The year is coming to an end. Time to look back and reflect. What are the books you've read in 2022? Which books made you change your mind or you simply enjoyed? And which books would you recommend to others for 2023?
One book stuck out to me this year: Blindsight by Peter Watts.
What happens when humankind on the verge of post-scarcity suffers its first alien contact -- truly alien contact. A team of engineered humans is sent to meet them.
What really stuck out to me is how the content of the book could be applied to a potential AGI -- an alien, intelligent entity that we can't really understand and still have to interact with. I can't go further without delving into spoilers. It's really good. But, also, very bleak.
If you like dense SF you'll like Watts. Specifically Watts is like Gibson, Banks, Stross etc. in that he has throwaway ideas in his books that would be the entire basis of a novel for lessor authors. With Blindsight most famously it's his Vampire character but also there's the character with beneficial split-personalities, "heaven", and more others may remember that have faded for me since I read the books 5+ years ago.
Incredible book and your post has reminded me that I need to reread it.
This is definitely a book that stuck with me over the years. The concepts were very foreign and unusual at the time I read it, and I still find them novel to think about. Definitely in my top five recommendations for sci-fi reading.
I haven't read the book, just some plot spoilers, so take this with a big grain of salt: it seems to be yet another book that flatters the reader by positing that humans are relatively more sentient than other spacefaring species. Where are the books that posit the opposite (which I'd think is actually much more likely) ?
Trying to summarize a half-remembered book, but the big revelation is that the aliens are not sentient at all. They are rather operating on instinct. The point of the book was more to discuss the nature of being human and is consciousness/sentience all that necessary. Lots of philosophical waxing on the nature of thought.
As to your question about other species, I think you are posing a rather challenging problem. How does an author write from the perspective of a being significantly more intelligent than themselves? Their actions and motivations become wholly alien as comprehension is not within our reach. One can justify any alien action as the unknowable motivations of a capacious god.
The Three-Body Problem is an iconic example of the opposite, with humans simply struggling to survive in a universe where every other space-faring species is vastly more intelligent.
I really enjoyed this book as well. Just a heads up for anyone interested, there is a vampire character, which seems very out of place initially, but just something that needs to be accepted for the story. It does all kind of fit in by the end though.
Blind sight has been recommended enough times so I'll add a note about the sequel.
Watts wrote a loosely related sequel called Echopraxia that was not nearly as good as Blindsight but expands on some of the concepts. It was much more of a slog to read through and a bit confusing to follow the story and I had to force myself to finish it. If you are thinking of picking that up after reading Blindsight.
Both books have a good section after the story where Watts explains the research and citations of how he came up with the story. If you read that part it may break your brain in a questioning existence kind of way.
Heh, +1 on Blindsight and also on the sequel not being as good :) I think Watts had remarked something like, people complained there was not enough action, so he added more action. But based on the comments I keep seeing (and Amazon stars) people like it much less...
To each their own, but I thought this book was at best just ok. Had some neat parts but overall I didn’t get very into it. To anyone reading this comment, it’s from 2006 btw, not that the OP specified new books in 2022.
This book gave me mixed feelings as well, spoilers ahead.
On the good side, I think the author is brilliant, the way he created this new race of aliens, how he explains their physiology, faster than what it takes for your brain to process images, their camouflage, how their body is a whole lens, their communication system, their way to accumulate energy, etc... that was amazing and worth reading.
On the bad side, I hated every character in the book, it's maybe expected to not like the protagonist with his "lack of empathy", but who makes a crew of such a bunch of uncooperative people, is like nobody wanted to do their job properly; All their conversations felt hostile, not sure how to put it, but I would expect a sense of wonder, curiosity and cooperation from the people sent to do a first alien contact.
The part that I disliked the most is how the human ship felt so abstract, they are in a ship, but everyone stays in some sort of independent tent, I thought this was my problem maybe I missed some key information about it, but after reading some critics, other people also have this feeling of disorientation.
Overall, it's worth it if you really like the genre, but not a must in my opinion.
