It took me a moment to realize, even after the mention of Echopraxia, that this was Peter Watts.
If you enjoy hard to very-hard science fiction, I strongly recommend the first book of his series, Blindsight. I thoroughly loved the read and bounced right back to the beginning for a second read with the context I'd gained on the first one. It's an absolute firehose of concepts; reminded me a bit of Accelerando by Charles Stross but a little less pleased with its own geekiness. The best summary I could give would be a meditation on consciousness set against a first-contact backdrop.
This may be well known, but I'm posting it because I didn't know: "very-hard" science fiction in this context means extremely plausible science fiction, as opposed to extremely speculative science fiction. The author explains how these fantastic things exist in a way which is realistic.
Originally, I thought it meant "very hard to understand" i.e. very technically complicated
"Hard" refers to scientific plausibility. The antipode of "hard science fiction" is "space opera."
When we talk about science fiction that focuses heavily on ideas over more traditional narrative concerns like character and action, we talk about "high-concept" science fiction.
Plausible oftentimes, I would say, but more that there are reliable, consistent systems at work that may or may not be explained, but that are definitely used. Very little "magic" or hand waving, but at the least the implication that there is an understandable system at work at some level.
To me, "hard science fiction" evokes the old school writers like Arthur C. Clarke who would explore ideas with a slide rule or a calculator when planning a story. Even if he had to use a little hand waving and some unobtainium to make Ringworld work.
Maybe the neatest part of that with Ringworld is when fans proved that the theoretical structure itself is orbitally unstable... which he then came up with explanations for and used as a major plot point in a follow-up book.
For a mere mortal like myself, those definitions aren't mutually exclusive. I think I tried reading "Blindsight" a long time ago but never got past a few dozen pages. Maybe I should give it a try again someday.
Blindsight is known to be a slog for a lot of people including myself.
I love sci-fi, I love challenging ideas, and I really liked the concepts explored in Blindsight - except that I learned those concepts through summaries and selective reading.
Yes, there were definitely parts where I felt maybe I was picking up on a vibe or a hint, and later realized that was now a structural part of the story without which I would be quite lost.
I found this INCREDIBLY FULL OF SPOILERS explanation of fundamental plot points to be helpful in confirming or summarizing some things I missed[0].
I'm certified dumb as a box of rocks 19 Wonderlic and I was able to follow most of it without issue or pause. It's possible that it's a bell curve and I'm too dumb to realize I was missing things. Hard to say.
Astonishing book which I reread regularly. Echopraxia has grown on me upon further reading - initially I focused on the seeming promise of action and plot, vs ideas and concepts.
His Starfish book however has the most realistic, plausible, feasible, likely AI doomsday scenario though - published as it was 26 years ago and without AI being the focus for majority of the book.
The Freeze-Frame Revolution is also fantastic, along with the short stories, which collectively form the "Sunflower" cycle.
Watts writes the smartest but also scariest science fiction. There's an aura of existential, Lovecraftean dread in all his writings that I find incredibly appealing. In the case of Sunflower, Watts is able to make the idea of floating through space for millions of years, unable to stop, into something genuinely upsetting. It's bleak, but also really well plotted.
Not too long ago, Watts published a short story set right after Blindsight, "The Colonel". It's an excellent, standalone read.
But yes. Especially when you boil it down to the essentials: humans take an AI built to perform one task and press it into duty for another, much more impactful task which it was completely unsuited for.
This is one of the coolest things I've read here in some time. This is the kind of insanity I can get behind.
> The rest of us might think we achieve artistic immortality if our work lasts a century or three. Bök blows his nose at such puny ambitions. His work might get deciphered by Fermi aliens who finally make it to our neighborhood a billion years from now. It could be iterating right up until the sun swallows this planet whole.
I got frisson reading this. I may have to read the author's novels, his writing style is compelling.
I read Starfish close to 20 years ago. He had a uniquely dark vision of the future compared to the zeitgeist in 2007 or so. It's been interesting living through reality since then. I fear the day will come when I reread his earlier works and they start sounding optimistic.
Fantastic. While it's not quite at the level of Bök's work, an inevitable comparison is all of Tom7's projects (and in particular http://tom7.org/harder). I always love when this kind of stuff pops up onto HN. I feel that we're all interesting and experimental, and sometimes need a nudge to remember that people can do weird, neat stuff.
Amazing article! His writing style is unique and made me go down a rabbit hole of discovering his other works.
I was unaware of this demagogue of a bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans. It survives levels of radiation that is designed to kill all lifeforms. Wikipedia [0] lists this as a bacteria that supports panspermia -- that life originated elsewhere but spread through cosmic dust and was seeded on Earth eventually.
Fun fact: Thermococcus gammatolerans is known to be the one that tolerates the most toxic radiation.
For those of you who read with glee of the author's work and it's launch in Toronto soon, the event is free and open to the public if you wanna flee to Toronto for fun or are already there. I hope this won't become an unlikely Superbloom given the subject.
I have a phd in a related field and I can't understand exactly what is being said here. From what I can tell, the author claims a protein was engineered, where the protein sequence maps (through a chosen translation table) to a human text. But at the same time, the protein folds into a well-defined shape (predicted, then experimentally determined), and somehow also enciphers... another poem?
You've got the right idea. The "poem" ("any style of life / is prim...") is encoded as a DNA sequence. This DNA codes for a protein, whose amino acids can be read as English text as well ("the faery is rosy / of glow..."), and which causes the bacterium to glow red. Watts mentions this work in his book Echopraxia as follows:
"The sequence spells a message and codes for a protein. The protein fluoresces and contains a response. It’s not contamination or lateral transfer. It’s a poem."
There's a more verbose explanation in this interview of Bök:
> only known organism to have ever lived on the Moon
Anyone know what this is referring to? The only instance I know of was the Surveyor 3 camera, which was supposedly Streptococcus mitis and even that situation is greatly contested.
because they are also unedited indulgences by the author in his own sadomasochistic fantasies of sexual violence (specifically, to women), and they are in effect sexual torture-porn.
Have you read Behemoth? Recently? Blindsight is one of my favorite books of all time but Rifters is dark, even by whatever standards a reasonable person might consider "adult".
Desjardins' character isn't written for the reader to get off on. But I see exactly why a reader who didn't expect to do so would rather blame the author than recognize the mirror into which he's been surprised to find himself looking. The projection is trivially obvious and the lack of insight that allows it to be aired this way in public should be embarrassing.
I mean, I agree that it's probably not a projection of Watts' secret fantasies. But "un-recommendable" is still pretty close to true. I literally had this discussion about this series yesterday.
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
If you enjoy hard to very-hard science fiction, I strongly recommend the first book of his series, Blindsight. I thoroughly loved the read and bounced right back to the beginning for a second read with the context I'd gained on the first one. It's an absolute firehose of concepts; reminded me a bit of Accelerando by Charles Stross but a little less pleased with its own geekiness. The best summary I could give would be a meditation on consciousness set against a first-contact backdrop.
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