Just finished Echopraxia, and man, only a mini-series could do it justice. Watts himself said he would like HBO. I would like to know how /tv/ would cast it, especially Valerie.
>>219365493Whats it about, and is it as good as The Expanse
Hear me out, lads>>219365511I only watched The Expanse, never read it. I suspect The Expanse is far better when it comes to pacing, a far more pleasant experience, and much less complicated. Blindisight was hard enough for me to read, Echopraxia had sections where I had to re-read five times to start getting a glimpse of what was happening. Unfortunately, it's really not for everyone, and I wouldn't really recommend it unless you enjoy vampires, "intelligence gambits" and theory of mind discussions, and protagonists getting tossed left and right in plots they can barely make sense.
>>219365493Maybe I didn't have the right mindset when I read it but to me it seemed very protestant in the "you are play gods, you grasp exceeds grasp" sense.> human dares think its consciousness and cognitive abilities are unique? vampires and aliens already outpace it> human resurrects a completely extinct species? it is its natural predator and it's actively evolving past its only weakness> human builds a spaceship to go and contact aliens for the first time? they are several millenia more advanced scientifically and will not even notice hm or have any interest in himI don't need my science fiction to be le hecking positive quirk chungus whimsical comedy like PHM but this is really going too far in the other direction, you have to be a glutton for punishment to enjoy it IMO.
>>219366355Some of that only applies to Blindsight. Echopraxia gives PostHumans a bit of an edge. If you want a short bridge into that, read The Colonel (short story between Blind and Echo); hives are fucking scary.I think Echopraxia has a bit of positive note, at least compared to Blindsight, if you are into Transhumanism, but yeah, there is a lot of bleakness, and that's a point of the series that Watts likes to hammer down: consciousness could be blocking our intelligence.
Watts (and his writings) is too much of a dour, miserable shit for any of his stuff to ever get adapted even remotely faithfully.Although, the guy really does embody the zeigeist of the postmodern age. I watched a lecture he gave years ago, where he ranted about things like how he thinks humanity is doomed because energy consumption scales with energy production so we're going to increase production and consumption both exponentially until we burn out the planet, and that's why he thinks everyone should stop having children. (But, though he didn't explicitly mention it, I'm sure he would think you were a nazi if you said that non-white people need to stop having children.)This is the kind of guy who'll get into a fistfight with a canadian cop while crossing the border, over literally nothing.He also hosted a TED talk about how he thinks ants are conscious. I don't have a spin on that one, I just thought it was interesting enough to mention.
>>219365493Zendaya
>>219366695He did write one of the few shorts in Secret Level that was worthwhile (Armored Core). It's too bad he doesn't write for e.g. Black Library, his dour style would suit something like Warhammer well.
>>219365493stop spamming this thread, no one cares about your reddit book
>>219366861I didn't create the other one, but I did participate. I was still reading Echopraxia.If anyone cares, this is it: >>219204342
Interesting that 4chan CHUDS love this book so much for some reason, considering Watts is such a retarded "libtard" as people on here would call him irl kekHe was in my country a few years ago, promoting a new book or whatever and I watched some shitty morning TV interview with him, they asked him one of those pointless morning interview questions that the retarded female reporters usually do, about the future and shit and he started sperging and I quote about "an orange idiot back across the ocean building walls between humans" for 5 minutes
>>219366781They should've adapted his The Thing short story.
>>219367058I watched a bunch of interviews (on text) with him. He has a PhD on biology and did his bit of reading/research for these novels back in the day, so he talks about a bunch of interest stuff. His transhuman characters are quite grounded and interesting too, so I dunno, maybe he's like that in real interviews? I never watched them
Someone could make really neat effects for the scramblers on the rorschach with modern 3d effects and ai generated effects.
>>219367270It will hardly beat the short they made. They nailed to a tee. Perfect scramblers exactly like I imagined them.
What was the deal again with the Scrambler's movements again? They only moved during the moments when our dumb brain doesn't record movement, yet the stayed still the whole time? Wouldn't we just atleast see them suddenly be in a new position?
>>219367409Watts stretched that plausibility of the idea a bit, but you are quite right. IRL we would probably be able to see vestiges. They would be in one place, then another, extremely fucking fast, and we would just see a blurriness in our sight.
>No psycho vamp gfI want to kill myself so daman much man holy fuck this world was not made for me I want out
>>219367058The feeling I get from him is that he is just extremely intrinsically emotionally negative, so he latches on to whatever the most negative community he can find in order to satisfy his emotional needs. (He won't want to be part of an emotionally balanced community, because that would involve constantly getting into fights with people.) I don't read much into his politics, in light of this; he's always going to find the worst aspects in anything he looks at.His books are interesting, even if they're all too depressive for me to read too many of them at once or too regularly.If I ever somehow met him IRL, I would say that I both love and hate his books and then probably get into a fight with him. Not a physical one, hopefully. But who knows with this guy. I would like to meet him if I could though.The guy does kind of embody the old edgy core of 4chan, that will take the piss out of anything. Actually, the feeling I most get from him is that he has the emotional state of myself when I was in my late-early teens. But he's like this as a grown man well into his middle age, with all the ostensible wisdom that includes, and increased ability to articulate his chaotic and negative emotional state. So it leads to an interesting person. Though I imagine he would get tiring to be around very fast. Like the autistic teenage male version of a BDP woman.
