7.6 KiB
[RT][HSF] The Last Angel: Ascension | Chapter 37
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Author: u/narfanator *
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URL: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-last-angel-ascension.346640/page-257#post-51042889
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Score: 20
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Created: 2018-09-26T22:21:00
Post:
Comments:
u/narfanator [+6] (37 seconds later)
I'm unsure of the HSF tag, but this is definitely NOT a space opera. Still, includes FTL and the like.
u/Sparkwitch [+7] (an hour later)
To get to the bottom of Moh's mineral you've got to be talc, which is pretty solid stuff compared to non-minerals like cotton or fat and even colloid minerals like wet clay.
This is space opera. Reconstructed, rational space opera. Hard space opera, even, by the standards of that genre. I'm just not not sure it's mineral-hard sci-fi. Still, if you'd said DC that would give people less clue about genre and this is absolutely a genre piece.
u/kmsxkuse [+3] (5 hours later)
What would qualify as a mineral hard sci-fi?
A plasma modeling textbook? My calc 3 professor always said that field was all nonsense and fiction.
Cant really think up of any sort of fiction I've read that had proofs and peer review backing up any sort of claims they make.
u/Sparkwitch [+7] (5 hours later)
Talc isn't that hard to scratch with anything that looks even vaguely like a rock. Neither is gypsum. There's a healthy chunk of stuff that's still approachable and entertaining. Niven and Pournelle are more than chalky enough, for example, without being able to survive abuse from orthoclase feldspar.
FTL is only one of The Last Angel's sins, there's a uniformity and familiarity to alien culture, they all breathe the same atmosphere, they're mostly biologically compatible and can eat many of the same foods. Language compatibility. Space battles that are designed to be fun rather than make a lot of scientific sense.
I love it, mind you. It's also strong rational in that the author has done both world and story design homework. Things make a deeply satisfying narrative sense, without much in the way of holes. Please enjoy responsibly.
(...and, as mentioned elsewhere, this is a sequel to a previous work and spoils a lot of the surprises of that one early. Make sure to read it first.)
u/wren42 [+3] (21 hours later)
these mineralogy metaphors are getting hard to follow XD
u/kmsxkuse [+1] (5 hours later)
Interesting, ya got any of them links?
I'm checking out The Last Angel and it seems pretty good so far.
u/Laborbuch [+1] (18 hours later)
Robert L. Forward’s “Dragon’s Egg” is on the hard end in its science (for the time).
u/wren42 [+1] (21 hours later)
Dragon’s Egg
oh man, it's been years since I thought about that story.
there's a lot of magic tech in there still, though, and the accelerated learning/civilization development could be said to violate some physics, as experiments take time to perform no matter how short your lifespan is.
u/wren42 [+1] (a day later)
quite enjoying last angel. My only objection so far is the scene where the captain plays chess with Red. Her objection that Red is "cheating" is pretty silly, as is the idea that the captain should expect to be able to win at all. Chess AI are already way beyond what humans can compete with, and I'd expect a futuristic supercomputer to surpass our current state of the art. This would have been common knowledge even in 2013 when this was written. It would be better if the author had just invented a novel strategy game rather than reference chess without having much knowledge of it.
u/notagiantdolphin [+3] (9 hours later)
Stephen Baxter usually does a pretty good job. It's far from perfect (what isn't), but it usually fits within accepted models. He's a mathematician, so probably helps.
u/Sparkwitch [+6] (14 hours later)
Agreed. Also the dark futures of Greg Bear, some of which are practically topaz.
If you want to ease your way in on the crumbly end, there's always Neal Stephenson and Michael Crichton. They aspire to hardness, and give a sense of what you'd be getting yourself into if you went in search of hard sci-fi.
I guess that's my critique of realism in Last Angel: It aspires to be great war fiction, great space pirate fiction, great haunted house fiction. Hardness isn't the goal at all, and if it would come into conflict with any of those other goals it's perfectly happy to develop scratches.
u/MilesSand [+1] (3 days later)
I have a feeling your professor is exaggerating, and doesn't realize most students might not have the context to understand the exaggeration. Otherwise I wouldn't be around to tell you this (I used to work on & maintain equipment that was designed with plasma modeling techniques) and you wouldn't have such a nice or cheap computer to have this conversation (semiconductor manufacturing uses equipment that yadda yadda)
:)
u/narfanator [+2] (9 hours later)
Seems like should be [RT][SF][WIP].
u/Solaire145 [+2] (16 hours later)
I cannot recommend this enough. Absolutely fantastic.
u/panchoadrenalina [+2] (5 days later)
Because of this post i began reading the previous novel and i loved it, thanks for post it.
I dont think it qualifies as hard scyfi at all though. Ftl, inertial dampeners, shields, reduce the hardness quite a bit, it doesnt detract from its quality at all. It just changes its clasification.
u/narfanator [+1] (5 days later)
Sure. But, I wouldn't call it a Space Opera.
Or, rather, I wouldn't call both it and Fifth Element or Valerian space operas. It's not hard like a Benford, but it is a universe with a series of exploitable (and exploited), well-defined fake physics.
So, guess that makes it just SF? I'll tag it that way next time.
PS - Oh! I think that does make the Stonepunk story hard scifi?
u/panchoadrenalina [+1] (5 days later)
Fair enough is not really kin to the fifth element and the like. Now you made me think where would i put it in a library.
If the library separates scifi from litarature? This would sit nicely besides Old Man War and the Lost Fleet. Militaty scifi.
If the library divides by how the book pulls you in, what feeling uses to keep you reading, this is a mistery novel with a bit of horror for the first part. Like the harry potter books are mistery novels at their heart, this draw you with questions of what happened to the ship after the prologue or what will happen to the cadets.
Still and excelent novel, if i werent as broke as i am i would donate to the authors patreon without a doubt.
I dont know what stonepunk story are you talking about but if you kindly point me in that direction i will give it a look.
u/narfanator [+1] (5 days later)
This guy: https://setinstonestory.wordpress.com/about/
I wish I could find the author's OP here on R/Rational, his original backstory got torn up and a new absolutely amazing one filled in the gap.