It took me a moment to realize, even after the mention of Echopraxia, that this was Peter Watts.
If you enjoy hard to very-hard science fiction, I strongly recommend the first book of his series, Blindsight. I thoroughly loved the read and bounced right back to the beginning for a second read with the context I'd gained on the first one. It's an absolute firehose of concepts; reminded me a bit of Accelerando by Charles Stross but a little less pleased with its own geekiness. The best summary I could give would be a meditation on consciousness set against a first-contact backdrop.
Boogie_Man 15 hours ago [-]
This may be well known, but I'm posting it because I didn't know: "very-hard" science fiction in this context means extremely plausible science fiction, as opposed to extremely speculative science fiction. The author explains how these fantastic things exist in a way which is realistic.
Originally, I thought it meant "very hard to understand" i.e. very technically complicated
jkingsman 14 hours ago [-]
Plausible oftentimes, I would say, but more that there are reliable, consistent systems at work that may or may not be explained, but that are definitely used. Very little "magic" or hand waving, but at the least the implication that there is an understandable system at work at some level.
mordechai9000 13 hours ago [-]
To me, "hard science fiction" evokes the old school writers like Arthur C. Clarke who would explore ideas with a slide rule or a calculator when planning a story. Even if he had to use a little hand waving and some unobtainium to make Ringworld work.
crooked-v 11 hours ago [-]
Maybe the neatest part of that with Ringworld is when fans proved that the theoretical structure itself is orbitally unstable... which he then came up with explanations for and used as a major plot point in a follow-up book.
riffraff 55 minutes ago [-]
Also the mountains on ringworld Which recycle the sea bed are the outcome of some fans pointing out the problems with a static land mass, iirc.
Loughla 11 hours ago [-]
Larry Niven wrote ringworld and the follow ups, not Clarke. Clarke wrote the Rama series.
ZpJuUuNaQ5 14 hours ago [-]
>extremely plausible science fiction
>I thought it meant "very hard to understand"
For a mere mortal like myself, those definitions aren't mutually exclusive. I think I tried reading "Blindsight" a long time ago but never got past a few dozen pages. Maybe I should give it a try again someday.
Scene_Cast2 14 hours ago [-]
Blindsight is known to be a slog for a lot of people including myself.
I love sci-fi, I love challenging ideas, and I really liked the concepts explored in Blindsight - except that I learned those concepts through summaries and selective reading.
jkingsman 14 hours ago [-]
Yes, there were definitely parts where I felt maybe I was picking up on a vibe or a hint, and later realized that was now a structural part of the story without which I would be quite lost.
I found this INCREDIBLY FULL OF SPOILERS explanation of fundamental plot points to be helpful in confirming or summarizing some things I missed[0].
There are no spoilers for Blindsight at that link. All it does is describe the events of the plot.
Boogie_Man 13 hours ago [-]
I'm certified dumb as a box of rocks 19 Wonderlic and I was able to follow most of it without issue or pause. It's possible that it's a bell curve and I'm too dumb to realize I was missing things. Hard to say.
throwanem 7 hours ago [-]
What did it leave you with on the subject of consciousness?
throwanem 7 hours ago [-]
"Hard" refers to scientific plausibility. The antipode of "hard science fiction" is "space opera."
When we talk about science fiction that focuses heavily on ideas over more traditional narrative concerns like character and action, we talk about "high-concept" science fiction.
ngangaga 12 hours ago [-]
I would characterize "hard" sci fi as "consistent" or "coherent", not necessarily "plausible".
Scarblac 13 hours ago [-]
The way I see it is that hard science is about the new science and its effects on people, so it has to make the science believable somehow.
Whereas soft science fiction has a futuristic setting but isn't primarily about that.
swayvil 9 hours ago [-]
How about very comprehensible science fiction?
Because science first and foremost strives for comprehensibility in its discussion of strange things.
Which is exactly why we borrow it for fiction.
subscribed 15 hours ago [-]
I think the Blindsight is the best sci-fi book for me. Absolutely gripping and novel.
And what I found particularly interesting, the afterword is about as interesting and engaging as the book.
It's such a gem of a book.
