Hernando
Among the 7 stories, the most remarkable was the one that gives the book its name.
It is a very sadistic take on what would an AI turned bad could do to humans that are at its will. The concept was indeed interesting, but I got spoiled by knowing basically everything beforehand. Not a fault of the book itself but I could not help to enjoy it more.
This book hooked me from the very first 20 pages. One of the best generation ship stories I have ever read.
There is such a sense of wonder when the book tries to explore an idea , which is basically impossible to achieve with current technology, while trying to keep the very idea grounded in modern understanding of physics and playing with the speculative tech of the future.
A few thousand people aboard a sentient or semi sentient ship wanting to go far and beyond our solar system to settle and make a new home is the main premise of the book. The plan for them is to terraform one of our neighbor planetary systems (home of the Tau Ceti star) or at least one of the main planet's moon.
All kinds of situation start happening when they find out that things are not going as expected with the biological system of the sentient ship.
I have seen many people disliking the end of the book, but to me it was just excellent. It gave the needed doses of adrenaline and makes you really think about what lies ahead of human exploration and all the risk that comes with it.
Can not say enough to this great-short story. One of my favorites ever.
I have read this story countless of time and it continues being fascinating.
A barely functional robot (Multivac) is being asked the fundamental question of how can we decrease the amount of entropy of the universe in order to "save" it.
This question span eons into the future (is asked every couple of decades) while versions of the robot are more and more intelligent. We would guess that as the robot gathers vast amount of data with the passing of the centuries, it will be able to give a proper answer to the question.
A flawless story with a superb ending.
This was a light , fun and quick read.
A robot that gains total control of its own systems and start going deep into existentialism while at the same time keeping the humans of a scientific Spedition on a distant planet safe.
Nothing else really and waiting for the next novella to come out just killed any bit of enthusiasm I had at the time.
I almost DNF'd this book.
It relates a story of post humanism where things like communication by thoughts, mind copies, AGI and Singularity are very real. All this is thrown at the reader without any bit of explanation, which makes the book interesting initially.
By the time you know how all things really work and were supposed to be "fun", it felt quite plain and boring.
I did not mind the device the author used to tell the story at all, which I can understand why some people hate it, but by the end of the book I think it was not even worth the struggle.
I might be judging this book too harshly, but I am still interested in giving it a revisit and see if my opinion changes.
An interesting way to deal with consciousness.
There were a few things that were a bit annoying tho, like how the scenes of what was happening were described, as if something Watts was forgetting in the process of constructing the story. Confusing at times.
The other thing that will probably make this book not as enjojable a second time is the way one of the characters was basically clicking his tongue the whole time.
Apart from that, it's a solid book with a very intriguing and unique set of characters. The climax alone was worth the few hundred pages.
Probably the most influential time travel novel ever. Not only in terms of going on a ride to a distant time but also in terms of its sociological aspect.
Imagining what human beings could look like hundred of thousands of years ahead, opened so many gates of human speculation.
It also made traveling through some sort of device a popular idea, which later became the de facto item for time traveling in pop culture.
I revisited this book after so many years (read it on my teenage years) and this time did not enjoy it quite much as I expected (or remembered) , but I will probably read it again some time in the future.
Humans fighting for centuries against an alien race in different theaters of war (mostly on far distant planets) are one of the main attractions of this book for me
Those soldiers on the front line travel at the speed of light to fight the enemy, they get older by a few days, while their relatives on earth do it by the years. And old but still cool idea.
The book reflects the very idea of going to war (in the real world) and coming home where everything is so unrecognizable (your family and friends are mostly gone) that you feel like an alien.
This is to me an interesting take on the scars of war. While I enjoyed Starship Troopers premise a bit more, this is a far more honest book.
A very good book with plenty of cool ideas.
We got a berserker AI trying to eat whatever races it encounters, a planet of peculiar species of group minds and an interesting take on Singularity.
A galaxy divided into Zones where its laws of physics determine the intelligence their inhabitants have, even for artificial beings makes the book even more intriguing.
Similar to Gateway by Frederik Pohl, I read the Spanish version but in this case the way they translated the name of some species put me a bit off.
Read the Spanish version of this book directly on my phone while commuting everyday during the final months of that 2018 Hong Kong summer. During this time was when I thought about tracking all the books and get an E-reader. I remember this and A Fire Upon The Deep quite fondly because of the memories of those days.
The book has an obvious old school SciFi tone where things happen very quickly and the big idea, in this case the first contact with alien artifacts, obfuscates partially the characters development. In this case though, they were interesting enough to maintain the plot's consistency.
Everything revolves about some left behind devices by an alien race and how humans are trying to make sense of them. The main artifacts being a few startships that gets you anywhere and/or everywhere. Eventually they humans go on missions with this ships and get money when they come back. The most interesting part is what actually happens during these trips.
There is a major violent event between the main characters that may put some people off. Like some other classics, this did not have any major impact back then.