the aliens were boring and generic only reason ppl read those is the paleo vampires
>>219367409The idea is something like, you're searching for your keys, you look directly at your keys, but you don't notice them because your brain didn't recognize the pattern (because they were in a strange position or unexpected location etc.) so it dismisses them as not what you are looking for.The scrambles would be doing something similar; tricking your brain into thinking that what it's looking at isn't what it's looking for, so it dismisses it as unimportant. It leans into facts about how the brain constructs our perception of reality, which is pretty easy to demonstrate with many optical illusions, and even easier to see in people with brain damage. These people will experience sometimes nearly unbelievable visual problems, such as losing the ability to perceive half the world. That is, they will look at e.g., their plate of dinner; see only HALF of what's on the plate, eat half of the food, and then complain about still being hungry. Obviously, their eyes can see the plate, food, etc., but the way the brain processes this info is it splits it between the brain halfs. So if you have damage in one of them, and so it won't be doing its job, but the damage is such that it also won't realize that it isn't doing its job, you will not be able to perceive the things that that part of your brain is responsible for processing, and you will not be consciously aware that you're not seeing it.Anyway, it's something like that. Their eyes are looking directly at the scrambler, but the scrambler (on the fly) realizes how the brain works and then manipulates its own movement to trick the brain into not being able to consciously process what it's looking at.Personally, I thought it was the most terrifying presentation of an alien I've read in any kind of fiction. This thing would need to be so intelligent that it's incomprehensible to us.
>>219365493Actual Phd scientists should not write books.Yes, they have cool ideas , but they are too autistic trying to incorporate their "le actually scientifically plausible" cool idea which their prose fucking SUCKS.
>>219368172Not only that, by the end of the book, the scramblers juryrigged Susan James's brain so she would sabotage the mission. Just exploiting the attack vector that her own brain stem provided, giving you a new drive that you can't even notice.
>>219368282You have to make an effort. I think the problem lies more in the sequel than in the first book. Having said that, Echopraxia is fucking packed with action. The vampires fleeing containment, the desert attack, the hurricane, the aerosol, the escape, the decoy, all before reaching Icarus, it just doesn't stop.
I liked Blindsight and Echopraxia a great deal, was less hot on the Rifters series which I think started out well but collapsed a bit second book onwards. He tones back the overt sexual sadism a lot in BS/EP vs. Rifters.But overall I think the Sunflower series is probably my favourite. Really high concept, interesting scenario, apparently originally conceived as some kind of hybrid RTS game and you can kinda see that in how the stories are episodic and might represent ‘levels’:>far future, humanity is looking fucked and Earth is a burned out husk>turn a gigantic asteroid into a rocketship, accelerate it to 20% of c and staff it with a stock of frozen high quality humans and an ai>their job is to build wormholes en route the rest of humanity can jump through to expand and survive>unbelievably long amounts of time pass; crew can go millions of years frozen before the ship hits a problem and they are woken up>the ai has a highly focused intelligence about the size of a chimp’s brain: it is smart but not imaginative, rapidly loses context for the problems they start running into and all the crew hate it>they burn out their ai implants and fight a constant sort of cold war trying to remove the ai from control>the stuff coming out of the wormholes they’re still building doesn’t even look human anymore and is sometimes hostile
>>219368696Not going to read all of that greentext due to possible spoilers, but it seems interesting. I will check it now. Thanks.
>>219368282Watts’ prose is not bad, he has a bit of a jargon tendency but I’d say he’s comfortably above-average as an SF writer. I mean fucking Asimov’s prose sucks ass. This is a genre where you can be reading for the ideas.
>>219368282>whichwhile*>>219368503im talking in general, i get that Blindsight is SUPPOSED to feel autistic, but hes just not a very good writerIs true for most authors with PHD in science, aside for maybe Asimov. Theres a reason why people love Dune or stuff written by Bradbury, Le Guin, Simmons, Zelazny, Wolfe, etc the most, because they are writers first and know how to use good prose and compose a good novel
>start reading the expanse>oh boy oh boy hard sci-fi>oh fuck, zombies, is it slop?>eeh, it's okay>start reading blindsight>oh boy oh boy first alien contact>oh fuck, it's actually space horror>now i want more
>what if true sentience wasn't really evolutionarily beneficial? What if the last 10,000 years of human higher thought and civilization were an aberration, destined to be wiped out by leaner, less psychologically cluttered lifeforms?>And what if I just had that one idea, and I kept writing about it, over and over, never really bringing anything else to the table, until the point became laboured and inane? What then?t. Peter Watts
i read the three body problem trilogy last yearbook 1 was awesome, book 2 was weird cold war drama and the 3rd book was just weird
>>219368752kek, i literally said in my next post >>219368795 that i think Asimov is an exception and actually has good prose, compared to other egghead writers
>>219368795Dune’s prose is actively bad from CoD onwards. Your subjective judgement of good prose is poor imo
>>219368846there isnt a single "great" sci-fi trilogy that doesnt progressively gets worse with each bookits extremely rare to get more than 1 or 2 good books in a series anyway, thats why i prefer the one-off novels more, usually. they always fuck up when they start making sequels
>>219368823>what if sci fi authors wrote within their scientific interestWhat’s with all these fucking stories about ROBOTS man. Why do you keep telling me about SPACE NUNS BREEDING.
