The Children of (insert adjective) series by Adrian Tchaikovsky is really, really good, especially the second in the series. Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by.
I concur on "really good" but have to disagree on the "series" part. Children of Time is a remarkable book, one of the best science fiction stories in a very long time.
Children of Ruin is ... okay. Children of Memory is not a good book, IMO. Both of these suffer from the same mysticism-used-to-spin-up-a-red-reset-button plot device plague that fundamentally guts Xenocide. Nowhere as bad as that, of course, but the unpleasant echoes are there.
As it happens I'm in the middle of the Architects series and while it has its distant whiff of Stainless Steel Rat[ß], on the whole the series and its universe have so far remained consistent.
ß: Stainless Steel Rat was notorious for repeatedly putting the protagonist into impossible situations and then whipping up near-magical pieces of technomancy that just happened to solve the problem of the moment.
For me, Children of Ruin had more of a horror focus to it and left me with much more icky feelings than the brilliant positivity I felt at the end of the first book. It was still well done, though.
I agree that Children of Memory is not very good, mostly because it repeats itself so much. That could've been handled differently while still advancing the plot. I LOVE the overall concept, and the author's skills describing Gothi and Gethli's unique kind of intelligence was great, so I was okay with it overall... but too much of it was just a slog. First book is by far the best in my opinion as well.
I always took the Deus Ex Machina in Harrison's books to be just more of the satire. He never really takes his settings or characters lightly, but the presentation is almost always aimed at comedic effect.
I was not particularly a fan of them - the plot seemed to find overly easy solutions to all the actual messiness that comes when dealing with others very unlike yourself, which given the rest of the stories, feels like it undercuts the entire point of them.
The Tchaikovsky novella I really like is Elder Race. Technology-as-magic is done in so many places (Ventus is another favourite), and I usually enjoy it, but I felt that in Elder Race it was pulled off in an unusually elegant way.
It'd be (insert noun) and the first one is far and away the best but on the big picture you are absolutely correct that it is fantastic. Children of Time (first one) is maybe my favorite book ever.
Yes Children of Time is very good. Tchaikovsky is excellent at portraying alien/non-human minds. You can tell he studied zoology and psychology at university.
Children of Time so very good, it is in the top 5 of my favorite books of all time. I enjoyed the second one as well, and found the third one to be a bit inconsequential and I didn't re-read it when I re-read part 1 and 2.
> Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by.
Apart from "Solaris", which many probably know because there's been a reasonably well-known movie, I recommend "Fiasco" by the same author, Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by Stanisław Lem. Spoiler: It does not end well. The aliens are too alien, and the humans do what humans often do.
Roadside Picnic I believe would also fall into this category. Though the aliens are just theoretical in the book and the characters deal with what is speculated to be the aftermath of an alien visit.
> Roadside Picnic I believe would also fall into this category. Though the aliens are just theoretical in the book and the characters deal with what is speculated to be the aftermath of an alien visit.
Another sci-fi classic sorta made into a movie (Stalker).
In Shroud, Tchaikovsky does very alien (“real” aliens, not “uplifts”) very well. Anthropocentrically, it does not “end well.” Literarily, it vies for my favorite SciFi read of ‘25. Technically, I read “There Is No Antimemetics Division” last year, but I’d already kind of read it... or at least I think I thought I had.
I have a spider phobia, and struggled not to put the book down at first!
But the concepts and writing are excellent... really engaging stuff. And by the end of the book I'd learned so much about spiders that I honestly felt less scared of them! Definitely not cured by any means, but a year on and I still fear them less than I used to.
I think humans and spiders and octopus and viruses are for him just a background for the object he wants to narrate. In difference to many other fiction where the persons are the objects. I also missed a human part of it.
If you want more spiders from him (actually, a spider-man), in a fantasy setting, I recommend Spiderlight. Just a fun novella that feels like a D&D campaign, works great as a palate cleanser.
I find his writing style really enjoyable, to the point that I really need to dive into his entire repertoire now.