NikolaNovak 15 hours ago [-]
Astonishing book which I reread regularly. Echopraxia has grown on me upon further reading - initially I focused on the seeming promise of action and plot, vs ideas and concepts.
His Starfish book however has the most realistic, plausible, feasible, likely AI doomsday scenario though - published as it was 26 years ago and without AI being the focus for majority of the book.
atombender 9 hours ago [-]
The Freeze-Frame Revolution is also fantastic, along with the short stories, which collectively form the "Sunflower" cycle.
Watts writes the smartest but also scariest science fiction. There's an aura of existential, Lovecraftean dread in all his writings that I find incredibly appealing. In the case of Sunflower, Watts is able to make the idea of floating through space for millions of years, unable to stop, into something genuinely upsetting. It's bleak, but also really well plotted.
Not too long ago, Watts published a short story set right after Blindsight, "The Colonel". It's an excellent, standalone read.
duskwuff 9 hours ago [-]
"Checkers or chess?"
But yes. Especially when you boil it down to the essentials: humans take an AI built to perform one task and press it into duty for another, much more impactful task which it was completely unsuited for.
throwanem 7 hours ago [-]
But, importantly, not obviously completely unsuited for. Indeed, so subtly so that it almost ended the world before anyone noticed.
lynx97 3 hours ago [-]
I would have enjoyed that book so much more if he had left out vampires. To me, that part unnecessarily ruined the "seriousness" of that book for me. Apart from that, the underlying premise of the book is quite chilling and refreshing at the same time.
otikik 15 hours ago [-]
I wonder how he's feeling about Chinese rooms these days.
ImaCake 9 hours ago [-]
He blogs a lot on the OP link. I would imagine he has a few words about LLMs in there.
One of his older works explores the risks of software similar to LLMs but a little more advanced.
throwanem 7 hours ago [-]
Not at all more advanced. Only differently implemented. He thought there would be slightly more meat involved.
Atreiden 14 hours ago [-]
This is one of the coolest things I've read here in some time. This is the kind of insanity I can get behind.
> The rest of us might think we achieve artistic immortality if our work lasts a century or three. Bök blows his nose at such puny ambitions. His work might get deciphered by Fermi aliens who finally make it to our neighborhood a billion years from now. It could be iterating right up until the sun swallows this planet whole.
I got frisson reading this. I may have to read the author's novels, his writing style is compelling.
subscribed 13 hours ago [-]
You can download several of his novels from his own website.
Yeah, for free.
And indeed, his style is like this. It's really hard to put the book down.
The5thElephant 14 hours ago [-]
Peter Watts is fantastic. Very different tone from a lot of other scifi, with some very clever and dark ideas.
Wobbles42 7 hours ago [-]
I read Starfish close to 20 years ago. He had a uniquely dark vision of the future compared to the zeitgeist in 2007 or so. It's been interesting living through reality since then. I fear the day will come when I reread his earlier works and they start sounding optimistic.
throwanem 7 hours ago [-]
What wasn't optimistic about the Behemoth trilogy? There are humans alive at the end.
andrewflnr 5 hours ago [-]
I actually do really like the ending of that series, but not for its optimism.
dejobaan 12 hours ago [-]
Fantastic. While it's not quite at the level of Bök's work, an inevitable comparison is all of Tom7's projects (and in particular http://tom7.org/harder). I always love when this kind of stuff pops up onto HN. I feel that we're all interesting and experimental, and sometimes need a nudge to remember that people can do weird, neat stuff.
davidthewatson 14 hours ago [-]
For those of you who read with glee of the author's work and it's launch in Toronto soon, the event is free and open to the public if you wanna flee to Toronto for fun or are already there. I hope this won't become an unlikely Superbloom given the subject.
At least they didn't describe the event as a "release party".
MinimalAction 13 hours ago [-]
Amazing article! His writing style is unique and made me go down a rabbit hole of discovering his other works.
I was unaware of this demagogue of a bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans. It survives levels of radiation that is designed to kill all lifeforms. Wikipedia [0] lists this as a bacteria that supports panspermia -- that life originated elsewhere but spread through cosmic dust and was seeded on Earth eventually.
