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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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SoylentNews Book Club: October 2018
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For recreational use only.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 03 2018, @02:15PM (1 child)
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
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.