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 · 9h 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
throwanem · 1h 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.
jkingsman · 8h 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 · 8h 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 · 6h 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.
Loughla · 5h ago
Larry Niven wrote ringworld and the follow ups, not Clarke. Clarke wrote the Rama series.
ngangaga · 7h ago
I would characterize "hard" sci fi as "consistent" or "coherent", not necessarily "plausible".
ZpJuUuNaQ5 · 9h 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 · 8h 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 · 8h 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 · 8h 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 · 1h ago
What did it leave you with on the subject of consciousness?
Scarblac · 7h 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 · 4h 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 · 9h 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 · 9h 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 · 4h 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 · 4h 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 · 1h ago
But, importantly, not obviously completely unsuited for. Indeed, so subtly so that it almost ended the world before anyone noticed.
otikik · 9h ago
I wonder how he's feeling about Chinese rooms these days.
ImaCake · 4h 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 · 1h ago
Not at all more advanced. Only differently implemented. He thought there would be slightly more meat involved.
Atreiden · 9h 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 · 8h 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 · 8h ago
Peter Watts is fantastic. Very different tone from a lot of other scifi, with some very clever and dark ideas.
Wobbles42 · 2h 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 · 1h ago
What wasn't optimistic about the Behemoth trilogy? There are humans alive at the end.
dejobaan · 7h 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.
MinimalAction · 7h 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.
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".
dekhn · 6h ago
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 · 4h 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:
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 · 7h 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 · 6h ago
their description of deinococcus has several errors. For example, they claim it reproduces without DNA, which is not true.
flysand7 · 6h 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.
throwanem · 1h ago
Oh, don't be a child.
andrewflnr · 1h 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 why a reader who didn't expect to do so would rather blame the author than recognize the mirror into which he's looking.
swayvil · 4h ago
Meh. Art guided by science is like flight guided by digging.
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
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.
>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...
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.
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
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/coach-house-spring-group-launch-...
"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...
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.
Desjardins' character isn't written for the reader to get off on. But I see why a reader who didn't expect to do so would rather blame the author than recognize the mirror into which he's looking.
Otoh science guided by art is good.