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

The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life. To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...

The War on Science - Lawrence Krauss (Ed.) ****

At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier. It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the same ground, so there is a lot of repetition. Even so, it's an important book. There are a few well-known names here - editor Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - but also a range of scientists (with a few philosophers) explaining how science is being damaged in academia by unscientific ideas. Many of the issues apply to other disciplines as well, but this is specifically about the impact on science, and particularly important there because of the damage it has been doing...

Search This Blog