* Three Body Problem. I've heard of it many times, but never read it. Picked it up a month or two ago, read the whole thing in a few sessions, one of my favourite sci-fi books ever. Will read the next book in the series.
* Immune: A Journey into the Mysterious System that Keeps You Alive. Best pop-sci book I've read in a while. Strikes the right balance between including pertinent information without being overwhelming, explaining things in a digestible way without dumbing down, etc. Inspired me to read a proper immunology primer (How the Immune System Works), which was also very good.
* How Rights Went Wrong. An excellent, level-headed take on the U.S. conception of rights, and how it leads to zero-sum thinking in supreme court cases. The author is so relentlessly reasonable that it's hard not to buy into his argument. Even though this book is about the U.S., it has lots of case studies where it contrasts with various other countries, which helped me understand my country's (Canada's) court system and system of rights better.
Let-downs:
* Seeing Like a State. The first few chapters are interesting, and do a good job of explaining the world-view of the author. Worth buying just for this. However, the last half or two-thirds of the book is a tedious re-hashing of the same ideas through various examples.
* The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. Many interesting factoids in here (killer asteroids: solved problem). However, the book's central argument failed to convince me. Many of the analyses and probability estimates were disappointingly shallow and hand-wavy, especially for the #1 risk cited in the book--unaligned AI--which he thinks has a 10% chance of ending civilization this century.
Three Body Problem's sequel, The Dark Forest, is one of the most mindblowing books I've ever read. When they go over the Dark Forest theory, I thought, wow, the author came up with a novel solution to Fermi's paradox, after all this time.
After reading Seeing Like a State and Utopia of Rules, I'm keen to learn more about "bureaucracy". My hunch is the battlelines and dogma wrt making the world "legible" (measureable, manageable) and "bullshit jobs" (make work, no value add) are overdue for an update.
I'm going to use my vote to vote against the Three Body Problem. If more people keep recommending it, more people will have to read it, and that would make me sad.
Because it's a terrible book.
It epitomizes the sort of sci Fi that sci Fi people keep recommending, with it's kinda interesting concept and embarrassingly bad writing. It's just hundreds of pages of unreadable.
And it ends abruptly before resolving anything so it tricks you into getting the sequel. Which is somehow even more poorly written.
I wouldn't call it bad writing. It is different from what I used to. It is non-linear, which is actually quite common (eg see Hyperion) and I would say not-character-focused. It is more about a concept itself. And even though latter I don't like much, the core idea of the book is very interesting.
For me it was harder to read, but still very enjoyable experience.
>And it ends abruptly before resolving anything
hmmm, I wonder what kind of books you usually read. Because this is very common approach, when authors don't do full LoTR ending, but end story at the point when reaching it would be rewarding, but won't everything to the last bit, so readers can still think about for a while.
I know what you mean about the bad writing, but I don’t think that makes it a terrible book. Unfortunately most sci-fi has flat writing for the same reason most great literature recycles the same ideas and concepts: it’s hard to do everything at once.
Sci-fi generally sacrifices prose quality and character depth to pack in more interesting ideas; great literature generally makes the opposite tradeoff. If you read a sci-fi novel expecting great writing you’ll be frustrated.
Three Body Problem had enough interesting ideas to keep me turning the page, where most sci-fi novels don’t—I prefer short stories for sci-fi exactly because of the generally low quality writing.
Some people like this kind of book. In fact, I sometimes wonder if explicitly "bad writing" is good for hard sci-fi, at least some authors. My personal favorite example is Greg Egan. In Permutation City/etc., characters are cardboard cutouts, but the books are wonderful based on the ideas. Then in Teranesia he tried to write characters but the ideas fell flat IMHO. It's almost like there's limited bandwidth...
+1 for poor writing. I tried to read it after hearing recommendations and being interested in the idea of Sci-fi happening outside of the US. I got bored halfway through the first volume and dropped it.
