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posted by martyb on Wednesday October 03 2018, @03:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the hit-the-hit-books dept.

October: Foundation by Isaac Asimov
November: The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin.
December: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

October's book is Foundation by Isaac Asimov, meaning the collection of 5 short stories first published in 1951. It is the first published entry in the Foundation series.

Please discuss last month's book, Mars, Ho! below if you haven't done so already. You can also suggest books for January 2019. I can include titles that were already suggested, such as in the comments on the poll. We may be able to increase the maximum number of poll options to accommodate more books.

Previously: SoylentNews Book Club is Alive


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 03 2018, @02:00PM (2 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 03 2018, @02:00PM (#743382)

    As mentioned previously I messed up the scheduling and was confused when this should be discussed so I'm 66% of the way thru the book. I intend to finish it probably this week. I bought it on Amazon for $1.99 and read it on my kindle whenever I'm waiting somewhere bored. I hope Amazon does not charge $1.98 of transaction costs and fees or whatever, that sounds very Amazon.

    The book style is a mix of hard and soft sci fi. The technical details are very realistic hard sci fi excellent immersion, at least so far. The endless harping about pork being expensive is odd/interesting; you'd think a world of fusion generators would have infinite energy to grow livestock feed and do exotic genetic engineering and animal breeding, so an utter apocalypse of a species (virus or whatever) would likely be rectified in a couple years at most. Given infinite free energy, some things in the book are a little obscure. Maybe its a cultural problem such that people won't buy pig unless its provided with a full video record of its life proving its not "long pig" aka human flesh. If Chinese will export baby formula containing melamine to westerners .... I would be nervous about buying pork sausage especially after one of their periodic political purges. Then again infinite free energy might destroy world trade, why send "long pig" sausage from China to the USA if the energy cost is zero making it trivial to grow the pork we eat in our cities, like whats the point of eating old food far away that costs more than fresh local food, if, when energy is infinite and free, that situation applies to all foods?

    Cultural issues can be a little weird. Pro sports turned out to be boomer; in the 90s when star trek DS9 had a weird side plot about no one watches pro baseball anymore that seemed the usual ethnic group that always instinctively has to countersignal the dominant group just to be disagreeable, up to its usual tricks, although here we are almost 2020 and baseball is in fact dying out with the boomers. So there's strange anachronisms where the dude pays attention to pro sports and is addicted to spending like half his waking hours watching non-interactive pre-recorded boomer-era entertainment. And his girlfriend is apparently of similar interests implying he's not some kind of retro-hobbyist oddball. Boomer memes about higher ed come up constantly in the protagonists thoughts.

    The book portrays a very white male boomer civilization, which is refreshing given recent ridiculous industry awards based solely on the authors results in the Diversity Olympics competitions. Basically every non-NPC in the book, so far, is a white male, possibly with a suntan and grew up in Africa or possibly they talk about other people being non-pork eating muslims or dog eating asians, or even anatomically a woman despite being a white male research scientist or charity founder and CEO. By being a white male, I mean WRT IQ, personality, work ethic, cultural beliefs, morals, ethics, attitudes, there are no cultural groups in the story other than white men and NPCs. I suppose its unrealistic to assume you can have a space faring civilization with sub-saharan africans and Jews, a successful space program is an inherent White (and Asian) privilege. The story is culturally pretty much Hugh Hefner and all his boomer baggage takes 200 whores on a USO "entertainment" trip to Mars, instead of Vietnam like in "apocalypse now". Its entertaining as all heck even if parts are not terribly realistic or are ... unusual.

    There are character personality issues. As stated above everyone in the story is a white man or a NPC, including all the "Heinlein-Style" fake diversity and the women. There's not much in between, at least so far there are no characters that are not critical to the story or are NPCs. Maybe the white male research doctor (who anatomically is a woman...) is kinda in between a main character and part of the background setting... Its interesting to read and not necessarily bad, but its unusual and non-formulaic to not have a hierarchy of characters, there's just utterly important white males and background NPCs.

