Chris
took the never-ending book quiz.
| questions answered: | 212 |
| correct: | 173 (81.6%) |
| skipped: | 223 |
| best streak: | 11 |
| questions added: | 22 |
bookshelves: fiction
This is a truly excellent book.
There is a very good review here: http://tinyurl.com/yej4aws
And there's very little I could add to that review, save to say that Blindsight is not for the faint of heart. It's genuinely disturbing. The most disturbing elements are not the parts which are invented, like the Rorshach, or the Scramblers, or the extinct but genetically resurrected Vampire species - born predators, true sociopaths, and more efficient than us in every way. The most disturbing elements of Blindsight are the parts which are true. Blindsight is a Lovecraftian journey into the haunted house of the mind: we are not what we think we are. Even if you've spent years reading Dennett, Metzinger, Edelman, Sacks, Hoffstader, Chalmers... there's a different perspective on the same data here. And it's an obvious perspective. It could well be true. And that makes it more frightening than any tentacled abomination from beyond the walls of time: this is a nightmare that we can't escape, because it's already in our heads.
If there's one Lovecraftian cliche that sums up Blindsight, it's this: there are things that man was not meant to know. You come away from Blindsight with a visceral sense of horror. It's brilliant stuff. ]]>
bookshelves: fiction
I really wanted to like this book.
Richard Morgan was on a panel at Eastercon a couple of years ago, and later I picked up Altered Carbon and its sequel, Broken Angels. I ground to a halt on Altered Carbon and only picked it up again last week.
It's essentially an ultraviolent noir thriller set in a science fiction dystopia. The only gamechanging SF element is Digital Human Storage - you can backup your mind to a cortical stack, and if you die you can download to a new body in a process called resleeving. This is Egan-lite, and it's more a plot hook than a reason to explore the technology, the philosophy or any profound societal changes. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but anyone who's read SF that explores the deeper implications of this technology may come away feeling shortchanged. Evidently there is a rich-poor divide, in that the rich are more or less immortal but the poor struggle to afford their next clone, but otherwise consciousness downloading seems to have left little mark on society. We know the technology's been around for at least three centuries... it seems like things would have grown stranger, after three hundred years.
So the 26th century is strangely familiar. One might suppose there's a cultural stasis imposed by an elite of effectively immortal oligarchs, but the world we see is far more similar to the world we know than the world of 500 years ago. And it is hinted that Earth is inhabited by stay-at-home luddites, so for all we know there are entire polises of uploaded humans spamming the cosmos. The backstory is revealed in intriguing snapshots - nobody infodumps huge tracts of history - and there's probably more of the story revealed in the sequels.
Unfortunately, it's a hard slog, and by the halfway mark my attention was drifting. It's a murder mystery, but by the end I couldn't really give you a good summary of what actually happened, let alone why. It's full of genuinely good writing, but did it engage me? Not really. It's good enough to start the sequel, but only because it's already waiting on the shelf. ]]>
bookshelves: to-read
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I'll throw in another vote for Lucifer's Hammer.
And Footfall.
I discovered Wyndham as a kid, around the time of the BBC adaption of The Day of the Triffids, and really liked his stuff. He's the master of the cozy catastrophe. Triffids, The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids, Web. Web terrified me. ]]>
Stephen wrote: "Jessica wrote: "anyone ever read a book called footfall? i remember reading that in 8th grade..."
Yes, Footfall was a great book! That was probably the 2nd or 3rd [author:Larry Nive..."
I was about 13 when that came out. It was one of the first books that I found completely unputdownable. Don't think I moved for the last few hundred pages, right from the moment the Michael blasted off...
"Eat hot gamma rays, foolish Centaurans!"
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bookshelves: to-read
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by Joe Haldeman
Although I found the ending chilling and ominous, and Haldeman has this to say about it:
"The Forever War does not have a happy ending. Marygay and William do get back together - the book ends with the birth announcement of their first child - but they're together on a prison planet, preserved as genetic curiosities in a universe where the human race has abandoned its humanity in a monstrous liaison with its former enemy." ]]>