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The Space Opera, Military Sci-Fi, and Interstellar Sci Fi thread


C.T. Phipps

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I finished A Deepness in the Sky. Have to thank everyone that recommended this. Not sure I've read anything like this but my sci-fi lit genre is limited. I've either delved into cyberpunk (Altered Carbon) or military sci-fi / shallower space opera (Old Man's War, Forever War etc) and this was not that. 

Overall, I'm still not sure what to make of the novel though the ending was epic and page turning enough for me to really appreciate it now that I've put the book down. There were tedious parts in the middle where the vocabulary and science bogged me down because I'm not a PhD student in physics, astrophysics or some form of spatial engineering. Ramscoops and localizers don't mean much to me.. but after googling they were real things or at least realistic scientific proposals of space and electronics. Combine that with some of the concepts of time, space, neurobiology (which I'm more familiar with), the architecture of the starfaring vessels and the way people moved through them .. I ended up googling the author and I'm not surprised he was a professor of mathematics and CompSci. Sometimes the book felt like a science or engineering lesson and something intended for a master's / graduate level science background audience. The opera and scale of warfare and politics felt like it was on a more serious level compared to the Old Man War's series which I had immediately transitioned from. And it was deeper or more serious in it's content at all levels...orbital mechanics, economics and the economies of scale of industries in space, politics, electronics.  Given the book was written in 1999, I wonder what science concepts Vernor Vinge would change or improve upon what the technology of today. It certainly left an impression on me.

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On 1/18/2018 at 3:25 AM, WarGalley said:

Given the book was written in 1999, I wonder what science concepts Vernor Vinge would change or improve upon what the technology of today.

He's one of the planet's leading futurists (e.g. he coined the term "technological signularity") so there probably aren't that many. And yes, he's a professor and it shows -- though you don't need to be a mathematician, scientist or engineer to enjoy his work, you just need a thorough understanding of contemporary popular science.

A Deepness in the Sky is pretty unique among modern science fiction books in that it is quite close to "hard" science fiction. That is, it mostly sticks to modern physics (the only exceptions being the On-Off star and some of the artifacts in its system) and goes into considerable depth explaining how things would work. This used to be how most science fiction operated, but it fell out of fashion and now it's mostly about the story and characters rather than the science and technology -- even V. Vinge doesn't do this often (the rest of this series does have quite a bit of technology indistinguishable from magic).

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6 hours ago, Altherion said:

He's one of the planet's leading futurists (e.g. he coined the term "technological signularity") so there probably aren't that many. And yes, he's a professor and it shows -- though you don't need to be a mathematician, scientist or engineer to enjoy his work, you just need a thorough understanding of contemporary popular science.

A Deepness in the Sky is pretty unique among modern science fiction books in that it is quite close to "hard" science fiction. That is, it mostly sticks to modern physics (the only exceptions being the On-Off star and some of the artifacts in its system) and goes into considerable depth explaining how things would work. This used to be how most science fiction operated, but it fell out of fashion and now it's mostly about the story and characters rather than the science and technology -- even V. Vinge doesn't do this often (the rest of this series does have quite a bit of technology indistinguishable from magic).



Have you read Alastair Reynolds? He's all about hard SF. At one point (in Terminal World) he even takes on a concept pretty similar to the Zones of Thought, though on a smaller scale (and more applying just to tech than outright thinking abilty) and gives a go to a scientific explanation for it.

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15 hours ago, Altherion said:

He's one of the planet's leading futurists (e.g. he coined the term "technological signularity") so there probably aren't that many. And yes, he's a professor and it shows -- though you don't need to be a mathematician, scientist or engineer to enjoy his work, you just need a thorough understanding of contemporary popular science...

His books in the Realtime/Bobble series accurately describe the state of the art military research project management (not the technology of the Bobbles, but the processes used and the locations as depicted in the stories) of our Motorola facilities in the late 1980s and 1990s.  Unlike many writers, he was a writer who was an actual part of the milieu of scientific experimentation and progress who happened to be a writer, rather than a writer who set his stories in what he thought was a scientific manner.  As a result, although there may be other writers whose styles I like or find easier to read than Vinge, there are no other writers whose writing was so utterly absent of errors in describing project management, experimentation, research, or development.

The Peace War (1984)

Marooned in Realtime (1986)

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The sequel to my Lucifer's Star novel, Lucifer's Nebula, came out this month.

I also would like to share STAR WARS EXPANDED UNIVERSE recommendations here.

STAR WARS Legends

The Thrawn Trilogy

The Rogue Squadron series

The Wraith Squadron series

Shatterpoint

The Revenge of the Sith novelization

STAR WARS Canon

Bloodline

Lost Stars

Thrawn

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I finished A Fire Upon the Deep. Like others, I preferred A Deepness in the Sky more because it was a little more grounded in reality and had far more compelling antagonists. Both novels felt structurally similar in that there is a long buildup to a relative fast and epic conclusion though I think A Deepness in the Sky pulls it off better. I swear both of these books have increased my vocabulary more than all of the other books I've read over the last 10 or 15 years.