    Another character oddity is the main character kills a bunch of space pirates early on in an interesting military fight; not a terribly realistic psychological portrayal of actual combat vets I've met. To some extent this is another boomerism like Star Trek where they can't decide if they're a WWII battleship propaganda movie, or space battleship yamamoto, or if they're some greenpeace research vessel. Also the pirates are weird; at least the early first 2/3 of the book they're basically Somalians-in-space like the youtube video of "The Old Negro Space Program" parody documentary. If you have a culture where only white men exist then its weird to put Somalians-in-space in as an incompetent antagonist given extensive historical literature about actual white male pirates black-beard or whatever-diverse-color-beard or going back further to Norse raider psuedo-pirates or chartered letter of marquee privateer operators. Also in space, I'm not sure a pirate fleet is sustainable without a base and if they have a base, a space or land based railgun can eliminate the base rapidly resulting in no fleet, so why are there pirates to begin with? At least so far its a moderately entertaining story without pirates. Maybe it would have been more realistic to have pirate action be a totally new thing in space, surprise to both the protagonist AND the reader. Maybe it'll make more sense if I finish reading the book.

    There are other cultural oddities like there appear to be no leftists, no progressives, no jews, no identity politics, no social media, no higher ed forced political indoctrination, no social virtue signalling, no oppression olympics; of course as stated above its fairly realistic that a society sick enough to have those illnesses can't go into space, so this society being in space, obviously there cannot be media support for female SJWs on space-twitter posting about how they want to genocide the white men who created civilization for them to criticize as being so awful; because Haiti, Saudi Arabia, and India are such a paradise on earth for women to live.

    The women in the book, admittedly NPCs or reskinned white men, do not exhibit blue pill behavior like sick women, or red pill behavior like real women, or even legacy hollywood or modern hollywood or sci fi tropes; their behavior is ... unique. Admittedly in context all of them but two are supposed to be addicts, but even the two non-addicts kinda had the mold broken when they were born, it seems. So a guy finds (fictional) women to be mysterious and interesting; maybe thats the most realistic way to portray them of all?

    Speaking of droppers, I haven't finished the book but I'm assuming the "common widely available chemicals" that go into drops are something like pulverized colloidal American twenty dollar bills or powdered gold or similar. Thats unrealistic in that in the current century we've already invented an antidote to women having too high of a sex drive, its called "wedding cake". Yeah well maybe I should not be writing comedy. But making drops ground up twenties would have made the story both more realistic and more funny. I haven't finished the book, maybe drops are pulverized credit cards, i donno.

    It seems in the story that the promises of "big data" did not materialize at least WRT infinite business optimization. Apparently no AI or data scientist noticed their flight scheduling system was super un-optimized or no one noticed Mars had a woman shortage or Earth had a problem with droppers or they can't build cleaning robots that don't have their lithium batteries explode. So you got "Alexa built into a dining room table" but somehow nobody uses MySQL or Hadoop or whatevs to analyze operations data anymore; uh yeah about that...

    Overall I like the book, its not formulaic and gives the reader a lot to think about and is just plain old fun. Its also really cheap, giving it a great ratio of enjoyment to expense. I would recommend this book, at least the first 2/3 that I've completed so far.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 03 2018, @02:15PM (1 child)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 03 2018, @02:15PM (#743389)

    Oh other hard sci fi oddities, no big deal:

    They don't have "big data" and AI at corporate HQ to competently run the company, but on board the ship, they have a substantial SCADA system that makes the poor captain spend half his time tediously responding to voltage alarms on the ion drives per company procedure. Thats weird. Also they got no video cameras in this universe so he needs to walk around instead of looking at cams and looking at drone footage (they do have drones, just no drones with cameras). So the poor guy has a kinda crappy job in the sense of walking around a lot because his employers are kinda dumb.

    Another sci fi oddity; its apparently common to get small batteries for drones with great surface area to volume ratios that none the less explode and catch fire inside the ship constantly, BUT its an established plot line multiple times that every ship has enough batteries such that if (when) both generators blow up there's enough stored energy to keep the hotel loads operating for many months. Maybe hes just neglecting to mention the solar array or modern hotel loads are extremely efficient such that a 9V radio battery could keep you alive for months, I donno.

    They've carefully manipulated the IQ of the AI repair robots such that they're smart enough to repair robots that catch fire, which must be very hard, but not quite smart enough to determine the root cause of HQ buying inferior quality batteries, which is weird.

    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday October 03 2018, @03:58PM

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 03 2018, @03:58PM (#743451) Journal

      The dearth of cameras is an intentional thing, and mentioned in the pilot's contract. If all he had to do was watch cameras, he'd swell up into a lard-assed blimp, and he'd probably implode when he got into a gravity field greater than our moon. So, the pilot walks, unless he'd prefer to run.