Slow Time Between the Stars (SF)

Slow Time Between the Stars (SF) - John Scalzi ***

This is a bit of an oddity - it's a review of a single SF short story, available separately on Kindle (free to those with Prime/Unlimited). As I noted when reviewing Connie Willis's Time is the Fire collection, science fiction is a natural for short stories and the concept here is both timely and interesting.

Getting to the stars is going to take a long time - far too long for an ordinary human voyage. Over the years, SF writers have come up with all sorts of ways around this, from generation starships to warp drive, but the most realistic option is we don't send people at all. In John Scalzi's story, a fully autonomous AI is sent out with the ability to create human life if and when it reaches a suitable planet. We get to see the AI's decision making over thousands of years, how it decides to approach its mission and how its viewpoint drifts away from its human creators.

Unfortunately, while a good idea is essential for a short story, so is engagement of the reader - and that really doesn't happen here. The story is all told in the first person by the AI - making it a story that's a single internal monologue, and not a very interesting one at that. This means we get a whole lot of tell and no show. According to my Kindle, the story is a 19 minute read but it felt a lot longer than that.

Sometimes to make an idea work you have to approach it tangentially. The story is described in the blurb as mind-bending, but I'm afraid I found it rather mind-numbing.

Kindle:
Ebook:
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Comments

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...

The Bright Side - Sumit Paul-Choudhury ***

When I first saw The Bright Side (the subtitle doesn't help), I was worried it was a self-help manual, a format that rarely contains good science. In reality, Sumit Paul-Choudhury does not give us a checklist for becoming an optimist or anything similar - and there is a fair amount of science content. But to be honest, I didn't get on very well with this book. What Paul-Choudhury sets out to do is to both identify what optimism is and to assess its place in a world where we are beset with big problems such as climate change (which he goes into in some detail) that some activists position as an existential threat. This is all done in a friendly, approachable fashion. In that sense it's a classic pop-psychology title. For me, Paul-Choudhury certainly has it right about the lack of logic of extreme doom-mongers, such as Extinction Rebellion and teenage climate protestors, and his assessment of the nature of optimism seems very reasonable, if presented at a fairly overview leve...

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on...

Search This Blog