Fun fact: Thermococcus gammatolerans is known to be the one that tolerates the most toxic radiation.
I have a phd in a related field and I can't understand exactly what is being said here. From what I can tell, the author claims a protein was engineered, where the protein sequence maps (through a chosen translation table) to a human text. But at the same time, the protein folds into a well-defined shape (predicted, then experimentally determined), and somehow also enciphers... another poem?
duskwuff 10 hours ago [-]
You've got the right idea. The "poem" ("any style of life / is prim...") is encoded as a DNA sequence. This DNA codes for a protein, whose amino acids can be read as English text as well ("the faery is rosy / of glow..."), and which causes the bacterium to glow red. Watts mentions this work in his book Echopraxia as follows:
"The sequence spells a message and codes for a protein. The protein fluoresces and contains a response. It’s not contamination or lateral transfer. It’s a poem."
There's a more verbose explanation in this interview of Bök:
Broadly speaking, think of codon-anticodon pairings, but with actual letters mapped to them.
any style of life/ is prim
¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦¦ ¦¦ ¦¦¦¦ ¦¦ ¦¦¦¦
the faery is rosy/ of glow
flobosg 3 hours ago [-]
Wow! Happy to read that the Xenotext went on. I’ve been following Christian Bök’s work for more than a decade and he never fails to impress me. Ulver’s musical rendition of his “Vowels” poem is just beautiful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTh5BpUWrFw
sriram_malhar 14 hours ago [-]
This (Xenotext v2) blew my mind. I'm astonished not just by how people can think like this, but the persistence of effort to get it to fruition.
I have to read it a couple more times to savor this. What a delight!
alnwlsn 13 hours ago [-]
> only known organism to have ever lived on the Moon
Anyone know what this is referring to? The only instance I know of was the Surveyor 3 camera, which was supposedly Streptococcus mitis and even that situation is greatly contested.
dekhn 11 hours ago [-]
their description of deinococcus has several errors. For example, they claim it reproduces without DNA, which is not true.
flysand7 11 hours ago [-]
This reminds me of "I'm Humanity" by Yakushimaru Etsuko, which was also etched onto a DNA of a bacteria. I love that song.
because they are also unedited indulgences by the author in his own sadomasochistic fantasies of sexual violence (specifically, to women), and they are in effect sexual torture-porn.
Wobbles42 2 hours ago [-]
Content warnings make sense, and I do know what portions you are talking about, but they really are a fairly small part of only one of the books (IIRC the third one?).
I wouldn't describe the entire series as torture-porn just for that, personally, though I would agree that the work would be better if they were removed or at least toned way down.
throwanem 7 hours ago [-]
Oh, don't be a child.
andrewflnr 7 hours ago [-]
Have you read Behemoth? Recently? Blindsight is one of my favorite books of all time but Rifters is dark, even by whatever standards a reasonable person might consider "adult".
Desjardins' character isn't written for the reader to get off on. But I see exactly why a reader who didn't expect to do so would rather blame the author than recognize the mirror into which he's been surprised to find himself looking. The projection is trivially obvious and the lack of insight that allows it to be aired this way in public should be embarrassing.
duskwuff 4 hours ago [-]
> "Torture porn?" That's considerably excessive.
Watts has (jokingly) used that phrase himself to describe Behemoth.
Jokingly, yes. Jokingly, it's applicable enough. My original interlocutor gave no impression of levity.
andrewflnr 5 hours ago [-]
I mean, I agree that it's probably not a projection of Watts' secret fantasies. But "un-recommendable" is still pretty close to true. I literally had this discussion about this series yesterday.
throwanem 3 hours ago [-]
"I'm embarrassed about my taste in science fiction" isn't really something I know how to address.
I don't recommend the Rifters trilogy either - in this more or less emulating its own author, these days - nor have I bothered rereading it in by now well over a decade. It was interesting, I'm glad I read it, but what was there to be found I have long since taken away, and even when Watts comes up on the topic of his later work, his earlier doesn't really even occur to me. It's something I read most of 20 years ago that held my interest for a while with some of its ideas about artificial and archaic life and some of its character drama, but - no real critique, this, I read a lot of things - otherwise just didn't make all that much of an impression.
