Fantastic, much appreciated. It looks like you read scifi with much the same lens I do (very aware of scientific and logical realism), which makes your reviews much more valuable to me than sifting through amazon reviews. I agree with your reviews pretty closely for the maybe 1⁄2 of your list I’ve read.
I’ll just mention a few of my favorites from a similar perspective and try to not spend too much time describing why I love them so despite their minor shortcomings.
Charlie Stross is amazing for actual futurism. So is Cory Doctorow, but Stross also happens to be a crack storyteller, with the pacing, characterization, and brevity that turns an interesting idea into a bestseller.
Stross’s Accelerando is a must-read for any aspiring futurist- which means anyone working on alignment. It’s not as good a story, as an early work and collection of connected short stories, but some details of his near-future history toward AGI takeover are highly plausible and non-obvious.
His Glass House is simultaneously utopian speculation, and a micro-lens on current gender politics. And a rollicking tampered-memories adventure. And a touching, resonant romance. But no real AI involvement or major insights on possible futures. And low on the science rating. I recommend it to non-scifi people since it’s so good as a story and occasional mind=blown moments.
The Fractal Prince is also, IMO, a staggering achievement; a story told so beautifully that each paragraph is almost a poem. This doesn’t make it easy to follow, but surely you like a little challenge? I found it captivating. It’s not about AI as much as brain uploads, and hierarchical self-slavery on an epic scale. It has some dramatic departures into quantum magic, but for the most part its world and plot is driven by theoretically realistic technologies of brain uploading and editing. But it’s a world sculpted by poets as well as described by one; it is strange and beautiful first, and a study in futurism second. Few insights for societal or AGI alignment, but holy heck what a book. The fact that this was the author’s first publication is part of what makes me so puzzled at how he pulled it off.
I’m noticing that, despite having read everything I can find that tries to treat AGI seriously, very little of it has any relevance for alignment, beyond helping with predicting societal impacts of emerging technologies or mostly-aligned parahuman AGIs. I think some good realistic fictional stories centering on alignment might be really helpful. If anyone with more talent and time for fiction wants to take a swing, I’ve got ideas for plots that could both carry a story as well as get the reader into some of the important alignment logic.
re: The Fractal Prince (really the whole Quantum Thief trilogy), I may be biased, but when I first read it I had 2 reactions: (1) this is the most targeted-at-my-ingroup novel I have ever read (2) nobody outside of my ingroup will get the kajillion references flying around, since Hannu Rajaniemi never bothered footnoting / defending any of them (unlike say what Peter Watts did with Blindsight), so people will think he’s just making up technobabble when he’s not, which means he’ll be generally underappreciated despite the effusive praise (which will be of the generic “he’s so smart” variety), which made my heart sink.
But Gwern not only got it (unsurprisingly), he articulated it better than I ever could, so thanks Gwern:
Hannu makes no concessions to the casual reader, as he mainlines straight into his veins the pre-deep-learning 2010-era transhumanist zeitgeist via Silicon Valley—if it was ever discussed in a late-night bull session after a Singularity University conference, it might pop up here. Hannu stuffs the novels with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it ideas on the level of Olaf Stapeldon. A conventional Verne gun is too easy a way of getting to space—how about beating Project Orion by instead using a nuclear space gun (since emulated brains don’t care about high g acceleration)? Or for example, the All-Defector reveals that, since other universes could be rewriting their rules to expand at maximum speed, erasing other universes before they know it, he plans to rewrite our universe’s rule to do so first (ie. he will defect at the multiversal level against all other universes); whereas beginner-level SF like The Three Body Problem would dilate on this for half a book, Hannu’s grand reveal gets all of 2 paragraphs before crashing into the eucatastrophic ending.
For world-building, he drops neologisms left and right, and hard ones at that—few enough American readers will be familiar with the starting premise of “Arsène Lupin in spaaaace!” (probably more are familiar with the anime Lupin The Third these days), but his expectations go far beyond that: the ideal reader of the trilogy is not merely one familiar with the Prisoner’s Dilemma but also with the bizarre zero-determinant PD strategies discovered ~2008, and not just with such basic physics as quantum entanglement or applications like quantum dots, but exotic applications to quantumauctions & game theory (including Prisoner’s Dilemma) & pseudo-telepathy (yes, those are things), and it would definitely be helpful if that reader happened to also be familiar with Eliezer Yudkowsky’s c. 2000s writings on “Coherent Extrapolated Volition”, with a dash of Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov’sRussian Cosmism for seasoning (although only a dash2).
This leads to an irony: I noted while reading Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell cyberpunk manga that almost everything technical in the GitS manga turned out to be nonsense despite Shirow’s pretensions to in-depth research & meticulous attention to detail; while in QT, most technical things sound like cyberpunk nonsense and Hannu doesn’t insert any editorial notes like Shirow does to defend them, but are actually real and just so arcane you haven’t heard of them.
