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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
My understanding is that the central thrust is that consciousness as we know it which separates us from all other animals may not be the deciding factor in advanced vs simple cognition and a state to which evolution and development is geared as we've always assumed, but rather an evolutionary aberration that doesn't necessarily exist in other advanced life forms and may cease to exist in humanity eventually.
At first I felt a bit depressed and devalued, but then recognized that even if it was true, it made consciousness and my conscious experience even more valuable than if it were a foregone conclusion, and added that much more importance to art and religion.
Okay gotcha gotcha. I don't know what a "Wonderlic" is but for what it's worth, up to now, you're the only other person in this entire thread I'm convinced has actually read the book.
Either that, I suppose, or you're a very skillful prompter. I confide you won't take the qualification too personally, recognizing that 2025 merely requires it.
I'd have to be a real psycho to use AI to pretend to have read books. Reading is probably one the most important parts of my existence, and yet I don't do it nearly enough.
I do experience the same phenomenon where I feel other people haven't actually read books. The book I've experienced this with the most is Infinite Jest. It's twofold in that people both misunderstand basic pieces of the story ("what ethnicity is Hal (arguably the book's protagonist)?" is a common mechanism by which I determine people didn't read or didn't understand the novel), and that I've never ever once online or in person seen commentary about the central "thing" the book is doing, although it's blisteringly glaringly obvious and I'm afraid everyone else just knows it and it's too obvious to state rather than being something only I noticed.
But, you know. There's a lot of social cachet in talking about whatever's trendy lately, as long as you don't make it obvious that you actually studied it among people who are only pretending in front of someone they want to impress. That may constitute defection and attract harsh punishment.
I say what I like here because I don't care what internet randos think of me, and no one with a life reads or comments on this website. I avoid such carelessness with great care in real life, at least unless I intend to give so grave an insult.
That need is most rare, but when I do find it, people often quietly introduce themselves to thank me after. In the meantime those who know me tend to find me kindly and somewhat retiring, if not at first positively shy, despite or perhaps because of my imposing size and build and carriage.
The thing is, what they see isn't a lie. That's why I value this website so highly. It offers a venue for the love of pettifogging disputation and waspish propriety that's always flawed an otherwise I think quite solidly respectable sort of character. Doing that on here, I feel no urge to do it out there. I believe the term is "harm reduction?"
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.
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].
"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.
Er, that word does not mean what you are saying. "Antithesis" would be closer.
But saying that, I disagree: space opera isn't the opposite of hard SF. Science fantasy is. Space opera is a different sort of extreme, which makes the point that this is not an X-Y scale we're talking about here. There's no Mohs scale of hardness of SF.
It's at least a 2D area:
hard <-> soft
is at 90º to
rigorous <-> totally without rigour
Does it have a set of rules or axioms you can work out? If it has, does it apply them strictly? Does it play by its own rules, or does the author does improvise as they go along, changing the rules?
Where "the rules" are real life science, physics etc., for hard SF, modulo some additional plot device, whereas for sci-fantasy it has its own rules but they're not our rules. Say, an innate ability to step into other universes (say, Amber by Roger Zelazny, or the Family Trade by Charles Stross), or using a machine (the Long Earth books by Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett).
I take this line-vs-area argument from /Red/, /Green/ and /Blue Mars/ by Kim Stanley Robinson. Those are pretty hard SF -- no FTL, no AI –- but Mars has a lot more nitrogen than it seems to and they invent life extension.
> Er, that word does not mean what you are saying. "Antithesis" would be closer.
No, I meant specifically the opposing point on a globe, and chose the correct word to denote that concept. Metaphor is not error.
To the rest, knowledge of the concept of orthogonality would have saved you several paragraphs. So would exhaustively defining your terms. You've cast hard/soft as orthogonal to rigorous/fantastic and I can imagine no intuitively less coherent thesis; much work remains to make it make sense.
It has not escaped my notice that you've implicitly projected from my metaphor's three dimensions in a sphere, into two on a flat plane. I think that has so far escaped your own notice. Let's see if pointing you directly at the error helps you find the root cause.
Also, while HN's markup does not predate Markdown, it fails to emulate. Delimit with asterisks, not slashes, for emphasis.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I found it a letdown, lacking conviction and thus unconvincing. Oh, the story had to end some kind of way, but by then both its author and I had mostly lost interest. I don't hold that against what came prior.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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:
I honestly can't tell if this is truly clever, like in the way a skilled poet can combine vocabulary and meter constraints to generate wonderful phrases (Kubla Khan poem being a nice example), or just a mechanical process. I am also confused how he managed to engineer and predict the folding and functionality of a fluorescent protein (presumably by borrowing a known sequence?). Ultimately, I see this more like an incomplete quine, or something similar but not identical to a quine.