Typically the fashion in which that manifests is that I simply do not start any conversations on the topic, because it never occurs to me to do so. I'm not here to psychoanalyze the commenter who chose otherwise this evening. But if that were me, it would be interesting to me to reflect on why I had chosen to start the conversation I did, in a context where its subject was not at all relevant beyond a trivial coincidence of authorship.
andrewflnr 2 hours ago [-]
Warning people about exceptionally disturbing content in a book is not the same as being embarrassed about my taste.
throwanem 2 hours ago [-]
You didn't start this conversation, nor so far as I can tell impute your own perspective on a work to its author. Indeed the second person appears at no time in the comment to which you here reply, or at any time when I was describing my perspective on a commenter who, were it not by now sufficiently explicit, is not you.
It does annoy me when the work is misunderstood in this way, because the technique in use is subtle. Watts doesn't show you what Desjardins does, so that a pervert would get off on it - indeed nearly none of the infamous torture scenes is actually very explicit at all, the gory details left mostly in implication, because Watts is interested not in what Desjardins does to his victims but why he does it. That's why he spends his time showing you how Desjardins thinks, instead. It would be interesting to me to talk about that, because I think it successfully depicts something essential about the nature of sadism, which is worth understanding if for no other reason than in self-defense.
Certainly it would offer more interest than evident in the matter of the discussion thus far. That people commonly mistake moralistic vacuity for substantive discussion I do recognize and acknowledge, but I believe I will never for the life of me grasp the appeal.
15 hours ago [-]
swayvil 9 hours ago [-]
Meh. Art guided by science is like flight guided by digging.
Otoh science guided by art is good.
Klaus_ 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
keeganpoppen 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 14 hours ago [-]
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
If you enjoy hard to very-hard science fiction, I strongly recommend the first book of his series, Blindsight. I thoroughly loved the read and bounced right back to the beginning for a second read with the context I'd gained on the first one. It's an absolute firehose of concepts; reminded me a bit of Accelerando by Charles Stross but a little less pleased with its own geekiness. The best summary I could give would be a meditation on consciousness set against a first-contact backdrop.
Originally, I thought it meant "very hard to understand" i.e. very technically complicated
>I thought it meant "very hard to understand"
For a mere mortal like myself, those definitions aren't mutually exclusive. I think I tried reading "Blindsight" a long time ago but never got past a few dozen pages. Maybe I should give it a try again someday.
I love sci-fi, I love challenging ideas, and I really liked the concepts explored in Blindsight - except that I learned those concepts through summaries and selective reading.
I found this INCREDIBLY FULL OF SPOILERS explanation of fundamental plot points to be helpful in confirming or summarizing some things I missed[0].
[0]: —-EXTREME SPOILER WARNING-- https://old.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/4p6zqj/understandi...
When we talk about science fiction that focuses heavily on ideas over more traditional narrative concerns like character and action, we talk about "high-concept" science fiction.
Whereas soft science fiction has a futuristic setting but isn't primarily about that.
Because science first and foremost strives for comprehensibility in its discussion of strange things.
Which is exactly why we borrow it for fiction.
And what I found particularly interesting, the afterword is about as interesting and engaging as the book.
It's such a gem of a book.
His Starfish book however has the most realistic, plausible, feasible, likely AI doomsday scenario though - published as it was 26 years ago and without AI being the focus for majority of the book.
Watts writes the smartest but also scariest science fiction. There's an aura of existential, Lovecraftean dread in all his writings that I find incredibly appealing. In the case of Sunflower, Watts is able to make the idea of floating through space for millions of years, unable to stop, into something genuinely upsetting. It's bleak, but also really well plotted.
Not too long ago, Watts published a short story set right after Blindsight, "The Colonel". It's an excellent, standalone read.
But yes. Especially when you boil it down to the essentials: humans take an AI built to perform one task and press it into duty for another, much more impactful task which it was completely unsuited for.
One of his older works explores the risks of software similar to LLMs but a little more advanced.
