Fair enough, but still average-to-poor Banks is better than the best of most other authors, and The Algebraist, even if nowhere as deep as his best work, is still probably one of the best balls-out Space Operas I've ever read.
Oh, I did. The Night's Dawn trilogy was very good, but the unrelenting unpleasantness (even from the point of view of somebody who loves Banks) means that I'll probably never read anything by Hamilton again. I was glad when it was over.
As for Hyperion, the first book was indeed a revelation, but the second book was, to me, such an abomination and a betrayal of the first one that I've given up on the series for good.
I really liked Ringworld when I was much younger, but I really hated The Ringworld Engineers, and haven't dared read any of the rest. Then I discovered Iain M. Banks and my standards of quality in Sci-Fi moved to a different galaxy altogether. Banks's Orbitals make a lot more sense than full-blown Ringworlds anyway:)
PS. For a nice example of a Banks Orbital, play Halo.
Re:The city was the main character (you idiot)
on
The Scar
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· Score: 1
New Crobuzon is basically Ank Morpork minus a sense of humour.
Iain M. Banks is arguably the best living SF writer, and (minus the M.) one of the best mainstream fiction writers in the world right now.
As for "Perdido Street Station", I found the world to be wonderfully realized, but the unrelenting nastiness pretty much wore me down, the same problem I had with Peter F. Hamilton's "Night's Dawn" trilogy. And this considering Iain Banks is not averse to pretty strong imagery himself.
I was going to buy Enter the Matrix, but after reading these reviews, I'm well and truly put off.
If you don't care much for the Matrix connection, and are looking for a fighting/shooting/bullet-time fix, you can probably do a lot worse than try Bloodrayne, which is pretty much Max Payne with Nazis and lots of flying limbs. There is a demo out, and it's quite easy to figure out if you will like the full game from that one level.
Alternatively, there is a fantastic Kung Fu mod for Max Payne, which makes it almost a whole new game (almost, because in the last level or two the enemies are just too tough for Kung Fu).
The future isn't the silver bullet that it once was, certainly enough, but on the other hand, the past is always demonstrably worse. I don't want to die in a world that's the same as the one I was born in, so bring on the future, warts and all.
To return to what was asked in the original post, the coolest, best realized and with the greatest 'damn, I'd live there' factor universe in all of Science Fiction is without a doubt Iain M Banks's 'The Culture'.
I would recommend anybody wanting to try it to get started with 'Excession', and then move on to something heavier, such as 'Use of Weapons' or 'The Player of Games'.
Quite the opposite, in fact. Society is turning away from spectators (TV, Cinema) and towards participators (videogames, chat).
So there you go.:-P
Re:Astute observations with hope for a solution: y
on
The Shockwave Rider
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· Score: 1
Or, it could be conversely argued, European films lack happy endings because they are so heavily subsidized that they don't really depend on audience reaction, and thus they aren't made for the public, but for the masturbatory, artiste clique of pseudo-intellectual friends of the director, whom consider any such things as happy endings way too populist.
I'm European, I used to live in the US, and I've worked in the film industry in both places, so I have heard all kinds of bullshit nationalist bias coming from both sides of the pond.
Still, I'll concede the point that too many American films picture guns as the ultimate problem-solver...
Well, I don't have any children yet, but I should think that a child is probably better off spending time in a virtual reality, where they are at least interacting with people, even if it's by way of avatars, than zombified in front of the TV, where they are doing nothing, learning nothing and developing no skills.(I've also been addicted to the EverCrack. I dropped out because of circumstances beyond my control, and I can't wait to get back in...)
Some people go on vacation to exotic places, work at wonderful, fulfilling jobs that unleash their creativity, have smart and gorgeous Significant Others and lead lives straight out of Coca-Cola commercials; for the rest of us, there was first storytelling, then books, then comic-books, then radio and television. Now, Multiplayer Environments promise to fulfill the same socially equalizing function (because, at the end of the day, a wheat farmer can get just as much enjoyment out of a good movie as Bill Gates), but with the added advantage of being able to bring something of yourself into the experience.
Of course, a game of EverQuest is no substitute for a good, fulfilling real life, but it can be a good substitute for a boring, stressful one.