For example, some readers accuse Hannu of relying on FTL communication via quantum entanglement, which is bad physics; but Hannu does not! If they had read more closely (similar to the standard reader failure to understand the physics of “Story of Your Life”), they would have noticed that at no point is there communication faster-than-light, only coordination faster-than-light—‘spooky action at a distance’. He is instead employing advanced forms of quantum entanglement which enable things like secret auctions or for coordinated strategies of game-playing (quantum coordination, like treating the particle measurements as flipping a coin and one person does the ‘Heads’ strategy and the other person does the ‘Tails’ strategy does not require communication, obviously, but surprisingly, quantum coordination can be superior to all apparently-equivalent communication-free classical strategies). He explains briefly that the zoku use quantum entanglement in these ways, but a reader could easily miss that, given all the other things they are trying to understand and how common ‘quantum woo’ is.3
Rajaniemi confirmed that Gwern “got it” like nobody else did:
As a longtime fan of gwern ’s work—gwern.net is the best rabbit hole on the Internet—it’s a treat to see this incredibly thoughtful (and slightly spoilery) review of the Quantum Thief trilogy. gwern.net/review/book#quantu… Gwern perfectly nails the emotional core of the trilogy and, true to form, spots a number of easter eggs I thought no one would ever find. This may be my favorite review of all time.
I admire Rajaniemi for pulling it off as you said, but I’m somehow not that surprised. He’s bright (mathematical physics PhD) and has been working at writing-as-craft for a while:
But talking to him about his rapid career, it’s quickly apparent he’s no stranger to being compared to other sci-fi rising stars, having first seriously begun writing in 2002 while studying his PhD as part of writing group called Writers Bloc – which includes authors Charles Stross and Alan Campbell. “It is, and always has been a place with quite a harsh level of criticism,” he says. “But in a healthy and professional way, of course, so it was a good group of people and environment in which to develop.”
I personally got the Quantum Thief trilogy because I’d been blown away by Stross’ Accelerando, wanted more, and saw Stross say of Rajaniemi: “Hard to admit, but I think he’s better at this stuff than I am. The best first SF novel I’ve read in many years.”
Fantastic, much appreciated. It looks like you read scifi with much the same lens I do (very aware of scientific and logical realism), which makes your reviews much more valuable to me than sifting through amazon reviews. I agree with your reviews pretty closely for the maybe 1⁄2 of your list I’ve read.
I’ll just mention a few of my favorites from a similar perspective and try to not spend too much time describing why I love them so despite their minor shortcomings.
Charlie Stross is amazing for actual futurism. So is Cory Doctorow, but Stross also happens to be a crack storyteller, with the pacing, characterization, and brevity that turns an interesting idea into a bestseller.
Stross’s Accelerando is a must-read for any aspiring futurist- which means anyone working on alignment. It’s not as good a story, as an early work and collection of connected short stories, but some details of his near-future history toward AGI takeover are highly plausible and non-obvious.
His Glass House is simultaneously utopian speculation, and a micro-lens on current gender politics. And a rollicking tampered-memories adventure. And a touching, resonant romance. But no real AI involvement or major insights on possible futures. And low on the science rating. I recommend it to non-scifi people since it’s so good as a story and occasional mind=blown moments.
The Fractal Prince is also, IMO, a staggering achievement; a story told so beautifully that each paragraph is almost a poem. This doesn’t make it easy to follow, but surely you like a little challenge? I found it captivating. It’s not about AI as much as brain uploads, and hierarchical self-slavery on an epic scale. It has some dramatic departures into quantum magic, but for the most part its world and plot is driven by theoretically realistic technologies of brain uploading and editing. But it’s a world sculpted by poets as well as described by one; it is strange and beautiful first, and a study in futurism second. Few insights for societal or AGI alignment, but holy heck what a book. The fact that this was the author’s first publication is part of what makes me so puzzled at how he pulled it off.
I’m noticing that, despite having read everything I can find that tries to treat AGI seriously, very little of it has any relevance for alignment, beyond helping with predicting societal impacts of emerging technologies or mostly-aligned parahuman AGIs. I think some good realistic fictional stories centering on alignment might be really helpful. If anyone with more talent and time for fiction wants to take a swing, I’ve got ideas for plots that could both carry a story as well as get the reader into some of the important alignment logic.
re: The Fractal Prince (really the whole Quantum Thief trilogy), I may be biased, but when I first read it I had 2 reactions: (1) this is the most targeted-at-my-ingroup novel I have ever read (2) nobody outside of my ingroup will get the kajillion references flying around, since Hannu Rajaniemi never bothered footnoting / defending any of them (unlike say what Peter Watts did with Blindsight), so people will think he’s just making up technobabble when he’s not, which means he’ll be generally underappreciated despite the effusive praise (which will be of the generic “he’s so smart” variety), which made my heart sink.
But Gwern not only got it (unsurprisingly), he articulated it better than I ever could, so thanks Gwern:
Rajaniemi confirmed that Gwern “got it” like nobody else did:
I admire Rajaniemi for pulling it off as you said, but I’m somehow not that surprised. He’s bright (mathematical physics PhD) and has been working at writing-as-craft for a while:
I personally got the Quantum Thief trilogy because I’d been blown away by Stross’ Accelerando, wanted more, and saw Stross say of Rajaniemi: “Hard to admit, but I think he’s better at this stuff than I am. The best first SF novel I’ve read in many years.”