> The rest of us might think we achieve artistic immortality if our work lasts a century or three. Bök blows his nose at such puny ambitions. His work might get deciphered by Fermi aliens who finally make it to our neighborhood a billion years from now. It could be iterating right up until the sun swallows this planet whole.
I got frisson reading this. I may have to read the author's novels, his writing style is compelling.
Yeah, for free.
And indeed, his style is like this. It's really hard to put the book down.
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/coach-house-spring-group-launch-...
I was unaware of this demagogue of a bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans. It survives levels of radiation that is designed to kill all lifeforms. Wikipedia [0] lists this as a bacteria that supports panspermia -- that life originated elsewhere but spread through cosmic dust and was seeded on Earth eventually.
Fun fact: Thermococcus gammatolerans is known to be the one that tolerates the most toxic radiation.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans
"The sequence spells a message and codes for a protein. The protein fluoresces and contains a response. It’s not contamination or lateral transfer. It’s a poem."
There's a more verbose explanation in this interview of Bök:
https://maisonneuve.org/article/2011/06/1/sls-interviews-chr...
I have to read it a couple more times to savor this. What a delight!
Anyone know what this is referring to? The only instance I know of was the Surveyor 3 camera, which was supposedly Streptococcus mitis and even that situation is greatly contested.
Also see https://ars.electronica.art/aeblog/en/2018/05/30/im-humanity...
> "To quote Bök himself: ... It needs no oxygen to live."
And I assumed that this means that it's anaerobic.
Out of curiosity I went to Wikipedia to read up about this bug (1)
And it says:
> It is an obligate aerobic chemoorganoheterotroph, i.e., it uses oxygen to derive energy from organic compounds in its environment.
Are they both correct? Can anyone clarify?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans
Peter Watts' Rifters books (hence the domain),
are however full of memorable compelling ideas,
totally un-recommendable,
because they are also unedited indulgences by the author in his own sadomasochistic fantasies of sexual violence (specifically, to women), and they are in effect sexual torture-porn.
I wouldn't describe the entire series as torture-porn just for that, personally, though I would agree that the work would be better if they were removed or at least toned way down.
Desjardins' character isn't written for the reader to get off on. But I see exactly why a reader who didn't expect to do so would rather blame the author than recognize the mirror into which he's been surprised to find himself looking. The projection is trivially obvious and the lack of insight that allows it to be aired this way in public should be embarrassing.
Watts has (jokingly) used that phrase himself to describe Behemoth.
https://rifters.com/real/2009/01/rip-off-alert.html
I don't recommend the Rifters trilogy either - in this more or less emulating its own author, these days - nor have I bothered rereading it in by now well over a decade. It was interesting, I'm glad I read it, but what was there to be found I have long since taken away, and even when Watts comes up on the topic of his later work, his earlier doesn't really even occur to me. It's something I read most of 20 years ago that held my interest for a while with some of its ideas about artificial and archaic life and some of its character drama, but - no real critique, this, I read a lot of things - otherwise just didn't make all that much of an impression.
Typically the fashion in which that manifests is that I simply do not start any conversations on the topic, because it never occurs to me to do so. I'm not here to psychoanalyze the commenter who chose otherwise this evening. But if that were me, it would be interesting to me to reflect on why I had chosen to start the conversation I did, in a context where its subject was not at all relevant beyond a trivial coincidence of authorship.
It does annoy me when the work is misunderstood in this way, because the technique in use is subtle. Watts doesn't show you what Desjardins does, so that a pervert would get off on it - indeed nearly none of the infamous torture scenes is actually very explicit at all, the gory details left mostly in implication, because Watts is interested not in what Desjardins does to his victims but why he does it. That's why he spends his time showing you how Desjardins thinks, instead. It would be interesting to me to talk about that, because I think it successfully depicts something essential about the nature of sadism, which is worth understanding if for no other reason than in self-defense.
Certainly it would offer more interest than evident in the matter of the discussion thus far. That people commonly mistake moralistic vacuity for substantive discussion I do recognize and acknowledge, but I believe I will never for the life of me grasp the appeal.
Otoh science guided by art is good.
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html