> I honestly can't tell if this is truly clever, like in the way a skilled poet can combine vocabulary and meter constraints to generate wonderful phrases (Kubla Khan poem being a nice example), or just a mechanical process.
I can't recall if Bök gave details about his methodology, but my guess is that he brute-forced ciphers until he found a suitable one. And he’s quite good at constraint-based (Oulipo) poetry.
> I am also confused how he managed to engineer and predict the folding and functionality of a fluorescent protein (presumably by borrowing a known sequence?).
The designed protein (Protein 13) is not fluorescent. He’s expressing it as a Protein 13-mCherry[1] fusion construct.
There is a bit more flexibility to this than 1:1 mappings, since there are more codons (64) than amino acids coded (20). You could have both CUU and CUC be different characters on the DNA side, that both map to same character on the protein side.
Plausible alternative would be to have the codons or amino acids still code the other half, but have pairs of nucleotides code a 1.5 times longer poem. This would restrict you to 16 different characters, vs. 64 possible codons (minus a few stop codons).
There are around 20-22 amino acids commonly used by known life, so that already restricts you to a bit smaller alphabet than 26 letters.
In this particular case you can consider codons coding for the same amino acid as synonymous, restricting, as you mentioned, the possible mappings to the ~20 proteinogenic amino acids.
Another possibility for expansion would be to take advantage of the genetic code’s degeneracy/redundancy and reprogram it to allow non-canonical amino acids in certain synonymous codons.
This (1) suggests that it can perform some metabolism in anaerobic conditions, but not all that it would need to grow/replicate:
"Deinococcus radiodurans is an exceptionally radiation-resistant microorganism capable of surviving acute exposures to ionizing radiation doses of 15,000 Gy and previously described as having a strictly aerobic respiratory metabolism. Under strict anaerobic conditions, D. radiodurans R1 reduced Fe(III)-nitrilotriacetic acid coupled to the oxidation of lactate to CO(2) and acetate but was unable to link this process to growth."
The abstract goes on to describe the metabolism in a bit more detail.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
I stand by my description, my assertions about Watt's own personal investment, and more to the point, the appropriateness of a warning.
As in another example of otherwise memorable and contemporary scifi, _Accelerando_,
the BDSM slash sex & violence slash misogyny tropes are utterly unnecessary to the plot.
They're an indulgence, and they narrow the prospective audience to those unbothered by, or excited by, such things. Everyone else deserves fair warning.
Stand by what you like. Content advice would be reasonable if you had managed to leave it there, but your gratuitous and idiosyncratic airing of grievances interested me, especially when that required going so far out of the way as to start a conversation on the subject, only so that you could warn everyone of how much attention they mustn't pay to all those terrible...half dozen or so short scenes, in the span of three long novels. (And Stross too, now, comes in for similar ignominy. Do you keep a mental catalog of this stuff, or something?)
It's obvious you have a strong investment in blaming everyone else for your own unsettled and, plainly, deeply disquieted emotions on this topic. I wouldn't expect to see that change now and if I'd been inclined to take it personally, I would not have engaged in the first place. I hope you eventually figure out whatever it is that's troubling you so badly around this. In the meantime, kindly repay me the courtesy of engaging no further here.
"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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Larry Niven wrote ringworld and the follow ups, not Clarke. Clarke wrote the Rama series.
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.
>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.
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.
What did it leave you with on the subject of consciousness?
Spoilers:
My understanding is that the central thrust is that consciousness as we know it which separates us from all other animals may not be the deciding factor in advanced vs simple cognition and a state to which evolution and development is geared as we've always assumed, but rather an evolutionary aberration that doesn't necessarily exist in other advanced life forms and may cease to exist in humanity eventually.
At first I felt a bit depressed and devalued, but then recognized that even if it was true, it made consciousness and my conscious experience even more valuable than if it were a foregone conclusion, and added that much more importance to art and religion.
Okay gotcha gotcha. I don't know what a "Wonderlic" is but for what it's worth, up to now, you're the only other person in this entire thread I'm convinced has actually read the book.
Either that, I suppose, or you're a very skillful prompter. I confide you won't take the qualification too personally, recognizing that 2025 merely requires it.
I'd have to be a real psycho to use AI to pretend to have read books. Reading is probably one the most important parts of my existence, and yet I don't do it nearly enough.
I do experience the same phenomenon where I feel other people haven't actually read books. The book I've experienced this with the most is Infinite Jest. It's twofold in that people both misunderstand basic pieces of the story ("what ethnicity is Hal (arguably the book's protagonist)?" is a common mechanism by which I determine people didn't read or didn't understand the novel), and that I've never ever once online or in person seen commentary about the central "thing" the book is doing, although it's blisteringly glaringly obvious and I'm afraid everyone else just knows it and it's too obvious to state rather than being something only I noticed.