Yeah, but at the end of the day the real world offers more than any virtual world ever can, simply due to the
available processing power within the Universe.
Hardly. The real world definitely offers more, but the limiting factor is the possibility to get at it.
Of course, the Real World offers, say, jumping off helicopters to ski down the face of glaciers in Mount McKinley, Alaska, but for all the good it does me, that possibility might as well not exist.
On the other hand, within the self-contained reality of an online game, I can fight a dragon or conquer a galaxy. As long as your brain collaborates on sustaining the illusion, the thrill is there, and is all that matters.
The point is, it's more fun to fight a virtual, polygonal dragon than to work 8 hours behind a real desk shuffling real paperwork for real arseholes you couldn't give a toss about.
But in the end I don't think that these worlds will ever quite replace our own. No matter how good the programs
get, nothing can ever quite match the real world, and people get bored of things quickly when the novelty wears
off.
Funny, that's exactly what happened to the real world... the novelty wore off. Hence the popularity of online games.
I know people for whom an hour inside EverQuest is a lot more fulfilling socially than an hour in a smoky nightclub with loud techno music pounding their eardrums and brains into a pulp.
It must be that I haven't had enough caffeine today if I can't decide whether to moderate this up or down.
Off to get some joe, then... Need to wake up my sense of humour.
Still, for another example of Stephenson getting things frighteningly right, check out the Wired article on immense cargo airships. I have actually visited the company, and it looks for all the world that they know what they are doing (if the size of the hangar is anything to go by).
I was seriously afraid for a time they would leave a proper CLI out of it. Of course, there would be a third-party one in next to no time, but I'm really happy Apple are including one themselves. I'm all for snazzy graphical interfaces (you should seem my desktop), but I'm really pleased you have the option of a CLI when you need to do some real work.
Slashdot Mirror
Evolution is a phenomenon (as in, not only observable but, indeed, observed), Natural Selection is a theory put forward to explain Evolution.
For non-Americans, the US government already qualifies as "lots of people accountable to none of us"...
And what exactly would an omniscient, omnipotent entity need a test run for?
It was a great PR exercise, admittedly. When they actually make it to orbit, then I'll get excited.
Cthugha, surely?
http://www.afn.org/~cthugha/defines.html/
Fair enough, but still average-to-poor Banks is better than the best of most other authors, and The Algebraist, even if nowhere as deep as his best work, is still probably one of the best balls-out Space Operas I've ever read.
For a more detailed argument, read the book "Turin Shroud: In Whose Image?" by Lynn Pickett and Clive Prince.
Personally speaking, that's the theory I prefer to believe, because even if it weren't true, it's so beautiful it ought to be.
Oh, I did. The Night's Dawn trilogy was very good, but the unrelenting unpleasantness (even from the point of view of somebody who loves Banks) means that I'll probably never read anything by Hamilton again. I was glad when it was over.
As for Hyperion, the first book was indeed a revelation, but the second book was, to me, such an abomination and a betrayal of the first one that I've given up on the series for good.
I really liked Ringworld when I was much younger, but I really hated The Ringworld Engineers, and haven't dared read any of the rest. Then I discovered Iain M. Banks and my standards of quality in Sci-Fi moved to a different galaxy altogether. Banks's Orbitals make a lot more sense than full-blown Ringworlds anyway :)
PS. For a nice example of a Banks Orbital, play Halo.
New Crobuzon is basically Ank Morpork minus a sense of humour.
Iain M. Banks is arguably the best living SF writer, and (minus the M.) one of the best mainstream fiction writers in the world right now.
As for "Perdido Street Station", I found the world to be wonderfully realized, but the unrelenting nastiness pretty much wore me down, the same problem I had with Peter F. Hamilton's "Night's Dawn" trilogy. And this considering Iain Banks is not averse to pretty strong imagery himself.
It's a sad situation, but the upside is that at least we have found the solution to the Fermi Paradox.
I was going to buy Enter the Matrix, but after reading these reviews, I'm well and truly put off.
If you don't care much for the Matrix connection, and are looking for a fighting/shooting/bullet-time fix, you can probably do a lot worse than try Bloodrayne, which is pretty much Max Payne with Nazis and lots of flying limbs. There is a demo out, and it's quite easy to figure out if you will like the full game from that one level.
