4.5 KiB
[HSF] Passages in the Void: A diamond-hard SF series of short stories set in a world where AI colonize the galaxy in penance for letting humanity die off the first time.
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Author: u/Prezombie *
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Score: 10
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Created: 2014-02-22T04:54:24
Post:
Comments:
u/Escapement [+5] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (2 hours later)
Alright, I tried reading the first two stories. Stuff I noticed:
The AIs are extraordinarily incompetent at everything. Like, really badly so. It's quite remarkable, that they are simultaneously portrayed as godlike in some ways and totally useless a lot of the rest of the time. It breaks suspension of disbelief. I think that the author needed to come up with a better plan for causing human extinction than everyone in the setting being super incompetent at everything.
The AIs are also boring. Not necessarily the concept, but the way they are written to be devoid of personality sucks to read. The author referenced Iain Banks' culture, and one thing he ought to have noticed - but apparantly didn't - is that in those books to make AI characters interesting they are quite simply given as much emotion and personality as the humans. The Sleeper Service, the Grey Area, and in fact most of the ships and drones who got any time in the Culture books had more personality than the entire cast, humans included, of these stories. Skaffen-Amtiskaw by himself had more than twice as much personality as the sum total of all the characters in these stories. It's just a bad writing decision. People remember robots with a shtick, a personality, etc. We remember the Terminators and the SHODANs, the Datas and the C3POs and the Marvins. These robots, not so much.
I've read the whole humans disappeared from the solar system by extinction leaving our robots behind before; that was the premise of Charles Stross's Saturn's Children, which had a lot of really cool ideas and interesting writing, a couple really bad ideas, and the misfortune to attract the worst cover-art that it possibly could have had. Go read that instead, it's way more interesting and better than this - even the modes and methods of his failures are way more interesting than the rather mundane and boring mode of failure Williams achieved here.
u/localroger [+3] (7 days later)
Well everyone is going to have an opinion and Passages has been a lot less controversial than MoPI, but I have to say your reaction is exactly the opposite of nearly everyone else who has ever posted or bothered to contact me about Passages; almost everyone thinks Mortal Passage was the height of the series and Rite the nadir, largely because Rite did not maintain the epic scope, and most people found Bringer and its quest compelling -- if anything, the oddity (corrected by Mortal Passage) being its inexplicably doglike loyalty to the biological human form.
Anyway, sorry you didn't like it; no hard feelings, better luck next time etc. And yeah, Charlie Stross is pretty good, but what was with the cats at the end of Accelerando?
u/Prezombie [+2] (4 hours later)
Minor point of order: Saturn's children was published in 2008, the Passages stories were written between 2002 and 2007.
I agree though, Saturn's children is basically the first, second, and fourth stories, written much better. Charles Stross is one of those few authors I love enough to auto-buy everything he writes.
It's not the best story, it reads like a dry history for all but Rite of Passage (which is a standalone story set with a human POV, and honestly the only real story of the series that stuck with me) and Revelation passage (which suffers from Fast Forward syndrome, skipping over a whole new chunk of worldbuilding).
But still, it was an honest attempt at a hard sci-fi setting, even if doing so cost a lot of readability points.
u/sicutumbo [+1] (4 days later)
I just reread UoW and Skaffen was hilarious- "Trouble, Toots."
u/rictic [+1] (13 days later)
I thought that the AIs weren't very godlike in intellect, just in raw power. The had the ability to control the weather, but not the understanding necessary to predict the outcome or the wisdom to realize have better fallback options when things started going south. That seems entirely plausible if our only AI is the massively scaled up intellect of one dude, an AI which lacked the capacity to understand itself very well.
In any case, I loved this story and devoured it raptly, thanks for posting it OP!