You might just love Blind Sight. Here, they’re trying to decide if an alien life form is sentient or a Chinese Room:
“Tell me more about your cousins,” Rorschach sent.
“Our cousins lie about the family tree,” Sascha replied, “with nieces and nephews and Neandertals. We do not like annoying cousins.”
“We’d like to know about this tree.”
Sascha muted the channel and gave us a look that said Could it be any more obvious? “It couldn’t have parsed that. There were three linguistic ambiguities in there. It just ignored them.”
“Well, it asked for clarification,” Bates pointed out.
“It asked a follow-up question. Different thing entirely.”
Bates was still out of the loop. Szpindel was starting to get it, though… .
Blindsight is such a great novel. It has not one, not two but three great sci-fi concepts rolled into one book.
One is artificial intelligence (the ship’s captain is an AI), the second is alien life so vastly different it appears incomprehensible to human minds. And last but not least, and the most wild, vampires as a evolutionary branch of humanity that died out and has been recreated in the future.
Also, the extremely post-cyberpunk posthumans, and each member of the crew is a different extremely capable kind of fucked up model of what we might become, with the protagonist personifying the genre of horror that it is, while still being occasionally hilarious.
Despite being fundamentally a cosmic horror novel, and relentlessly math-in-the-back-of-the-book hard scifi it does what all the best cyberpunk does and shamelessly flirts with the supernatural at every opportunity. The sequel doubles down on this, and while not quite as good overall (still exceptionally good, but harder to follow) each of the characters explores a novel and sweet+sad+horrifying kind of love.
Characters in the sequel include a hive-mind of post-science innovation monks, a straight up witch who charges their monastery at the head of a zombie army, and a plotline about finding what the monks think might be god. And that first scene, which is absolute fire btw.
Primary themes include… Well the bit of exposition about needing to ‘crawl off one mountain and cross a valley to reach higher peaks of understanding’, and coping as a mostly baseline human surrounded by superintelligences, ‘sufficiently advanced technology’, etc.
My a favorite part of the vampire thing is how they died out. Turns out vampires start seizing when trying to visually process 90° angles, and humans love building shit like that (not to mention a cross is littered with them). It’s so mundane an extinction I’d almost believe it.
You might just love Blind Sight. Here, they’re trying to decide if an alien life form is sentient or a Chinese Room:
“Tell me more about your cousins,” Rorschach sent.
“Our cousins lie about the family tree,” Sascha replied, “with nieces and nephews and Neandertals. We do not like annoying cousins.”
“We’d like to know about this tree.”
Sascha muted the channel and gave us a look that said Could it be any more obvious? “It couldn’t have parsed that. There were three linguistic ambiguities in there. It just ignored them.”
“Well, it asked for clarification,” Bates pointed out.
“It asked a follow-up question. Different thing entirely.”
Bates was still out of the loop. Szpindel was starting to get it, though… .
Blindsight is such a great novel. It has not one, not two but three great sci-fi concepts rolled into one book.
One is artificial intelligence (the ship’s captain is an AI), the second is alien life so vastly different it appears incomprehensible to human minds. And last but not least, and the most wild, vampires as a evolutionary branch of humanity that died out and has been recreated in the future.
Also, the extremely post-cyberpunk posthumans, and each member of the crew is a different extremely capable kind of fucked up model of what we might become, with the protagonist personifying the genre of horror that it is, while still being occasionally hilarious.
Despite being fundamentally a cosmic horror novel, and relentlessly math-in-the-back-of-the-book hard scifi it does what all the best cyberpunk does and shamelessly flirts with the supernatural at every opportunity. The sequel doubles down on this, and while not quite as good overall (still exceptionally good, but harder to follow) each of the characters explores a novel and sweet+sad+horrifying kind of love.
Oooh, I didn’t even know it had a sequel!
I wouldn’t say it flirts with the supernatural as much as it’s with one foot into weird fiction, which is where cosmic horror comes from.
Characters in the sequel include a hive-mind of post-science innovation monks, a straight up witch who charges their monastery at the head of a zombie army, and a plotline about finding what the monks think might be god. And that first scene, which is absolute fire btw.
Primary themes include… Well the bit of exposition about needing to ‘crawl off one mountain and cross a valley to reach higher peaks of understanding’, and coping as a mostly baseline human surrounded by superintelligences, ‘sufficiently advanced technology’, etc.
My a favorite part of the vampire thing is how they died out. Turns out vampires start seizing when trying to visually process 90° angles, and humans love building shit like that (not to mention a cross is littered with them). It’s so mundane an extinction I’d almost believe it.