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Peter can write a paragraph about a spaceship course-correcting on a high-g burn that would make Herman Melville wring his hands in envy. He can also vividly ground the reader in the viscerality of a character’s experience, the physical sensations and emotions, and make even vastly unlikable people sympathetic and compelling.
We'll See
In its own way, though, that nihilism itself can be comforting, and this is another place where I quibble. If it’s all futile, we’re excused from trying. And not trying is so much easier than trying-and-failing.
This thematic freight—that all we see when we look out at the universe is our own selves reflected, because that is what we are programmed to see, and that our conscious minds may very well be holding us back and slowing us down (and making us miserable in the deal), and that we are all just part of the machine—is gorgeously developed on a dozen layers: in the choice of characters; in the biology and society
“You’re, you’re not the same,” Pag said from a safe distance. “You’re not even Siri anymore.” “I am too. Don’t be a fuckwad.” “They cut out your brain!” “Only half. For the ep—” “I know, for the epilepsy! You think I don’t know? But you were in that half—or, like, part of you was…” He struggled with the words, with the concept behind them. “And now you’re different. It’s like, your mom and dad murdered you—” “My mom and dad,” I said, suddenly quiet, “saved my life. I would have died.”
Very raw dialogue, unique
led me into Synthesis, fated me to our disastrous encounter with the scramblers, spared me the worse fate befalling Earth. Or the better one, I suppose, depending on your point of view. Point of view matters: I see that now, blind, talking to myself, trapped in a coffin falling past the edge of the solar system.
A handful of his genes live on in your own body so it too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar space. Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire.
They would never have risked our lives if we hadn’t been essential.
Not even these machines had fine enough fingers to reconstruct a few trillion synapses in the space of a Human skull. Not yet, anyway. I believed it. They would never have shipped us out fully assembled if there’d been a cheaper alternative.
Clean
He visited as often as she would allow: twice a week, then once. Then every two. Their marriage decayed with the exponential determinism of a radioactive isotope and still he sought her out, and accepted her conditions.
She wasn’t leaving because he was AWOL, or unfaithful. Her departure had nothing to do with him at all. It was me. Helen had left the world because she couldn’t stand to look at the thing who’d replaced her son.
Like everyone else, I bore witness to lurid speculations and talking heads. I visited blathernodes, soaked myself in other people’s opinions. That was nothing new, as far as it went; I’d spent my whole life as a sort of alien ethologist in my own right, watching the world behave, gleaning patterns and protocols, learning the rules that allowed me to infiltrate Human society.
In love with this character , screw you ancilliary justicd
“They’re assembling a team. The kind of … people you deal with.” My father was too rational to dispute the contributions of the recons and hybrids in our midst, but he’d never been able to hide his mistrust of them. “They need a Synthesist,” he said. “Isn’t it lucky you’ve got one in the family.” Radio bounced back and forth. “This isn’t nepotism, Siri. I wanted very much for them to pick someone else.” “Thanks for the vote of conf—
Subtle and elegant equations predict the behavior of the quantum world, but none can explain it.
The first two waves came out of the gate in even more of a hurry. I didn’t find out what had happened to them until thirty minutes before the briefing, when Sarasti released the telemetry into ConSensus. Then I opened wide; experience flooded up my inlays and spilled across my parietal cortex in glorious high-density fast-forward. Even now I can bring those data back, fresh as the day they were recorded. I’m there. I’m them.
Our autonomous microprobes measure everything our masters anticipated; tiny onboard assembly lines can build tools from the atoms up, to assess the things they did not. Atoms, scavenged from where we are, join with ions beamed from where we were: thrust and materiel accumulate in our bellies.
This tech is wild
A quantum particle, heavy as ten Jupiters.
The term rang a bell. I subtitled, and saw the thumbnail of a familiar wire-frame box:
Our paths had diverged, and we didn’t see each other in the flesh all that often; but two decades after I’d brutalized a handful of children on his behalf, Robert Paglino was still my best and only friend.
You’re an asshole, Pag.” “The tightest.”
She reveled in her own inconsistency: a woman whose professional machinery edited thought itself, yet mistrustful of the dehumanizing impact of telephones.
Online trope
“So. A Synthesist. Explaining the Incomprehensible to the Indifferent.” I smiled on cue. “More like bridging the gap between the people who make the breakthroughs and the people who take the credit for them.”
I felt something then, a strange, unfamiliar sensation that somehow loosened my vertebrae. The chair felt subtly, indefinably more comfortable at my back. “Anyway.” My silence had thrown her off stride. “Haven’t done it much since the bottom dropped out of the market. But it did leave me with a fondness for face-to-face encounters, if you know what I mean.” “Yeah. Pag said you took your sex in the first person.” She nodded. “I’m very old school. You okay with that?” I wasn’t certain. I was a virgin in the real world, one of the few things I still had in common with the rest of civilized
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“Sounds like agricultural aerosols, is what it sounds like. Those fuckers are turning the whole damn gas ball into a rice paddy bigger than Jupiter.” He gave me a scary grin. “Something’s got a beeeg appetite, hmm? You gotta wonder if we aren’t gonna be a teeny bit outnumbered.”
Huge scale, even for sci fi