Spoilers for both books below:

Spoiler

A Deepness in the Sky really resonated with me even days after I put it down which hasn't happened to me with a book in quite some time. In particular, the Emergency and Tomas Nau were very compelling villains and I found them much more fascinating than Steel or Flenser. Tomas Nau is probably my favorite character across both books just for his sheer villainy, composure and calculation. He's the perfect character to run SPECTRE in a futuristic Bond novel.

I preferred the Tine's hive mind race over the Arachnids. I haven't read a book where that hive mind ability is covered in a first person narration and the ability for a self to fragment, re-join from others, and the ability for a parent to be a child and vice versa were interesting concepts to explore.

On the other side of it, I didn't find the Blight as a compelling villain either. I suppose by nature of being a technological singularity, you can't really explore it too much since the unpredictability of it is inherent in the concept. As the remaining pages dwindled, I kept wondering how they were going to defeat the Blight in satisfactory fashion considering how powerful it was. I should have suspected the Zones would be the key but I didn't find the execution as interesting as the final 3-way (or even 4-way) conflict at the end of Deepness.

I think I need to go back and also re-read about the 2 other self-aware entities (Arne and Sjana?) born with the blight in the beginning of the book. Did they have a relationship with the parents? Did they play a role beyond the Prologue? Did they start Countermeasure before the OOB got to the Tines world (i.e. the first Zone storm)? I would also have liked to get a better idea of the state of the universe in all of the zones post-Countermeasure. How many lives / civilizations did they destroy in saving the rest of the universe? Pham pretty much.. reset the universe for anyone not in the Slow Zone if I understand it right.

Also, are there any scientific theories that led to the idea of the zones? That the laws of physics may change across spacetime (independent of something like black holes)? I think another reason why I liked Deepness is that I can see it being Jules Verne-esque in it's foresight of human society and trade in space.

 

 

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26 minutes ago, WarGalley said:
Spoiler

I think I need to go back and also re-read about the 2 other self-aware entities (Arne and Sjana?) born with the blight in the beginning of the book. Did they have a relationship with the parents? Did they play a role beyond the Prologue? Did they start Countermeasure before the OOB got to the Tines world (i.e. the first Zone storm)? I would also have liked to get a better idea of the state of the universe in all of the zones post-Countermeasure. How many lives / civilizations did they destroy in saving the rest of the universe? Pham pretty much.. reset the universe for anyone not in the Slow Zone if I understand it right.

 

Spoiler

Yes, the two entities from the beginning of the book were based on templates of the parents. They were part of Countermeasure and yes, the first Zone storm was a result of their actions -- Pham says so when he's describing why he'll be able to do more with it now. It's not clear how much of the Beyond was turned into the Slow Zone, but it was definitely not all of it: there's a final message exchange which says that the author is unable to contact anyone to one side of them.

34 minutes ago, WarGalley said:

Also, are there any scientific theories that led to the idea of the zones? That the laws of physics may change across spacetime (independent of something like black holes)?

No. In fact, conservation of momentum can be derived from the fact that the laws of physics are the same across space (this is one of the most important applications of Noether's theorem). The zones are more of a philosophical construct: V. Vinge is one of the greatest proponents of "the Singularity" and he wanted to explore what happens if instead of it being distributed across time, it was spread out across space.

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1 hour ago, Altherion said:
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Yes, the two entities from the beginning of the book were based on templates of the parents. They were part of Countermeasure and yes, the first Zone storm was a result of their actions -- Pham says so when he's describing why he'll be able to do more with it now. It's not clear how much of the Beyond was turned into the Slow Zone, but it was definitely not all of it: there's a final message exchange which says that the author is unable to contact anyone to one side of them.

No. In fact, conservation of momentum can be derived from the fact that the laws of physics are the same across space (this is one of the most important applications of Noether's theorem). The zones are more of a philosophical construct: V. Vinge is one of the greatest proponents of "the Singularity" and he wanted to explore what happens if instead of it being distributed across time, it was spread out across space.

I suspect they were probably also inspired by the changing laws of physics in Poul Anderson's Golden Age SF novel Brainwave.

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4 hours ago, Altherion said:
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Yes, the two entities from the beginning of the book were based on templates of the parents. They were part of Countermeasure and yes, the first Zone storm was a result of their actions -- Pham says so when he's describing why he'll be able to do more with it now. It's not clear how much of the Beyond was turned into the Slow Zone, but it was definitely not all of it: there's a final message exchange which says that the author is unable to contact anyone to one side of them.

... The zones are more of a philosophical construct: V. Vinge is one of the greatest proponents of "the Singularity" and he wanted to explore what happens if instead of it being distributed across time, it was spread out across space.

