Guardsman Bass wrote:While I've been on a non-fiction kick for a while, I'm going to try and read more fiction. I've got The Martian by Andy Weir, Bone Clocks by David Mitchell, and the Cruel Sea by Nicholas Montserrat up. But I'm also tempted to read Why Not Capitalism? and These Are The Voyages.
Having gone through a spat of not reading for ages, I burned through The Martian in two days; one if I hadn't been camping.
It's a nail-biting but hilarious hard-science survival story. Would recommend to anyone, but especially a science/engineering enthusiast.
The Ancillary series (Ancillary Justice and Ancillary Sword) by Ann Leckie is a rather interesting one.
It takes place in an Imperialistic space empire, the Radch, at the end-stages of it's expansion, and with some interesting social aspects (they don't divide between gender, 'she' is the default pronoun. Other cultures they visit, on the other hand, still do). One of it's primary tools of doing so are ships full of 'Ancillaries,' or human bodies with implants that allow them to be controlled by the ship AI.
The main character is an ancillary, who's ship has been destroyed and the ancillary is all that's left. She's now trying to get revenger for her own 'murder'. It goes back and forth between the present, with her on her task, and the past, and the events leading up to her destruction.
Ancillary Justice won a Hugo, Nebula, British SF Award, Arthur C. Clarke award, and Locus award. The sequel, Ancillary Sword, won the BSFA again and is up for Nebula and Hugo again. So it's good stuff ^^
Ancillary, to me, is a perfect illustration of Sturgeon's second law; "Science fiction writers don't try to predict the future. They're usually too busy trying to prevent it."
Interesting social aspects, well, yes, but the price of gender- blindness seems to be dictatorship; it's a civilisation that thinks nothing of armed oppression, trampling on people's rights and turning them into meat puppets, hierarchial to the extent that you have to go back to BC to find a close equivalent, underlings interchangeable and disposable. Leckie makes it look like the price of equality is identity.
There are much better vehicles for a progressive message; ones not on fire and speeding for the edge of the cliff would be good.
Spoilers be damned, incidentally. Finished Three Body Problem, and it actually made me nostalgic for the humanocentric xenophobia of the fifties. The crowning moment of suicidal stupidity occurs because one of the more important characters has, as explained by the historic context, so little faith in the human race's ability to solve its' own problems that they really think it would be a good idea if we were invaded by aliens; we would actually better off as pets of a species that does have its' shit together.
The major problem is that there may not be anything as humane as pethood on the alien agenda, and the lack of faith in humanity the movement exhibits may turn out to be a self fulfilling prophecy...
Myself, it's been an odd few weeks; the best of the bunch being, believe it or not, Date Night on Union Station, EM Foner, about the misadventures of the human ambassador to a multispecies, pangalactic trading station, and the alien AI run dating service that is plaguing her life. Funny, upbeat without being rose tinted, a relief from guddling through crapsacks.
Old Venus, GRR Martin edited, a collection of alternate reality stories about what if Venus wasn't the sulphuric cauldron we know and loathe today, but actually had turned out to be the livable, inhabitable swamp world we dreampt of before the evidence was in. Many authors, many takes, some fairly gloomy and full of misunderstanding, cross purposes and malcommunication, others achievement and triumph. Quite a lot of Soviet Venus, oddly.
S J Madill's Burnt Worlds- picture Voyager, done in the length of a single movie, with Canadians. Potboiler; not bad, just undistinguished. Despite the Canadian presence.
The Soviets' success in being the only people to get landers to the Venusian surface merits, in my opinion, tributes in fiction. Soviet Venus- fair enough in my book.
I read The Martian myself recently and it was quite entertaining. Currently too preoccupied with 'old memories' trawls of fanfic I'm fond of to really get into any novels.
Eleventh Century Remnant wrote:
Interesting social aspects, well, yes, but the price of gender- blindness seems to be dictatorship; it's a civilisation that thinks nothing of armed oppression, trampling on people's rights and turning them into meat puppets, hierarchial to the extent that you have to go back to BC to find a close equivalent, underlings interchangeable and disposable. Leckie makes it look like the price of equality is identity.
Man, that's a really niche reading of the book to consider those things as being causally related.
In fact, I'd say it's almost a hostile reading of the book, deliberately looking for something to criticise the gender presentation for, the Radch is a (somewhat) oppressive empire which also happens to have an unconventional gender presentation, it's not a (somewhat) oppressive empire because it has an unconventional gender representation.
