simular to the metaverse that the author describes. We're all discussing this book on a web site with all these other people we've never met in real life.

World of warcraft is a lot like a metaverse, except that its a game, and its not really designed to be very social. Second life gets even closer, but neither of those applications are very open, and they don't allow users the freedom to really express themselves, and the depend completely on the infrastructure of blizzard/linden labs.

Emerging protocols and techniques like open id, oauth, and the social network graph are really starting to shake things up by allowing web applications to interact with each other a lot easier. I'd bet thats where the biggest changes are going to come from in this area.


The main obstacle I see with a large 3d environment is that theres no real great easy open standard for the communication of three dimensional data. For http, we've got html/css/javascript which has millions of active developers and experts. But the number of people that actaully do 3d modeling is much smaller, and they are all fragmented on hundreds (maybe thousands) of different environments. I think the hardware infastructure is there to support a huge 3d world, but the software and the people have a long way to go.

i really enjoy stephensons books, but he can be overly cheesy at times.