>It's a bittersweet book, about being a small human in a world where the value of individual creative efforts are overwhelmed by the sheer might of automation and vast collaboration and technological accumulation. I also hold, strongly and somewhat idiosyncratically, that it would work quite well as a Studio Ghibli/Miyazaki film. (Chew on that for a minute, hahah.) (EDIT: So much so that I did, at one point, badly mock-up a poster for it: https://imgur.com/a/S96hTSV) RE is phenomenally underrated, not just because of its prescience, but also because of the way that it's simultaneously…
1) In a 2004 article for ACM Queue magazine, I couldn't resist excerpting the software archaeology bit as a an introductory section:https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039532 and of course, as an ancient Unix person, recognized the date.' 2) In 2007, I was Program Co-Chair for the Hot Chips conference, and got Vernor to give a keynote first day. We used keynotes for fun topics. (I had a connection via UC Berkeley Prof Kris Pister (smart dust), whose Dust Networks company I advised.) Second day, I took Vernor around the Computer History Museum in Mountain View for the morning to tour. He…
(minor spoilers for Deepness follow) When I read Deepness I actually imagined in my head a Studio Ghibli like aesthetic for the spider world chapters. I thought if it were ever adapted into film or TV, it would be essential to display the spider world as the humans listening to their radio broadcasts imagined it, as a playful, colorful, animated world populated by anthropomorphized cartoon spiders. Given the level of technology and political environment, it would feel very similar to the city backdrops of Kiki's Delivery Service or Howl's Moving Castle. It would also make the reveal at the…
My favorite (and admittedly unorthodox) companion piece to Nagel's Bat, and one of my favorite literary recommendations, is Vernor Vinge's Hugo-winning 2000 novel, A Deepness in the Sky [0]. It's a hard-sci-fi story about how various societies, human and alien, attempt to assert control & hegemony across centuries of time (at times thinking of this as a distributed systems and code documentation problem!), and how critical and impactful the role of language translation can be in helping people to understand unfamiliar ways of thinking. At the novel's core is a question very akin to that of…
I (who submitted of this article to HN) have this problem as well: on one hand, it's great that he's gotten rid of the tired trope of AI as and technology as a pathway to dystopia or of too-overt celebration of warfare that exists in a lot of military sci-fi. I'll also post a limited defense of why most of Culture novels take place outside the Culture (note that first third of "Player of Games" is a pretty big exception to this): to paraphrase Banks quoting Niven, "stories about happy people are boring". On the other hand, is the hypersadism needed? The levels are simply numbing, beyond…
My stock recommendation is: The first book is a classic for a reason. However, if you don't like it, stop here. The subsequent books will not change your opinion. In fact Herbert may really not be your thing. (He has a certain unique feel to his writing, I think.) The rest of the first trilogy is definitely more hurried and rather than "justifiably classic" are merely pretty OK if you like that sort of thing. A lot of people jam up here. God Emperor of Dune is one of those books that is more fun to read the second time than the first, because the first time you really want the primary plot…
The first time I read this, the middle of the book tried my patience and I wanted it to just get to the conclusion; I started skimming a bit more until I got to the end. The second time I read the book, I had planned on just skimming the middle again, but this time without the drive to know the resolution (since I remembered it from last time), I discovered that the middle of the book is really the best part. It's very detailed and well-thought-out, and the second time I didn't even have a problem with the pacing. It's just a very big book, in a good way. The only other book I know of that…
There's a great scene where young Pham, a kid from a medieval world, learns to maintain a 5000-year-old legacy code base on a starship: http://books.google.com/books?id=GUUvxumMf6kC&lpg=PA226&... Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. "The word for all this is 'mature programming environment.' Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more signicant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for…
Initially, I also thought the spiders were a bit too "human"... however, in thinking about the way Vinge portrays them, it was important for me to realize there's a point later in the story where he reveals that the focused translators are heavily anthropomorphizing everything they relate to the rest of the crew. I think this is a really strong suggestion that everything told from the point-of-view of the spiders is passing through the same narrator. There's a point where he specifically mentions that the translators seem to know about events and conversations they shouldn't, and we can infer…
No one else has mentioned what I think are his two greatest insights besides the Singularity: * A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human interstellar civilization thousands of years in the future, in which superluminal travel is impossible (for the humans), so travelers use hibernation to pass the decades while their ships travel between systems. Merchants, including the ones the book portrays, often revisit systems after a century or two, so see great changes in each visit. The merchants repeatedly find that once smart dust (tiny swarms of nanomachines) are developed, governments inevitably…