If you haven't read Ted Chiang's short stories yet, do so. His first collection (Stories of Your Life and Others) was my favourite, but his more recent one (Exhalation) was also very good (the title story, Exhalation, is gorgeous). Stories of your Life is what the movie Arrival was based on and (as ever) the story was better than the movie.
As far as sci-fi novels, I have pretty generic tastes for this crowd: Dune, The Dispossessed, The Martian. The Crying of Lot 49 is one of my favourite books. Not exactly sci-fi but close.
Early last year I read The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. I found it deeply affecting. The quality of the writing is incredible and I enjoyed the structure which alternates progressing the main story and vignettes of life around the main characters. But mostly I was shocked to realize how little has changed in ~90 years in terms of worker exploitation and the ability to fall through the cracks in the USA.
More astonishing is that he wrote it in 100 days by hand and published almost exactly what came out of his mind on the first draft. If you find the scans of his manuscript, it's shocking how few changes he made.
1. Breathe - James Nestor
I was a lifelong nighttime mouth breather due to a very dry winter climate growing up in Chicago, clogged up my sinuses. The book inspired me to look into solutions for this problem and now wake up with considerably less brain fog than I did before.
2. War and Peace / Anna Karenina - I wanted some sort of insight into Russian Imperialism and was surprised by how much my father was like some of the characters (his grandfather was a 'count'). I thought his personality was just a quirk of his since he was unlike anyone I knew growing up. He fit the Tolstoyan characterization of a noble like a glove, warts and all.
3. History of the Peloponnesian War - So many of the conflicts today are exemplified in the ancient Greek world and the relationships between the city states as described in the book. Hard to believe (I don't believe) that Thucydides could remember these lengthy speeches given by emissaries in various scenarios, but what is written is nonetheless riveting. It's great context for my current read, Plato's Republic, which was heavily influenced by the Athenian (democracy's) defeat against the Spartan oligarchy.
4. Come As You Are - Emily Nagoski
Shedding light on different sexual perspectives and experiences for something that is usually kept deep in the dark.
I recently read Lord Jim (1900) by Joseph Conrad and really enjoyed it. There is a dense playfulness with words in a way that doesn't exist in my diet of Internet reading. The plot is unfurled from questionable narrators, deft time shifts, and overall is compelling and peppered with ethical dilemmas.
If I had to pick one book from 2022, I would definitely go with Carlo Rovelli’s “The Order of Time” https://amzn.to/3W4PdVG
In the book, Rovelli explores the concept of time and how it has been understood by scientists and philosophers throughout history. An intellectually stimulating and not overly technical read about the concept of a universe without time and some of the latest developments in Loop Quantum Gravity (Rovelli’s field of work).
I'm about 25% through this book and struggling with it a bit. It's interesting, for sure, but it's kinda just going in one ear out the other for me. Don't feel like i'm learning or gaining new insight. Not to say I'm an expert -- anything but -- but don't have much to takeaway from it yet. Will trudge along...
Did not read that many books this year but this two books makes my list:
1)The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_Tasting_Tea
This book is about the history of Statistics which is weaved through the some remarkable personal stories behind the history of Statistics. If you have ever used statistics, some of the words will sound familiar and will help to understand the history behind it.
2)The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Song-of-the-Cell/...
I am still reading this book but I have read his previous book, "The Emperor of All Maladies" so knew his style. Again I enjoy historical perspective and this one tells about how we thought of the cell. It almost reads like textbook but is much interesting read than textbook. Brought some of the memories from my cell biology class. Always fascinating on how we take some things for granted such as blood transfusion came along in first place. He also narrates some his personal experience in between to make it even more readable.
In short, I love tech and biology sparkled with history.
The Song of the Cell is on my list for 2023. My local library has ordered few more copies after they realized the demand for this book. I have been waiting more than a month and my expected waiting time is another month!
I'm very interested in The Song of the Cell, thanks, I love books like that and I tried to read The Emperor of All Maladies and I enjoyed the writing but I just couldn't keep reading, Cancer and terminal illnesses just terrify me, that was truly a horror book for me.
