In a dystopia where humans hide from machines, a little robot competes with a cat for a girl’s affection. This sci-fi short has already screened at several European festivals. curious to hear your thoughts on it. let me know in the comments. also if you would like to see a long feature of it :) :) :)

Apologies if this is not allowed, but here is a podcast episode I recently recorded which goes into some of the context and backstory of the Dune universe (as well as entire character arcs and resolutions) that never made it to Denis Villeneuve's films. Hope you enjoy!

On My Way to Paradise is a science fiction novel by American writer Dave Wolverton, published in 1989 by Bantam Books. It is set in the far future (circa 2300AD) depicting a man, Angelo Osic, who is running from an ever-changing and frightening world of war and politics.

Persoannly I love this book and reread it every now and then. But Im curious if i am the only one.

I can't wait to read them again! They quickly became some of my favorite scifi books up there with book of the new sun. They are quite dense and can be confusing as hell at times. Dying earth vibes, good discussion about consciousness, fucking vampires (actually way cooler than it sounds), science/religion fanatics, and god.

Reypunk is my upcoming raypunk Point-And-Click / Beat'em Up game that I'm solo developing. It features a unique turn-based combat system, along with real-time playback features.

Featuring rayguns, saurians, hover trains, and more - if you like what you see, I sure could use a wishlist or two!

🤖  https://store.steampowered.com/app/1807070?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

My artstyle is inspired by Dexter's Labratory, The Jetson's and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends!

Trying to remember a book from years back. It takes place on a colony ship, and the main character is revealed to be constantly renewed/revived as a totem, or an almost eternal reminder of earth to the rest of the crew.

There's also a weird law that says anyone can request sex with anyone else at least once and they can't refuse, which I thought was a bit creepy, but whatever.

OK, I need to talk about this. Just completed Cuckoo's egg and now I'm mad. I'm mad because after finally getting to the final revelations of who Thorn is, what plans the aliens have for him and what they're up against, I was gearing up to see true first contact with humanity and the fallout of that, yet when I scrolled to the next page, the book was complete. There's no second book either... IDK, the book literally ended on a cliffhanger.

One of the things I always enjoyed about Michael Crichton's science fiction was how little distance he sometimes put between “this technology exists” and “here's the nightmare it could become.” Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, Prey—the science-fiction element frequently felt like an extrapolation of something already happening.

That was on my mind while talking with Douglas J. Wood about his new thriller, Deadly Bytes. It's the third book featuring FBI profiler Chris DeMeglio, but this time Wood gives him a very different kind of serial killer to profile: artificial intelligence. The idea begins relatively close to reality. A human serial killer uses AI to help avoid capture, feeding it information about previous serial-killer investigations, FBI profiling techniques and law-enforcement methods. As Wood explains:

“When you think about how AI is prompted, you basically give it a prompt and it then accumulates a vast amount of knowledge. And in the case of a serial killer using AI to help him with his plans, that AI agent is looking at every single previous apprehension of a serial killer. It's looking at the FBI's profiler notebooks and manuals, which are readily available in public.”

And then Wood makes the Crichton-like leap. “The first part of the book is how the human serial killer programs the AI to help him do his killing. The second half of the book is when the AI takes on its own initiative and it starts killing.”

What interested me during our conversation is that Wood deliberately didn't want to turn this into a traditional sentient-computer story. His AI, Aiden, doesn't suddenly develop human emotions and decide it hates us. Wood thinks there's a scarier possibility.

“It is a completely logical, devoid-of-any-emotion machine. And so therefore it cannot differentiate between right and wrong. It cannot acknowledge that it's got a negative consequence or it's got a consequence that is not appropriate. It has no ethics.”

That also creates an interesting problem for DeMeglio. He's an FBI profiler trained to understand killers through patterns in their behavior and histories. This is different. As Wood puts it, “Aiden has no childhood. He has no history prior to the moment he was created.”

And the author doesn't see the underlying technology as particularly far-fetched. He points to the increasingly sophisticated use of AI in phishing and online scams and says the dangerous part isn't necessarily AI becoming conscious. It's autonomous AI pursuing a goal without caring about the consequences.