I agree with this reading of Vinge's work.  He is working from the same sort of idea as William Gibson, whose famous quote on NPR was, "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed."  [Listen here: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1067220]

The Deepness in the Sky and Fire Upon the Deep works both appear to show the clash of civilizations that are on different points of the timeline around the Singularity.  Sometimes the clash is between pre- and post-singularity societies, sometimes it is between mid-singularity and before/beyond-singularity societies.  Even his Realtime books have a similar juxtaposition of pre- and post- societies as a result of the function of the bobbles, just written from a 1980s view into the future.  So does Tatja Grimm's World in a pre-steam-punk space-opera sort of way that reminds me a lot of something Jack Vance and GRRM might have written if this was a subject that interested them.

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On 2/24/2018 at 4:01 PM, Altherion said:
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Yes, the two entities from the beginning of the book were based on templates of the parents. They were part of Countermeasure and yes, the first Zone storm was a result of their actions -- Pham says so when he's describing why he'll be able to do more with it now. It's not clear how much of the Beyond was turned into the Slow Zone, but it was definitely not all of it: there's a final message exchange which says that the author is unable to contact anyone to one side of them.

No. In fact, conservation of momentum can be derived from the fact that the laws of physics are the same across space (this is one of the most important applications of Noether's theorem). The zones are more of a philosophical construct: V. Vinge is one of the greatest proponents of "the Singularity" and he wanted to explore what happens if instead of it being distributed across time, it was spread out across space.

Thanks for the clarification. The last text transmission makes a lot more sense.

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So I'm finally diving into The Reality Dysfunction by Hamilton, and I'm either going to love the crap out of this or throw it in the garbage.  Only 90 pages in so far, so it could go either way.

 

Edit: Yeah, I got about 300 pages into this monstrosity, thought well i hope this doesn't go where I thin kit does, then it did, then I looked up the rest, and fuck this. How this is considered scifi and not Christian Fiction is beyond my ken. I haven't hated a book like this in a long time.

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On 2/28/2018 at 9:35 PM, Darth Richard II said:

So I'm finally diving into The Reality Dysfunction by Hamilton, and I'm either going to love the crap out of this or throw it in the garbage.  Only 90 pages in so far, so it could go either way.

 

Edit: Yeah, I got about 300 pages into this monstrosity, thought well i hope this doesn't go where I thin kit does, then it did, then I looked up the rest, and fuck this. How this is considered scifi and not Christian Fiction is beyond my ken. I haven't hated a book like this in a long time.

There is a bit much graphic sex in this for it to be considered "Christian Fiction".  Read it years ago.

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On 2/28/2018 at 7:35 PM, Darth Richard II said:

So I'm finally diving into The Reality Dysfunction by Hamilton, and I'm either going to love the crap out of this or throw it in the garbage.  Only 90 pages in so far, so it could go either way.

 

Edit: Yeah, I got about 300 pages into this monstrosity, thought well i hope this doesn't go where I thin kit does, then it did, then I looked up the rest, and fuck this. How this is considered scifi and not Christian Fiction is beyond my ken. I haven't hated a book like this in a long time.

What specifically did you not care for in The Reality Dysfunction?

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6 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

There is a bit much graphic sex in this for it to be considered "Christian Fiction".  Read it years ago.

I do remember reading a review of it once describing it as 'Christian Propaganda', I think maybe that reviewer hadn't read the whole series, because I'd say it was ultimately very sceptical about any attempts by some of the character to try to interpret the events of the series as being based on their religion.

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2 minutes ago, williamjm said:

I do remember reading a review of it once describing it as 'Christian Propaganda', I think maybe that reviewer hadn't read the whole series, because I'd say it was ultimately very sceptical about any attempts by some of the character to try to interpret the events of the series as being based on their religion.

I agree.  The Edenists certainly seemed willing to accept the existence of souls on a purely materialist level.  The Soul is simply a type of energy that we hadn't been able to perceive before it was revealed to us.  The "Beyond" and life after death are simply aspects of the existence of a multiverse.  Remember... the Universe is not only stranger than we imagine.  It is stranger than we can imagine.  :)



 

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7 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I agree.  The Edenists certainly seemed willing to accept the existence of souls on a purely materialist level.  The Soul is simply a type of energy that we hadn't been able to perceive before it was revealed to us.  The "Beyond" and life after death are simply aspects of the existence of a multiverse.  Remember... the Universe is not only stranger than we imagine.  It is stranger than we can imagine.  :)

It's been over 15 years since I last read so my memory may be a bit vague on some points, but from what I remember the Edenists (despite their name) have what seemed like an atheistic (or possibly agnostic) world-view, and the narrative does tend to present them as being the most enlightened of the human societies in the series.

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Yeah i went a bit over the top there, I was just super dissapointed after being hyped up for so long, but the bad guys being Satanists who basically rape everyone for hundreds of pages combined with a protagonist that makes Kvothe look flawed did uh, not work for me. 

(I also found it quite offputting how every female character is described by her breasts. Kate Elliott's head would explode)

 

edit: I also found the prose to be shit, so that's another thing

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