* The End of the World is just the Beginning, by Peter Zeihan
How the globalisation is coming to an end, how the US Navy made Chinese power possible, how the 21st Century will be American after all, and many other counter-intuitive things. A must read IMO.
* Atlas of AI, by Kate Crawford
Politics of AI: power, exploitation, colonialism, global surveillance and control... Fascinating. Another must read.
I'm in the middle of the Zeihan book right now. Even if his prediction about globalization's end turns out to be wrong (not that I don't think it's possible), the history and worldview in this book has been really enlightening for me.
I'm reading this book too. I have to admire his case for the end of globalization. He presents the facts in a very convincing and logical manner so it's hard to say he's wrong.
Readit News
What happens when humankind on the verge of post-scarcity suffers its first alien contact -- truly alien contact. A team of engineered humans is sent to meet them.
What really stuck out to me is how the content of the book could be applied to a potential AGI -- an alien, intelligent entity that we can't really understand and still have to interact with. I can't go further without delving into spoilers. It's really good. But, also, very bleak.
Incredible book and your post has reminded me that I need to reread it.
This is definitely a book that stuck with me over the years. The concepts were very foreign and unusual at the time I read it, and I still find them novel to think about. Definitely in my top five recommendations for sci-fi reading.
Trying to summarize a half-remembered book, but the big revelation is that the aliens are not sentient at all. They are rather operating on instinct. The point of the book was more to discuss the nature of being human and is consciousness/sentience all that necessary. Lots of philosophical waxing on the nature of thought.
As to your question about other species, I think you are posing a rather challenging problem. How does an author write from the perspective of a being significantly more intelligent than themselves? Their actions and motivations become wholly alien as comprehension is not within our reach. One can justify any alien action as the unknowable motivations of a capacious god.
Watts wrote a loosely related sequel called Echopraxia that was not nearly as good as Blindsight but expands on some of the concepts. It was much more of a slog to read through and a bit confusing to follow the story and I had to force myself to finish it. If you are thinking of picking that up after reading Blindsight.
Both books have a good section after the story where Watts explains the research and citations of how he came up with the story. If you read that part it may break your brain in a questioning existence kind of way.
On the good side, I think the author is brilliant, the way he created this new race of aliens, how he explains their physiology, faster than what it takes for your brain to process images, their camouflage, how their body is a whole lens, their communication system, their way to accumulate energy, etc... that was amazing and worth reading.
On the bad side, I hated every character in the book, it's maybe expected to not like the protagonist with his "lack of empathy", but who makes a crew of such a bunch of uncooperative people, is like nobody wanted to do their job properly; All their conversations felt hostile, not sure how to put it, but I would expect a sense of wonder, curiosity and cooperation from the people sent to do a first alien contact.
The part that I disliked the most is how the human ship felt so abstract, they are in a ship, but everyone stays in some sort of independent tent, I thought this was my problem maybe I missed some key information about it, but after reading some critics, other people also have this feeling of disorientation.
Overall, it's worth it if you really like the genre, but not a must in my opinion.
* Immune: A Journey into the Mysterious System that Keeps You Alive. Best pop-sci book I've read in a while. Strikes the right balance between including pertinent information without being overwhelming, explaining things in a digestible way without dumbing down, etc. Inspired me to read a proper immunology primer (How the Immune System Works), which was also very good.
* How Rights Went Wrong. An excellent, level-headed take on the U.S. conception of rights, and how it leads to zero-sum thinking in supreme court cases. The author is so relentlessly reasonable that it's hard not to buy into his argument. Even though this book is about the U.S., it has lots of case studies where it contrasts with various other countries, which helped me understand my country's (Canada's) court system and system of rights better.
Let-downs:
* Seeing Like a State. The first few chapters are interesting, and do a good job of explaining the world-view of the author. Worth buying just for this. However, the last half or two-thirds of the book is a tedious re-hashing of the same ideas through various examples.