Y'see, a book can contain a thing like unconventional gender representation and not actually be about that, and the Ancillary series isn't, it's just one facet of the strangeness of the society that they don't have social gender differentiation.
Is equality a theme of Radch society in any other respect than 'lack of social gender differentiation? That might not be the only thing he's got in mind.
Not at all. It's an autocracy run by a person who has a consciousness split between many thousands of bodies so they can be personally present throughout the empire (and immortal), with society as a hereditary aristocracy where the most overriding social concept is political and financial patronage.
It is in no way pretended to be an equal society, there's just no social gender differentiation and the feminine pronouns are always used in the book.
Simon_Jester wrote:Is equality a theme of Radch society in any other respect than 'lack of social gender differentiation? That might not be the only thing he's got in mind.
Hah, no way It's very unequal, with Radch forming Houses which affect status, and patronage between higher and lower houses being a major factor in prestige.
There's parts where senior officers caution young officers against getting into romantic relationships with older officers from lower-status houses because the senior views it as a potential power play.
It's sort of a Roman thing. You get conquered and become part of the Radch, you *become* Radch (the Radch word for civilized is Radch), you form a house, and you begin climbing the social ladders. So they'd view as meritocratic. And the Radch uses tests, 'the Aptitudes,' which anyone can take and can get them into positions in social services like the military officer roles (though there is definite favoritism to those from high houses who's children pretty much always pass the apptitudes, of course, but the aptitudes get the best and brightest from all over). So... kinda backing off on my 'no way,' there's aspects that are somewhat open to all, but mostly in that there's openings to buy into the Radchaai power structure.
That said, the gender aspect is not presented as a bad part of the Radch nor the Radch as entirely bad (even if it's imperialism is), and the main character finds dealing with gender in other cultures fairly annoying and how people'll get mad when she accidentally calls them the wrong pronoun, and how in *this* culture this signals someone's a male/female, but in *that* culture it's something else. It's all so confusing, you know?
There are some people who are reeeeally annoyed by the gender aspect, calling it as 'SJW' [heh] novel and such, but really it's more just a fact-of-life part of a culture. There's weirder human cultures than the Radchaai who're mentioned in passing.
I've been reading through Perdido Street Station by China Mieville, and I love it. Now that the semester is over, I'll probably read the whole thing in the next day or so.
A really fun and interesting book I'm into is Grand Central Arena (+ it's sequel, Spheres of Influence), by Ryk E. Spoor.
It starts out in a rather nice Solar System. AIs (smart, but smart ones must operate with human supervision), nano-replicators (Called 'AIwish'), and mild transhumanism are all common (everyone is slightly enhanced for health by our standards, sometimes more across-the-board. Plus plenty of cosmetic stuff. And almost everyone runs with an AI assistants in their heads). There's an government enforcement group, but they don't have a lot to do- not since Project Hyperion, a rather unethical project to make heroes real that went off the rails in multiple ways some fifty-years back, but still occasionally comes back to haunt.
But they finally have something to approve- the first FTL ship.
Some unmanned probes with low-level AI have been sent, but sometimes they come back, sometimes they don't, and the AI never provide any readings, they just blank out, while mechanical instruments like clocks work fine, but don't provide enough intel to figure out what's really going on. Sending a higher level AI unsupervised is against the law, and besides, still may not work. So they have enough data to say it can probably be done crewed, and launch their first ship.
Jump!
And everyone's head-AI blank out and the ship's fusion engine cuts out, throwing most of the crew into brief confusion. The pilot stops them from crashing, as they certainly don't end up in empty space like they were expecting.
It turns out FTL space is filled with a construct. All of FTL space, with a single construct. AI doesn't work there, nanotech has some limits. And, as they soon discover, there's aliens, because *everyone* ends up there.
Now they have to secure humanity's place in 'the Arena,' a location full of aliens, all of whom far more familiar with the rules that govern the bizarre place, and some of whom possess fantastic abilities that mystify even most there.
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The author, Ryk E. Spoor, is a big fan of Golden Age SF like Skylark and Lensman by EE 'Doc' Smith, and it shows, in a good way, with a couple references (including one character, Marc C. DuQuesne, named after a character from Doc Smith's stories), but you don't need to be familiar with them for GCA. It's practically two SF settings in one, with the in-system side and Arena side each having it's own rules and attributes, with rumbles of a potential AI war growing in realspace while the crew fights for survival and a place among the stars in the Arena.
It's very unequal, with Radch forming Houses which affect status, and patronage between higher and lower houses being a major factor in prestige.