Alien Clay is also fantastic. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I think it gives the best intuition I’ve seen for a scientific concept that can be difficult to really grok otherwise.
Just finished it, and while I loved the whole plot, the adventurous expeditions away from the base, somehow this one with the waaay too long paragraphs seemed... Unnecessarily boring?
My first Tchaikovsky was children of time and TBH none of the sequels nor his other space operas were as captivating as that one for me.
Yet, I will read this one too. I believe that his ideas and stories are great in books and would never be able to make them into movies. So unique.
The elephant's dad was such a fascinating creature, and the way he described it keening in the distance at night reminded me of the amalgamation creatures from Annihilation. I loved Alien Clay – I hope we get a sequel because the world was so interesting.
The "aliens" are just spiders. With a lot of magical thinking. It's more like fantasy than science fiction. And character development is terrible. Only one or two are interesting and they get killed too early.
I can take SciFi that's at least either good story or good science. To this day I don't know why people recommend this author so much, even more than Watt's Rifters trilogy or Firefall. He is a "legal executive" who dropped out of zoology/biology. Explanations are just "nanovirus!" or "bioengineering!" and left at that.
Spoiler: the spiders make a space elevator and an asteroid catcher out of spiderweb; really. Stuff like this doesn't pass the suspension of disbelief for me. Reading it was quite annoying.
Feel free to downvote me, but if you do, I ask you the minor kindness to refute my points.
Edit: also "nanovirus!", what? All viruses are nano. And this virus being so complex it can't be too short, either.
This was a great read, and perfectly conveyed the combination of passion and anger of every WH player I’ve ever met has had.
Given the time, it’s hard not to view this same argument through the lens of AI. People who love crafting their creative works will still do it, even when AI can do it. They will still inspire others because they demonstrate what humans can do, and what we can aspire to.
This. As with all creative endeavours, part or even most of the enjoyment is the creative process, not the result.
Learning a skill and practicing it is still extremely enjoyable, even if a machine (or a factory) could do it better, faster, cheaper. The point is not the product, but the process.
Unfortunately, I've been to many coffee shops where the coffee tasted much worse than what a modern fully automated machine can produce.
And perhaps you have to be more nuanced - when TV's first hit the market, a wide-spread concern among film-makers was that it would kill movie theaters. The fear was that people would now only watch movies in the comfort of their homes. That didn't happen back then, but it pretty much did with the combination of big, flat-screen TVs and streaming services.
Not about quality. They want the experience of going to a cafe where the coffee is made and served by humans. These cafes exist along side automated coffee.
I don’t quite understand this comment, is it sarcastic? Drip coffee is already pretty automatic. Heck, I’ve been places where you just buy the cup and pump the coffee thingy yourself.
Compared to my home setup, (manual flair espresso press), most coffee shop espresso machines are quite a bit more automated. But I don’t begrudge them that automation, their arms would get too sore. And nobody is paying me to manually press my lever.
I mean "nobody" in the statistical sense. The number of people going to robot cafes is a rounding error compared with real cafe attendance. The fact that there are robot cafes and everybody (statistically speaking) is still going to cafes, proves the point exactly.
It sounds, as you point out, that he is aware of the tendency to typos and has an idea on how to guard against it. I’ve built up a similar portfolio of techniques and best practices to guard against my own shortcomings, and most of the friction I encounter is when the team I work with doesn’t have the same viewpoints on correctness and tests.
Languages like Python are the worst for exacerbating issues. Perl at least would parse the entire codebase and do some validation. Python doesn’t evaluate until runtime, meaning that unless you have 100% test coverage of all functions and branches a typo could cause an issue long after the process started.
As others have mentioned it sounds like you co-worker has good ideas. Adding test coverage, being stricter about configs (don’t ignore known keys, validate structure … as much as people hat XML, DTDs are an amazing help for catching config errors) are all things that will pay off down the road.
Long story short, instead of looking at your coworkers suggestions as a way to guard against their mistakes, take some time to understand that they live in a more chaotic worldview than you do, and have strong experience in dealing with it. Heck, put them in charge of QA processes. They sound like they’ve got the experience, and will feel better when that experience is appreciated.
