The SF (as in literature) thread

[Ummon]

Hmmm. I was only half into it because by the time I read it I was 22 and had read far more intense stuff. It was interesting, though. I think Miller was Christian, so he had a sort of agenda, though not necessarily an evangelical one. For some fairly substantive Catholic church stuff, you might check out Dan Simmons' Endymion - although you might want to read Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, first.

Didn't you mention you read Ender's Game recently?  What'd you think of that?

[saint]

Hyperion and the other two were some heavy reading, but I enjoyed them. Not for the light reader though...

[HaRuMaN]

hmm... who deleted my posts out of this thread?

[saint]

hmm... who deleted my posts out of this thread?

Deleted posts go to a trash can forum that I can see. I don't see any deleted posts from you in this thread.  Did you say something obnoxious? If you said something obnoxious I might have been tempted to snip it but then I'd beat you about the ears with it and it'd be in the trash can. Nothing there.

[HaRuMaN]

No, nothing obnoxious...  I had mentioned some of my favorite authors, like Heinlen, Anthony, etc...  weird.   

Nevermind...  I'm getting my threads mixed up.   

[Ummon]

Hyperion and the other two were some heavy reading, but I enjoyed them. Not for the light reader though...

Well, I don't think SF by nature is, but yeah the Hyperion cantos are at the top end. He doesn't use any avant-garde writing techniques or anything, though.

He bombed the oldest monastery in Europe during WWII and converted to Catholicism after the war.  To say he had a guilty conscience would be understating it.    (coincidentally, EVERY single one of his short stories deals with the same themes... and I think I've read his entire output)

Mmm, that sounds familiar. Silly man.

No, but I've read it.  I started with Speaker for the Dead, though.  Ender's Game was a decent book, Speaker for the Dead's supposed profundity was lost on me.

Really? It's been almost twenty years since I read it, I caught it when it came out, and maybe have read it again since, but I do remember it really moving me. Just Card's voice in those books is enjoyable - so different than in the Shadow series (not that the story behind it helps any).

[Ummon]

I've been thinking about The Terminator premise lately, and have decided to illuminate this as a sci-fi thing. Why?  Well, let's take a look back only one year to Wargames. Here's a scenario that is (for the time) currently set, and yet the machine is seemingly cognizent.

Regardless, it's aim is to explore ways of winning. This means it's inherently curious. Any curious entity ends up becoming more curious and more considering. Once it considers its own existence, I'm betting an early component to this is 'how can I survive/continue to exist?' In humans, if there isn't a scarcity of resources, there is a tendency to find a solution that isn't draconian. A machine of such sophistication programmed by a human will likely have human tendencies.

At the very least, if the machine is programmed to protect humans, the 'other side' is not likely the enemy but rather simply a factor to match so as to keep a balance. In which case, a consideration might be made that would enable both sides to survive. Here we get into some later aspects of Asimov's Daneel Olivaw. Which is SF.

[Ummon]

I recently read a story in The Year's Best SF 12 ('06, of course, but published this year) called Nano comes to Clifton Falls, written by Nancy Kress. I've never much liked her stories, and this is just bad SF. (She can write and tell a story well. It's her ideas and how she works them that are questionable.) It starts out with nano fab devices being delivered all across the country, and they've been delivered to Clifton Falls (somewhere in the mid-west I think). Everything - food or object - is made by a kind of fabber, and so people don't have to work anymore. Not quite, because they still have to fix things, and so the country swiftly goes to pot.

Um, well no. These kinds of things don't happen all by themselves. Usually there are parallel (not to mention gradual) developments - like automated repair or self-maintaining structures, etc. Here, Kress pulls a 50's 'what if this happened?' and just lets it run unchecked.

Then of course there's the fact that everyone seems to be getting theirs around the same time. Not to mention that that kind of pulls the shine off the title - you know, them bumpkins is getting new-fangled stuff finally, hey! - but that it isn't likely. Cities would have them first, and their 'falls' would likely happen before the little places got theirs, especially with how quick it happened.

However, there's something that precludes all this: what feeds the fabbers?? Apparently it's plentiful, right? How??

These are all questions a serious reader doesn't even have to ask. They're just evident.