Vinge’s Marooned in Real Time, A Fire Upon the Deep. The former introduced the idea of the Singularity, the latter gets a lot of fun playing near the edge of it.
Olaf Stapledon: Last and First Men, Star Maker.
Poul Anderson: Brain Wave. What happens if there’s a drastic, sudden intelligence increase?
After you’ve read some science fiction, if you let us know what you’ve liked, I bet you’ll get some more fine-tuned recommendations.
If anyone read it for the first time recently, I’m curious what you think of the Usenet references. Those were my favorite parts of the book when I first read it.
I thought the Usenet references were really cool and really clever, both from a reader’s standpoint, and also from an author’s standpoint. For example, it doesn’t take a lot of digression to explain it or anything since most readers are already familiar with similar stuff (e.g., Usenet.) It also just seems really plausible as a form of universe-scale “telegram” communication, so I think it works great for the story. Implausibility just ruins science fiction for me, it destroys that crucial suspension of disbelief.
If you would have tried to explain to people a hundred years ago that we will have interlinked computers and a lot of people will use them to view images of naked females I think most people would have found that hypothesis very implausible.
Any accurate description of the world that will exist 100 years in the future is bound to contain lots of implausible claims.
If you’re suggesting that all science fiction is implausible though, then that’s not true. There’s a difference between coming up with random, futuristic ideas, and coming up with random, futuristic ideas that have justification for working.
Vinge’s Marooned in Real Time, A Fire Upon the Deep. The former introduced the idea of the Singularity, the latter gets a lot of fun playing near the edge of it.
Olaf Stapledon: Last and First Men, Star Maker.
Poul Anderson: Brain Wave. What happens if there’s a drastic, sudden intelligence increase?
After you’ve read some science fiction, if you let us know what you’ve liked, I bet you’ll get some more fine-tuned recommendations.
I second A Fire Upon the Deep (and anything by Vinge, but A Fire Upon the Deep is my favorite). BTW, it contains what is in retrospect a clear reference to the FAI problem. See http://books.google.com/books?id=UGAKB3r0sZQC&lpg=PA400&ots=VBrKocfTHM&dq=%22fast%20burn%20transcendence%22&pg=PA400
If anyone read it for the first time recently, I’m curious what you think of the Usenet references. Those were my favorite parts of the book when I first read it.
I thought the Usenet references were really cool and really clever, both from a reader’s standpoint, and also from an author’s standpoint. For example, it doesn’t take a lot of digression to explain it or anything since most readers are already familiar with similar stuff (e.g., Usenet.) It also just seems really plausible as a form of universe-scale “telegram” communication, so I think it works great for the story. Implausibility just ruins science fiction for me, it destroys that crucial suspension of disbelief.
If you would have tried to explain to people a hundred years ago that we will have interlinked computers and a lot of people will use them to view images of naked females I think most people would have found that hypothesis very implausible.
Any accurate description of the world that will exist 100 years in the future is bound to contain lots of implausible claims.
If you’re suggesting that all science fiction is implausible though, then that’s not true. There’s a difference between coming up with random, futuristic ideas, and coming up with random, futuristic ideas that have justification for working.