Alternatively, there is a fantastic Kung Fu mod for Max Payne, which makes it almost a whole new game (almost, because in the last level or two the enemies are just too tough for Kung Fu).
The future isn't the silver bullet that it once was, certainly enough, but on the other hand, the past is always demonstrably worse. I don't want to die in a world that's the same as the one I was born in, so bring on the future, warts and all.
To return to what was asked in the original post, the coolest, best realized and with the greatest 'damn, I'd live there' factor universe in all of Science Fiction is without a doubt Iain M Banks's 'The Culture'.
I would recommend anybody wanting to try it to get started with 'Excession', and then move on to something heavier, such as 'Use of Weapons' or 'The Player of Games'.
Nicer looking, but not so new... I used to run the "Atlantis" screensaver on the background of my SGI Indy... :)
Sorry, I guess that's what happens when one has to learn English on the job. I'll go kill myself now.
Hmm... I can go one better. Why not place all those telescopes in a VLT array *at the Solar Foci*?
:)
Can't get better than that, can it?
Quite the opposite, in fact. Society is turning away from spectators (TV, Cinema) and towards participators (videogames, chat).
So there you go. :-P
Or, it could be conversely argued, European films lack happy endings because they are so heavily subsidized that they don't really depend on audience reaction, and thus they aren't made for the public, but for the masturbatory, artiste clique of pseudo-intellectual friends of the director, whom consider any such things as happy endings way too populist.
I'm European, I used to live in the US, and I've worked in the film industry in both places, so I have heard all kinds of bullshit nationalist bias coming from both sides of the pond.Still, I'll concede the point that too many American films picture guns as the ultimate problem-solver...
Well, I don't have any children yet, but I should think that a child is probably better off spending time in a virtual reality, where they are at least interacting with people, even if it's by way of avatars, than zombified in front of the TV, where they are doing nothing, learning nothing and developing no skills.(I've also been addicted to the EverCrack. I dropped out because of circumstances beyond my control, and I can't wait to get back in...)
Some people go on vacation to exotic places, work at wonderful, fulfilling jobs that unleash their creativity, have smart and gorgeous Significant Others and lead lives straight out of Coca-Cola commercials; for the rest of us, there was first storytelling, then books, then comic-books, then radio and television. Now, Multiplayer Environments promise to fulfill the same socially equalizing function (because, at the end of the day, a wheat farmer can get just as much enjoyment out of a good movie as Bill Gates), but with the added advantage of being able to bring something of yourself into the experience.
Of course, a game of EverQuest is no substitute for a good, fulfilling real life, but it can be a good substitute for a boring, stressful one.
Hardly. The real world definitely offers more, but the limiting factor is the possibility to get at it.
Of course, the Real World offers, say, jumping off helicopters to ski down the face of glaciers in Mount McKinley, Alaska, but for all the good it does me, that possibility might as well not exist.
On the other hand, within the self-contained reality of an online game, I can fight a dragon or conquer a galaxy. As long as your brain collaborates on sustaining the illusion, the thrill is there, and is all that matters.
The point is, it's more fun to fight a virtual, polygonal dragon than to work 8 hours behind a real desk shuffling real paperwork for real arseholes you couldn't give a toss about.
Same planet, different worlds.Funny, that's exactly what happened to the real world... the novelty wore off. Hence the popularity of online games.
I know people for whom an hour inside EverQuest is a lot more fulfilling socially than an hour in a smoky nightclub with loud techno music pounding their eardrums and brains into a pulp.
It must be that I haven't had enough caffeine today if I can't decide whether to moderate this up or down.
Off to get some joe, then... Need to wake up my sense of humour.
Still, for another example of Stephenson getting things frighteningly right, check out the Wired article on immense cargo airships. I have actually visited the company, and it looks for all the world that they know what they are doing (if the size of the hangar is anything to go by).
There is a God! :)
I was seriously afraid for a time they would leave a proper CLI out of it. Of course, there would be a third-party one in next to no time, but I'm really happy Apple are including one themselves. I'm all for snazzy graphical interfaces (you should seem my desktop), but I'm really pleased you have the option of a CLI when you need to do some real work.