>>219368696I'm not sure how well it would work as a straight adaptation to live action, but the basic premise is really solid for a 'mystery box' or 'politics in a pressure cooker' type show.
>>219368846I see people always commenting that 3BP book 2 is just fucking weird, but the third is kind of a return to form.
fantasy comedy is covered by terry pratchett but where are all the sci-fi comedy?we only got hitchhikers guide
>>219368795Well, I only read Blindopraxia so far, so maybe. Having said, not to nitpick, but from that list Wolfe was also an industrial engineer. I do concede that I've seen people say that his prose was a bit wonky, so you may be onto something. I think you need to take into account that Watts is writing hard-scifi, and autism comes baked with it.
>>219368972>book 1 is a foid selling out earth to ayys>book 2 is a man cleaning up after her>book 3 is another foid fucking earth up
>>219368885>>219368885might be, considering ive literally stopped reading dune after the second book, funnily enough. I found it way shittier rght away and iirc i dropped it halfway, not even sure if I finishd it. I also gave Dune just as an example, people love it, and I do think that the OG Dune has good prose, despite personally not really considering Herbert to be a great writer.Also, all that being said, im not an anglo, ive read most of those translated back when i was a teen, so it really depends on how good of a work the translator has done. But even with that in mind, you can just notice how most of the "hard sci-fi" authors just feel amateurish in their prose compared to "writer" writers, even through translations
>>219369000Apparently there is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murderbot_DiariesIt got turned into a tv show but it seems that it was just not good
>>219369000Vonnegut nigga
>>219368795>>219368882We probably just differ in taste anon. I think Watts is good but not great. I always really cringe at the line he finishes his Thing story with and think it's illustrative of some of his problems as a writer. I think a lot of Foundation is just really workmanlike writing, not engaging at all.>>219369066Well I would agree Bradbury Le Guin and Wolfe are GOATs so we've got some consensus.
>>219368823I don't think that's fair at all. It's not the only subject he wrote about, plus you can extract themes from every sci-fi series in existence. It's like cricizing Dune's lack of machines for being about "AI bad duh duh", but that's the point.
i'm on the expanse book 5 right nowhave donated book 3 and 4, they were lame and gay
>>219368942Blindsight and Rifters probably work better in live action because there's stuff in Sunflower where the characters are wowed by exploding nebulae or a gas giant being consumed by its sun where if you can't visually depict it it just won't land for a screen audience.
>>219369194havent read them, but i started watching the show last week. so far i love it, binged the first 2 seasons and im already halfway with 3 in a week, but ive heard it gets shittier later on, hope its not the case
>>219369194Are you where that hard ass general start to breed ships into existence? I always find that neat. The Culture books do something similar.
>>219369253Amazing that the liberal monosuperculture of mid-00s to mid-20s didn't give us a Culture adaptation.
>>219369305Amazon bought the rights. Bezos is a fan. The project was being worked on, but died a little after the pandemic.
>>219369253just got to the earth being bombed and amos crawled up out of prisonare they using the protomolecule to make ships now?
>>219369491I can't remember the details tbqh. Read a bunch of spoilers on the wiki some years ago. Thats where I took that, but maybe I'm wrong.
>>219365493Pretentious slop
>>219370050Anti Intellectualism is a he'll of a drug
>>219369138The goat
Bump
Valerie doing her zoom zoom creepypasta type shit while naked is kinda hot ngl. I'm not totally sure what happened at the end of Echopraxia. The main dude had Portia in his brain the whole trip back to Earth and it then started to take over his consciousness?
>>219373384I can’t remember too clearly but I think he’s most probably infected with brain tumour thing the monks have going on originally, another character sees that in his eyes. Then Valerie claims she will treat that but actually injects him with Portia, then makes a truce offer to Portia, Portia rejects it and kills Val which causes MC to realise he’s under control. He then tries to kill himself but Portia is in enough hardware by that point it can just keep him going. Questionable if he managed to end his own consciousness or got fused into Portia by the finish.
the most interesting part of both novels is definitely what happens offscreen, like enough metahuman and superintelligent entities coming to exist and compete with each that it explodes into system collapse. In the first book Siri thought the vampires came to predominate but it seems unlikely: they are still individual intelligences and vulnerable to a bunch of baseline human stuff. The VR heaven probably wasn’t attacked by vampires but by another mass consciousness project like the Moksha Mind or the Bicamerals. The Bicamerals unleashed Portia and might have been working with it the whole time, and Portia itself is a different alien threat from Rorschach in Blindsight. Shit’s so unbelievably fucked.