So... Anyone ever actually read IJ?
Not me!
But, you know. There's a lot of social cachet in talking about whatever's trendy lately, as long as you don't make it obvious that you actually studied it among people who are only pretending in front of someone they want to impress. That may constitute defection and attract harsh punishment.
I say what I like here because I don't care what internet randos think of me, and no one with a life reads or comments on this website. I avoid such carelessness with great care in real life, at least unless I intend to give so grave an insult.
That need is most rare, but when I do find it, people often quietly introduce themselves to thank me after. In the meantime those who know me tend to find me kindly and somewhat retiring, if not at first positively shy, despite or perhaps because of my imposing size and build and carriage.
The thing is, what they see isn't a lie. That's why I value this website so highly. It offers a venue for the love of pettifogging disputation and waspish propriety that's always flawed an otherwise I think quite solidly respectable sort of character. Doing that on here, I feel no urge to do it out there. I believe the term is "harm reduction?"
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.
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].
[0]: —-EXTREME SPOILER WARNING-- https://old.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/4p6zqj/understandi...
There are no spoilers for Blindsight at that link. All it does is describe the events of the plot.
I found it hard to read because it seems to true and hence so frightening.
Hard SF doesn't _need_ to be difficult to understand. Peter Watts just happens to produce books that are both.
I would characterize "hard" sci fi as "consistent" or "coherent", not necessarily "plausible".
"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.
> antipode
Er, that word does not mean what you are saying. "Antithesis" would be closer.
But saying that, I disagree: space opera isn't the opposite of hard SF. Science fantasy is. Space opera is a different sort of extreme, which makes the point that this is not an X-Y scale we're talking about here. There's no Mohs scale of hardness of SF.
It's at least a 2D area:
hard <-> soft
is at 90º to
rigorous <-> totally without rigour
Does it have a set of rules or axioms you can work out? If it has, does it apply them strictly? Does it play by its own rules, or does the author does improvise as they go along, changing the rules?
Where "the rules" are real life science, physics etc., for hard SF, modulo some additional plot device, whereas for sci-fantasy it has its own rules but they're not our rules. Say, an innate ability to step into other universes (say, Amber by Roger Zelazny, or the Family Trade by Charles Stross), or using a machine (the Long Earth books by Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett).
I take this line-vs-area argument from /Red/, /Green/ and /Blue Mars/ by Kim Stanley Robinson. Those are pretty hard SF -- no FTL, no AI –- but Mars has a lot more nitrogen than it seems to and they invent life extension.
> Er, that word does not mean what you are saying. "Antithesis" would be closer.
No, I meant specifically the opposing point on a globe, and chose the correct word to denote that concept. Metaphor is not error.
To the rest, knowledge of the concept of orthogonality would have saved you several paragraphs. So would exhaustively defining your terms. You've cast hard/soft as orthogonal to rigorous/fantastic and I can imagine no intuitively less coherent thesis; much work remains to make it make sense.
It has not escaped my notice that you've implicitly projected from my metaphor's three dimensions in a sphere, into two on a flat plane. I think that has so far escaped your own notice. Let's see if pointing you directly at the error helps you find the root cause.
Also, while HN's markup does not predate Markdown, it fails to emulate. Delimit with asterisks, not slashes, for emphasis.
Pointlessly rude, obscurantic, and reads like you're trying to score points while covering up a mistake.
HN is a better place without comments like this.
And El Reg was a better place in Lettice's and Orlowski's days. Are we done?
Well, I am done with your petty sniping, if that's what you mean. Well done for being this week's premier example of HN toxicity.
"Petty?" Don't tease. Make me famous or go find someone else to play with.
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.
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.
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.
I agree. I read it twice, enjoyed it, and don't know why some people found it hard.
It never touched the sides.
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.
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.
"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.
But, importantly, not obviously completely unsuited for. Indeed, so subtly so that it almost ended the world before anyone noticed.
I wonder how he's feeling about Chinese rooms these days.
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.
Not at all more advanced. Only differently implemented. He thought there would be slightly more meat involved.
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.
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.
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.
Peter Watts is fantastic. Very different tone from a lot of other scifi, with some very clever and dark ideas.
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.
What wasn't optimistic about the Behemoth trilogy? There are humans alive at the end.
I actually do really like the ending of that series, but not for its optimism.
I found it a letdown, lacking conviction and thus unconvincing. Oh, the story had to end some kind of way, but by then both its author and I had mostly lost interest. I don't hold that against what came prior.
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.
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.
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/coach-house-spring-group-launch-...
At least they didn't describe the event as a "release party".
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.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans
> 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.
their description of deinococcus has several errors. For example, they claim it reproduces without DNA, which is not true.
