These little messages from Houston are the only company I have. The contact is nice. Too bad Houston is full of assholes and taskmasters. Maybe prisoners in isolation feel what I feel: they hate their guards, but a beating now and then is at least some human contact.
NASA is weird about the things they fear. They get really nervous about unknown life forms, and yet it’s all they talk about. They’re like teenage boys with sex in this way.
Wait. So you didn't even like "The Lifecycle of Software Objects", which won the Hugo and Locus?I finished Exhalations today. Not to my taste, unfortunately. The only new thought for me was how Many worlds theory might impact life if it was provably true and how true AI might need to develop.
If I had been 20 I think the book would've been great, since it is easy reading and it touches on how science might impact life in many ways. Since I'm almost 40 and have read, watched and thought about all subjects he writes about here, it just wasn't interesting in any meaningful way without a good story. And the only good stories, in my opinion, were the first and last one.
I enjoyed the film Arrival, so I think I might like that book by him and will maybe get back to his books some other time.
Now I'll read Pandora's Star by Peter F Hamilton.
Haha, hate-reading is a bit strong, but yeah I would probably not enjoy it at the moment.Wait. So you didn't even like "The Lifecycle of Software Objects", which won the Hugo and Locus?
It's one of about two I've read from a different source (I haven't read this collection). I'm in my 50s, have a collection of over 2000 sf and f volumes, so there's little that surprises me, and I remember it being pretty good.
Don't read Arrival (aka Stories of Your Life and Others). I fear you might just be hate-reading him at this point, and there is always better things to do with our life.
(That said, if you do, my favourites from that one are "Story of Your Life" (which the movie Arrival is based on) and "Tower of Babylon".)
Yep. Chiang has only ever written short fiction and non-fiction (about AI n struff). That's one of his claims to fame, that he's massively respected and has an impressive number of awards for someone who only ever dabbles in the short form.I thought the Arrival book was a full-fledged novel, but it is another short story collection, then?