ariel *ੈ✩‧₊˚’s Reviews > Hyperion > Status Update

“…the Ousters have done what Web humanity has not in the past millennia: evolved. (They) have explored new dimensions of aesthetics and ethics and biosciences and art and all the things that must change and grow to reflect the human soul. Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome's faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized.”

[SPOILERS!!!!!]
“At first my role was to provide Web ingenuity to help the colonists do what they do best—destroy truly indigenous life.” Ex: zeplen, centaurs, & Seneschai Aluit
NTS: themes of colonialism

[SPOILERS!!!!]
“One in which the Shrike scourge soon to be released on the Web and interstellar humanity is a weapon from the Core-dominated future, a retroactive first strike from the Volatiles who rule the galaxy millennia hence. The other reality sees opening as a human fist struck back through time, a final, twilight effort by the those who escaped the Volatiles' extinction programs."

[SPOILERS!!!!]
“…the Core is embarked on a truly incredible project which would allow them to predict...everything. To handle every variable of space, time, and history as a quantum of manageable information."
"Their Ultimate Intelligence Project.”
…
“…the Tombs relate to some future war. A settling of future scores by rearranging the past, perhaps.”

Note to self: AI and poetry

IF OUR SOCIETY ever opted for Orwell's Big Brother approach, the instrument of choice for oppression would have to be the credit wake.
In a totally noncash economy…person's activities could be tracked in real time by monitoring the credit wake of their universal card. There were strict laws protecting card privacy but laws had a bad habit of being ignored/abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove.

“During those long months of beginning my Cantos on Heaven's Gate, I discovered that the difference between finding the right word as opposed to accepting the almost right word was the difference between being struck by lightning and merely watching a lightning display.”

Okay, Dan Simmons, we get it. She has nipples and her boobs are there, bouncing boobily

"The HTN stuff doesn't simulate," whined Cadet Radinski, the best Al expert Kassad could find and bribe to explain, "it dreams, dreams with the best historical accuracy in the Web-way beyond the sum of its parts 'cause it plugs in holistic insight as well as facts
-and when it dreams, it lets us dream with it."

AY YO WHAT THE HELL