7.9 KiB
Any rationalist stories like Carl Sagan's Contact or Arrival?
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Author: u/kyle2143 *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/5v96mo/any_rationalist_stories_like_carl_sagans_contact/
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Score: 10
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Created: 2017-02-21T03:06:41
Post:
I'm sure this has been asked before and I know there are hundreds of stories rational or otherwise relating to Human first contact with another species. So much so that it is hard for me to find one because of the sheer volume, so I'm asking for recommendations.
Really I want something pretty close to Contact because I just loved the overall tone of it. But there are some glaring problems, anyone who saw the film will agree. So I'm looking for something where humans are just setting out into understanding/exploring the universe like Ellie Arroway and her quest for knowledge. Maybe going further than Contact or Arrival does where it sort of ends with so many unknowns still floating about.
Comments:
u/None [+11] (an hour later)
If you haven't already read it, Three Worlds Collide is a pretty foundational work for this community, written by the same person as HPMOR. It focuses more on some of the concepts Arrival was based on, such as truly "alien" aliens.
u/kyle2143 [+3] (an hour later)
Thanks! I hadn't heard of that but it sounds really interesting, I really liked HPMOR but I didn't think he might've written something in this vein.
u/yourewelcome_bot [+2] (an hour later)
You're welcome.
u/kyle2143 [+3] (2 days later)
Okay, so I read that story. Was pretty good and very much in that author's style. I don't think it appropriately captured what I was looking for. Which was the wonder and discovery of it all that is in Contact and Arrival(to a lesser extent).
But I do like how it goes for very "alien" aliens like you said. Where values were just flat out incompatible and the issues were morally dubious at best. Interesting stuff to think about.
u/saltvedt [+10] (21 hours later)
Blindsight is the Hugo Award–nominated novel by Peter Watts, "a hard science fiction writer through and through and one of the very best alive" (The Globe and Mail).
Two months have past since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. The heavens have been silent since―until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us. Who should we send to meet the alien, when the alien doesn't want to meet?
Send a linguist with multiple-personality disorder and a biologist so spliced with machinery that he can't feel his own flesh. Send a pacifist warrior and a vampire recalled from the grave by the voodoo of paleogenetics. Send a man with half his mind gone since childhood. Send them to the edge of the solar system, praying you can trust such freaks and monsters with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find―but you'd give anything for that to be true, if you knew what was waiting for them. . . .
u/kyle2143 [+1] (a day later)
Now that does sound interesting. Really though, I have no idea what to make of it.
u/edwardkmett [+4] (2 days later)
Peter Watts tends to write novels each crammed with enough ideas for 4-5 other novelists. His plot is sort of set dressing to let him explore his world-building ideas on consciousness and biology. I don't really mind, as the churn of ideas is interesting.
He's a fairly interesting character in his own right: He's a former marine biologist, had his leg half eaten by necrotizing fasciitis, and he's no longer allowed in the US after getting pounded on by Cartman-esque border-cop several years back for the crime of asking what was going on during a delay as he was returning to Canada.
u/duskulldoll [+1] (a day later)
That's a pretty apt description of the majority of Peter Watts' work.
That said, Blindsight is exactly what you're looking for. It's a really excellent piece of fiction.
u/edwardkmett [+1] (2 days later)
The followup, Echopraxia, is even better.
u/duskulldoll [+2] (2 days later)
Echopraxia is like Blindsight, but moreso. It's incredibly dense and difficult to read, and even after to read-throughs I'm still struggling to get on a grip on what it was all about. (Though it's entirely possible/probable that's on me). Blindsight has a much more distinct and interesting lineup of characters, and even it's most convoluted/messy moments it's more focused and compelling than Echopraxia ever is.
tl;dr: I disagree. Echopraxia is incoherent, poorly-paced, and only occasionally brilliant.
u/edwardkmett [+3] (3 days later)
Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I personally thought the central point hung together better in the end.
Ultimately, at the risk of oversimplifying, I think one of the creepy and awesome main points from Blindsight was that consciousness itself could be an evolutionary disadvantage, and that aliens may not even have the concept. It explores this through all sorts of characters with different thinking patterns, and some nicely alien aliens. In some ways it is a rather Debbie-downer ending, because it basically indicates we may be an evolutionary dead-end about to be eaten by more efficient beings.
Echopraxia, on the surface of it seems to push on this a bit further on a couple of fronts:
First it digs in a bit more about what the consequences of force-evolved consciousnesses not having the same sort of safe-guards we've built up over centuries might be. (The bit about the sages not being able to even consider failure, etc.)
But I think, the central bit with the spider in Echopraxia I thought was very well done, in that it attacks one of the sort of standard over-simplified rationalist arguments that Yudkowski trots out over and over in HPMOR, about "how if I could form a sufficient mental model of what a smarter protagonist would do, then I'm just as smart as the protagonist", by noting that it can process large quantities of information, just very slowly.
It gets at the distinction between the ability to think a thought at all, no matter how slowly, and being able to do so fast enough for it to be useful through such an emulation layer.
Running very complicated thoughts on inefficient human wetware leads to the burst of activity pattern at the end of the book, and a (for Peter Watts) a rather uplifting ending, in that there seems to be a pattern in which we may not have to give up what makes us human to compete.
As with everything else Watts writes, though, most of the 'action' bits of plot and what have you are really just window-dressing so that he can talk about these things. The action in Blindsight was better done.
u/None [+1] (3 days later)
Seconding Blindsight. Literally one of the best books I've ever read. Deep analyses, dark plot, some horror, and got me to question my own consciousness.
u/Charlie___ [+6] (an hour later)
Have you read The Mote in God's Eye? For all its flaws, it remains a very clever book about a race making first contact.
u/Roxolan [+3] Head of antimemetiWalmart senior assistant manager (3 days later)
I will not risk calling it rationalist, but Stanisław Lem's Solaris is one of my favourite stories about alien aliens, so much so that true "contact" may be completely impossible.
(I have not seen any of the movie adaptations.)
u/Baconoflight [+1] (2 days later)
Sideways in Hyperspace is pretty good so far, it's not finished yet though.