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The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts
Dec. 8th, 2018 11:08 amThe Freeze-Frame Revolution
3/5. Hard sf novella about a rebellion against the dumb AI running a mission to seed the galaxy with transportation gates for a human race that might not even exist anymore, given it's been over sixty million years since they started.
Interesting in concept. The way time works in this story can really awe the mind if you dwell on it. Though once you take that wrapping away, this becomes far more pedestrian a story about trying to overthrow a friendly and helpful oppressive AI. But that's not entirely fair of me, because here the wrapping is a lot of the point. Motivations change when you've lived through sixty million years of the universe changing around you. At least they do when you're human. Not so much when change has been programmed out of you.
Sidenote: I have to point out this obnoxious blog post Watts made complaining about how reviewers shouldn't read political motivations into his texts because, like, he's a scientist, okay, and you can't call it ideology when it's derived empirically. Wow. Putting aside his smug belief in empiricism (reminds me strongly of some of the worst of the techbros I know), and putting aside how it's almost never a good look to complain about your reviewers having opinions of your writing that you didn't intend them to have, of course his texts are political. They exist and are read in our political context, so of course to the extent they differ from ours (or in the case of this novella, include a nonbinary character in passing) that is political. He's basically saying that he put in diversity because that's how large populations work, but you can't ascribe any meaning to that because it's math. When in reality of course there's meaning in that. Much of the effort to bring social justice consciousness to SF has been an effort to get stories that approach accurately reflecting statistical diversity across populations. You can't just be like well I did that, yeah, but I did it for science which is totally apolitical so there.
Ugh, it just really pisses me off when bros pretend to be above the fray like that, when of course they absolutely are not.
3/5. Hard sf novella about a rebellion against the dumb AI running a mission to seed the galaxy with transportation gates for a human race that might not even exist anymore, given it's been over sixty million years since they started.
Interesting in concept. The way time works in this story can really awe the mind if you dwell on it. Though once you take that wrapping away, this becomes far more pedestrian a story about trying to overthrow a friendly and helpful oppressive AI. But that's not entirely fair of me, because here the wrapping is a lot of the point. Motivations change when you've lived through sixty million years of the universe changing around you. At least they do when you're human. Not so much when change has been programmed out of you.
Sidenote: I have to point out this obnoxious blog post Watts made complaining about how reviewers shouldn't read political motivations into his texts because, like, he's a scientist, okay, and you can't call it ideology when it's derived empirically. Wow. Putting aside his smug belief in empiricism (reminds me strongly of some of the worst of the techbros I know), and putting aside how it's almost never a good look to complain about your reviewers having opinions of your writing that you didn't intend them to have, of course his texts are political. They exist and are read in our political context, so of course to the extent they differ from ours (or in the case of this novella, include a nonbinary character in passing) that is political. He's basically saying that he put in diversity because that's how large populations work, but you can't ascribe any meaning to that because it's math. When in reality of course there's meaning in that. Much of the effort to bring social justice consciousness to SF has been an effort to get stories that approach accurately reflecting statistical diversity across populations. You can't just be like well I did that, yeah, but I did it for science which is totally apolitical so there.
Ugh, it just really pisses me off when bros pretend to be above the fray like that, when of course they absolutely are not.