* The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. Many interesting factoids in here (killer asteroids: solved problem). However, the book's central argument failed to convince me. Many of the analyses and probability estimates were disappointingly shallow and hand-wavy, especially for the #1 risk cited in the book--unaligned AI--which he thinks has a 10% chance of ending civilization this century.
Because it's a terrible book.
It epitomizes the sort of sci Fi that sci Fi people keep recommending, with it's kinda interesting concept and embarrassingly bad writing. It's just hundreds of pages of unreadable.
And it ends abruptly before resolving anything so it tricks you into getting the sequel. Which is somehow even more poorly written.
See also: children of time
For me it was harder to read, but still very enjoyable experience.
>And it ends abruptly before resolving anything hmmm, I wonder what kind of books you usually read. Because this is very common approach, when authors don't do full LoTR ending, but end story at the point when reaching it would be rewarding, but won't everything to the last bit, so readers can still think about for a while.
Sci-fi generally sacrifices prose quality and character depth to pack in more interesting ideas; great literature generally makes the opposite tradeoff. If you read a sci-fi novel expecting great writing you’ll be frustrated.
Three Body Problem had enough interesting ideas to keep me turning the page, where most sci-fi novels don’t—I prefer short stories for sci-fi exactly because of the generally low quality writing.
What are your other favorite sci-fi novels, and books in general?
(Send some general fiction recs on my way if you feel like it.)
As far as sci-fi novels, I have pretty generic tastes for this crowd: Dune, The Dispossessed, The Martian. The Crying of Lot 49 is one of my favourite books. Not exactly sci-fi but close.
2. War and Peace / Anna Karenina - I wanted some sort of insight into Russian Imperialism and was surprised by how much my father was like some of the characters (his grandfather was a 'count'). I thought his personality was just a quirk of his since he was unlike anyone I knew growing up. He fit the Tolstoyan characterization of a noble like a glove, warts and all.
3. History of the Peloponnesian War - So many of the conflicts today are exemplified in the ancient Greek world and the relationships between the city states as described in the book. Hard to believe (I don't believe) that Thucydides could remember these lengthy speeches given by emissaries in various scenarios, but what is written is nonetheless riveting. It's great context for my current read, Plato's Republic, which was heavily influenced by the Athenian (democracy's) defeat against the Spartan oligarchy.
4. Come As You Are - Emily Nagoski
Shedding light on different sexual perspectives and experiences for something that is usually kept deep in the dark.
It really helped me understand better how to deal with stress, burnout, and how to talk about it at work.
What was your solution for nighttime mouth breathing?
Standard E-books made an excellently formatted version: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/joseph-conrad/lord-jim
In the book, Rovelli explores the concept of time and how it has been understood by scientists and philosophers throughout history. An intellectually stimulating and not overly technical read about the concept of a universe without time and some of the latest developments in Loop Quantum Gravity (Rovelli’s field of work).
I also have a blog post on my Top 10 books from last year: https://medium.data4sci.com/top-10-books-we-read-in-2022-c3d...
1)The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_Tasting_Tea This book is about the history of Statistics which is weaved through the some remarkable personal stories behind the history of Statistics. If you have ever used statistics, some of the words will sound familiar and will help to understand the history behind it.
2)The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Song-of-the-Cell/... I am still reading this book but I have read his previous book, "The Emperor of All Maladies" so knew his style. Again I enjoy historical perspective and this one tells about how we thought of the cell. It almost reads like textbook but is much interesting read than textbook. Brought some of the memories from my cell biology class. Always fascinating on how we take some things for granted such as blood transfusion came along in first place. He also narrates some his personal experience in between to make it even more readable.
In short, I love tech and biology sparkled with history.
How the globalisation is coming to an end, how the US Navy made Chinese power possible, how the 21st Century will be American after all, and many other counter-intuitive things. A must read IMO.
* Atlas of AI, by Kate Crawford
Politics of AI: power, exploitation, colonialism, global surveillance and control... Fascinating. Another must read.