Congrats on the progress thus far! I love aspirational languages, so please keep going.
That being said, as someone who struggles with maintaining large amounts of context when I’m debugging, I’d find context-specific execution hard to follow and debug. As a concrete example, the switch to an Admin context could appear far away from the call to GetPermissions without any obvious way to figure that out. Contexts end up being a sort of global state.
If you continue with this route, it would be nice if there was a way to print out the stack of the current contexts in play and where they were set in the code.
You're correct if Context is hidden or implicit (like Dependency Injection containers or ThreadLocals in Java), it becomes debugging nightmare.
To solve this, SFX treats the Context Stack as Explicit Data, not hidden magic.
1. Debugging: Because the runtime knows exactly what 'Reality' is active, we can print it. We are building a `Context.Trace()` tool that outputs something like:
`[Base Reality] -> [HolidaySale] -> [AdminMode]`
This tells you exactly why a method is behaving the way it is.
2. Layering: Yes, contexts are strictly layered (LIFO stack). If you activate `Situation A` then `Situation B`, the runtime checks `B` first, then `A`, then the Object itself. This allows for 'Behavioral Inheritance'—you can compose behaviors (e.g., `LoggingMode` + `SafeMode`) dynamically.
3. Scoping: Right now it is imperative (`Switch on/off`), but because SFX is indentation-based, we are working on block-scoped contexts for the next release:
Using AdminMode:
User.Delete() # Admin context
# Automatically reverts here
Except function colouring is a symptom of two languages masquerading as one. You have to choose async or sync. Mixing them is dangerous. It’s not possible to call an async function from sync. Calling sync functions from async code runs the risk of holding the run lock for extended periods of time and losing the benefit of async in the first place.
I don’t have anything against async, I see the value of event-oriented “concurrency”, but the complaint that async is a poison pill is valid, because the use of async fundamentally changes the execution model to co-operative multitasking, with possible runtime issues.
If a language chooses async, I wish they’d just bite the bullet and make it obvious that it’s a different language / execution model than the sync version.
I think this analogy is too extreme. That said, modern languages should probably consider the main function/threading context default to async.
Calling sync code from async is fine in and of itself, but once you're in a problem space where you care about async, you probably also care about task starvation. So naively, you might try to throw yeilds around the code base.
And your conclusion is you want the language to be explicit when you're async....so function coloring, then?
I still subscribe to Linux and Admin magazines, and look forward to getting them. They are nostalgic while still filled with genuinely useful information. There is something categorically different in the experience of sitting down and reading curated articles vs consuming an endless stream of updates. Both are worthwhile, and I’m glad both are options.
Plus, it’s a rare win/win of indulgence and plausible productivity.
I recently bought an electronics magazine for the first time in many years. Initially I flicked through and considered the articles in it kind of boring. But I think it’s just the absolute oversaturation of attention grabbing content online frying my brain.
The fact that you just have to read these medium form articles since that’s all there is for the month kind of resets your brain from just flicking through a million YouTube shorts.
Despite being Gen Z, our house wasn’t hooked up to the internet for most of my childhood and I remember spending ages analysing every single detail in the magazines I got. While now I have to actively avoid getting distracted and pulling out my phone.
I wasn’t aware of effects until I read the article, but I like the idea. The example you have is just an interface. Effects work a bit like boundary hooks. A pure function only works on things internal to its scope, and so it has no effects. An impure function might affect things outside of its scope, and may want to allow the caller to hook when those effects occur. Think a function that uses the gpu. That’s a side effect, and the function should be decorated to reflect that.
I’m guessing some languages would allow for checking to ensure that any induced effects are correctly noted and advertised so that the system as a whole can be more easily reasoned about.
The J language actually provides a lot of the niceties of the core Q / kdb functionality. It even has Jd, which is an on-disk columnar database. I don’t know if it counts as being commoditized, as the price in terms of time and effort to learn the language is still quite high.
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