Yeah, Conan the Bacterium is tough, but it's not magical. It's really really good at fixing DNA errors but it still has DNA and errors in it.
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?
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:
https://maisonneuve.org/article/2011/06/1/sls-interviews-chr...
I honestly can't tell if this is truly clever, like in the way a skilled poet can combine vocabulary and meter constraints to generate wonderful phrases (Kubla Khan poem being a nice example), or just a mechanical process. I am also confused how he managed to engineer and predict the folding and functionality of a fluorescent protein (presumably by borrowing a known sequence?). Ultimately, I see this more like an incomplete quine, or something similar but not identical to a quine.
> I honestly can't tell if this is truly clever, like in the way a skilled poet can combine vocabulary and meter constraints to generate wonderful phrases (Kubla Khan poem being a nice example), or just a mechanical process.
I can't recall if Bök gave details about his methodology, but my guess is that he brute-forced ciphers until he found a suitable one. And he’s quite good at constraint-based (Oulipo) poetry.
> I am also confused how he managed to engineer and predict the folding and functionality of a fluorescent protein (presumably by borrowing a known sequence?).
The designed protein (Protein 13) is not fluorescent. He’s expressing it as a Protein 13-mCherry[1] fusion construct.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCherry
Broadly speaking, think of codon-anticodon pairings, but with actual letters mapped to them.
There is a bit more flexibility to this than 1:1 mappings, since there are more codons (64) than amino acids coded (20). You could have both CUU and CUC be different characters on the DNA side, that both map to same character on the protein side.
Plausible alternative would be to have the codons or amino acids still code the other half, but have pairs of nucleotides code a 1.5 times longer poem. This would restrict you to 16 different characters, vs. 64 possible codons (minus a few stop codons).
There are around 20-22 amino acids commonly used by known life, so that already restricts you to a bit smaller alphabet than 26 letters.
In this particular case you can consider codons coding for the same amino acid as synonymous, restricting, as you mentioned, the possible mappings to the ~20 proteinogenic amino acids.
Another possibility for expansion would be to take advantage of the genetic code’s degeneracy/redundancy and reprogram it to allow non-canonical amino acids in certain synonymous codons.
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!
The article says
> "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
This (1) suggests that it can perform some metabolism in anaerobic conditions, but not all that it would need to grow/replicate:
"Deinococcus radiodurans is an exceptionally radiation-resistant microorganism capable of surviving acute exposures to ionizing radiation doses of 15,000 Gy and previously described as having a strictly aerobic respiratory metabolism. Under strict anaerobic conditions, D. radiodurans R1 reduced Fe(III)-nitrilotriacetic acid coupled to the oxidation of lactate to CO(2) and acetate but was unable to link this process to growth."
The abstract goes on to describe the metabolism in a bit more detail.
1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10788374/
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
This reminds me of "I'm Humanity" by Yakushimaru Etsuko, which was also etched onto a DNA of a bacteria. I love that song.
Also see https://ars.electronica.art/aeblog/en/2018/05/30/im-humanity...
De rigeur trigger warning,
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.
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.
Oh, don't be a child.
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".
Sure. "Torture porn?" That's considerably excessive.
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.
> "Torture porn?" That's considerably excessive.
Watts has (jokingly) used that phrase himself to describe Behemoth.
https://rifters.com/real/2009/01/rip-off-alert.html
Jokingly, yes. Jokingly, it's applicable enough. My original interlocutor gave no impression of levity.
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.
"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.
Warning people about exceptionally disturbing content in a book is not the same as being embarrassed about my taste.
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.
I stand by my description, my assertions about Watt's own personal investment, and more to the point, the appropriateness of a warning.
As in another example of otherwise memorable and contemporary scifi, _Accelerando_,
the BDSM slash sex & violence slash misogyny tropes are utterly unnecessary to the plot.
They're an indulgence, and they narrow the prospective audience to those unbothered by, or excited by, such things. Everyone else deserves fair warning.
Stand by what you like. Content advice would be reasonable if you had managed to leave it there, but your gratuitous and idiosyncratic airing of grievances interested me, especially when that required going so far out of the way as to start a conversation on the subject, only so that you could warn everyone of how much attention they mustn't pay to all those terrible...half dozen or so short scenes, in the span of three long novels. (And Stross too, now, comes in for similar ignominy. Do you keep a mental catalog of this stuff, or something?)
It's obvious you have a strong investment in blaming everyone else for your own unsettled and, plainly, deeply disquieted emotions on this topic. I wouldn't expect to see that change now and if I'd been inclined to take it personally, I would not have engaged in the first place. I hope you eventually figure out whatever it is that's troubling you so badly around this. In the meantime, kindly repay me the courtesy of engaging no further here.
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"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."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Meh. Art guided by science is like flight guided by digging.
Otoh science guided by art is good.