[gwd]

This reminds me of a scene in "A Fire Upon the Deep" (1992) where they're on a video call with someone on another spaceship; but something seems a bit "off". Then someone notices that the actual bitrate they're getting from the other vessel is tiny -- far lower than they should be getting given the conditions -- and so most of what they're seeing on their own screens isn't actual video feed, but their local computer's reconstruction.

[Rebelgecko]

Was that the same book that had the concept of (paraphrasing using modern terminology) doing interstellar communications by sending back and forth LLMs trained on the people who wanted to talk, prompted to try and get a good business deal or whatever?

[alex-robbins]

That happened in Redemption Ark by Alastair Reynolds (2002), though of course the idea may also have been used before or since.

[DoneWithAllThat]

This idea was also used in The Algebraist.

[miohtama]

And also it was a deep fake.

BTW This is the best sci-fi book ever.

[Retric]

Might be better if you like space opera style really soft science fiction. I really didn’t enjoy it.

[mercutio2]

Fascinating. Vinge is about the furthest from “soft” sci-fi I can think of. We must have very different definitions of what makes something soft.

It’s certainly true that Vinge doesn’t spend much time on the engineering details, but I find him unusually clear on “imagine if we had this kind of impossible-now technology, but the rest of what we know about physics remained, how would people behave?”

He was, after all, a physics professor.

Rainbow’s End is much clearer on this than his distant future stuff, of course.

[com2kid]

> Fascinating. Vinge is about the furthest from “soft” sci-fi I can think of. We must have very different definitions of what makes something soft.

That award goes to Greg Egan who has full list of citations on his website for each of his novels, as well as a list of mathematicians and physicists he requested help from.

If you want to read books that occasionally delve into pages of equations, Greg Egan is the author for you! (Seriously though, really good books, and the implications of his "what-ifs" are pretty damn cool)

[loxias]

Seconding this, Greg Egan is one of the best of all time.

The short stories "Luminous" and "Dark Integers", the novels "Diaspora" and "Schild's Ladder". So good.

qntm (another author) hits somewhat similarly.

[exe34]

i might have to have another go at dichronauts. that one broke my mind a few pages in and I had to stop.

[opo]

>He was, after all, a physics professor.

Actually, he was a mathematics and computer science teacher at San Diego State University.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge

[mercutio2]

You’re right, I was wrong!

[Retric]

Soft vs hard is based on how closely the world tracks with modern physics/science. As such even just FTL is soft, let alone everything else that doesn’t fit.

[jrussino]

> Soft vs hard is based on how closely the world tracks with modern physics/science

Maybe it's not productive to quibble about definitions like this, but FWIW I don't agree with this criteria. I would argue Greg Egan's work, for example, is just about the "hardest" sci-fi there is, and yet much of that work takes place in universes that are entirely unlike our own.

Personally, I think what makes for "hard" sci-fi is that the rules of the universe are well-laid-out and consistent, and that the story springs (at least in some significant part) out of the consequences of those rules. That may mean a story set in the "future", where we have new technology or discover new physics, or "alternate universe" sci-fi like Egan's.

[Retric]

If changing the laws of the universe is fine, then nothing gets excluded even Harry Potter. It’s one of those definitions that allows anything and ultimately only feels fine because you’re adding some other criteria.

In defense of hard science fiction, it’s a meaningful category to talk about even if it’s not something you personally care about. People often want to weaken it but that just opens a door for a new category say “scientific science fiction” and we are back to square one.

Asking questions like what does AGI look like when they can’t just magically solve all issues can be fun. Hand waving the singularly as some religious event can also make interesting stories but so is considering how chaos theory limits what computation can actually achieve.

[jamiek88]

That is simply your personal definition, right?

You don’t claim to be definitive?

[Retric]

It’s a classic definition. Soft/hard science fiction has two meanings either the topic is focused on hard sciences (physics) vs soft sciences (sociology) or “It can also refer to science fiction which prioritizes human emotions over scientific accuracy or plausibility.[1]”

So it’s not universal but is an accepted definition that any deviation from the possible or probable (for example, including faster-than-light travel or paranormal powers) to be a mark of "softness."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_science_fiction

Popular science fiction is generally extremely soft, but occasionally you get stuff like The Cold Equations where the plot is driven by real world constraints. Even then it included FTL so a purest would call it soft.

[gwd]

A friend of mine and I both read it about the same time and discussed it afterwards. I thought it was pretty good, he thought it was not that great. What we agreed on was that in spite of there being many fantastic aspects to the book, on the whole it failed to be an awesome novel.

Definitely worth giving it a try if you're a programmer, just for the fact that it's written by another programmer: the opening scene where they find a bunch of rules written down and just follow them reminds me of ACPI; the discussion of public-key cryptography and shipping drives full of one-time-pad around the galaxy; the "compression scheme" with the video.

[Boxxed]

I agree that it was good but not particularly great. A Deepness in the Sky, however, is fantastic -- similar in many aspects but just flat out better all around.

[lern_too_spel]

The softness is deceptive. Hard concepts about communication and different types of brains are essential to the plot.

[aaronblohowiak]

It uses technological differences as key plot and setting components not just space as sea, so it is sci fi but it is improbable in many ways so yea “soft” sci fi or more speculative fiction

[jf]

I beg to differ. A Deepness In The Sky is the best sci-fi book ever.

[space_fountain]

I think I agree both books were good and "A Deepness In The Sky" was better, but I would warn everyone that I thought both books used dramatic irony (showing us that characters were evil while hiding this from main characters) to hold attention to a degree that I kind of hated. And in "A Deepness In The Sky" sexual violence was used repeatedly to illustrate how evil the main characters were. I found it unnecessarily and a bit in poor taste.

On the other hand I think both books developed ideas wonderfully and there are bits of them I keep coming back to, even if I'll probably never reread them

[_kb]

At least for audio, that dystopia is already shipping in end-user product: https://blog.webex.com/collaboration/hybrid-work/next-level-...

[janandonly]

I came here to reply just this exactly and found a fellow geek beat me to it. Indeed a brilliant book.