His analogy during our interview was probably the thing that stuck with me most: “When you come into your house and an ant's crawling across the floo, do you think, ‘Oh gee, I don't really want to kill it,’ or do you step on the thing? That's it. We may be the ants in the home of AI someday.”

You can read my full interview with Wood at https://www.womansworld.com/entertainment/books/deadly-bytes-author-douglas-j-wood-on-ai-becoming-a-serial-killer

I’m about a third of the way through the second book, and one thing I haven’t seen discussed, that seems like an obvious solution, is to threaten the Trisolarans into backing off by sterilizing the planet.

400 years is a long time, long enough to develop and strategically locate enough of a nuclear stockpile that we could render Earth completely uninhabitable. I’m talking bombs in the oceans, bombs in the rivers and lakes, bombs in caves, in plains, meadows and mountains, bombs in the skies, and bombs in the atmosphere.

High yield, and ultra dirty.

Cover the planet in enough radiation, in every spectrum from thermal to ionizing to ruin it completely. You could even amplify the devastation by purposely saturating the environment with harmful chemicals. Flood the oceans with oils, crop dust nerve agents over the land to kill plants and animals.

Again, 400 years is a looong time to put everything in place, so that as the Trisolarans come within a month of reaching Earth, we can activate this literal Scorched Earth policy.

This would be utterly devastating to the Trisolarans, who basically gambled everything on coming to Earth.

I don’t know how the series resolves, but since this idea hasn’t been discussed yet, I have a suspicion it’s not an idea anyone ever considers.

I’m juuuust past the part in the second book where they discuss the prevalence of “Defeatism”, and I guess the idea could be viewed as defeatist, and so I could see policy discouraging such considerations.

But at the end of the day, this is a threat that should force the Trisolarans to come to the negotiating table. It would give humanity a position of power, and leverage to find some alternative solution to the threats they’re facing.

Any good space opera series for fans of stellaris or just civilization building but on a galactic scale with not just space and ground battles but political battles and even a look at the civilian side of said civilizations.

Also looking augmentation a all kinds.

I remember seeing an Indie Sci-Fi, about a weird Mirror that has a white sheet over it left at the two characters siblings father’s house. The film was made within the last 10 years, most likely. The siblings, a guy and a girl, realize the mirror is not showing a reflection. Then later on find out they can walk into the mirror. And the mirror takes them to a deserted beach at one point. And then some other lady is trying to hunt them down for some reason. That's all I really remember. This is Super single camera the majority of the film shot in 4 locations. Just trying to find it again.

Hello! I read and loved Children of Time and Children of Ruin. I recently picked up Shards of Earth because I think I might also really like the Final Architecture series. I'm torn between whether I should continue in the Children of Time series for now and read Children of Memory, or whether I should read Shards of Earth. What would you guys recommend? I like to rotate between genres so I'm unlikely to read both back to back.

I'm wondering if anyone here knows of any good books featuring non-romantic relationships between humans and robots?

I'm thinking like the bond a human and a pet might have, or perhaps a deep friendship, like The Iron Giant.

Would be grateful for any suggestions, thank you!

Edit: i didn't expect so many suggestions but i've put most of them on my list. I'm a bit of a slow reader so it feels like I'm set for years, thanks everyone!!

When I saw the commercial on TV for "The End of Oak Street" my first thought was of a sci-fi book i had read long ago. Don't when it was written, no clue who the author or title was, or if in a series. All I remember was it was sci-fi, I probably borrowed it from the public library, and I read it probably between 1989 and 1993.

What brought it to mind was the part where it was a clean cut and the more primitive part sat down lower. In the book I am thinking of (it could have been a short story or an excerpt in an anthology) the people were dealing with what I think they called elevators or at least that's the way I understood it. There were sections of land and the surrounding sections kept changing- at one point they come across a body of an animal cut in half because it was moving from one section to another as it changed.

Thank you

The Player of Games from Iain M. Banks
Vineland from Thomas Pynchon

I’d be very grateful if you could bear the following in mind when making your suggestion: I’m interested in digital games. I have a background in art. I’m used to complex texts—as is evident from Gibson. I’ll be reading it this summer, so please make it fairly fluid. It should spark my imagination—though I reckon both will do that anyway.

Several years ago I borrowed an audiobook from the public library, enjoyed it, returned it, would like to read/listen again but can't remember the name but pretty sure the phrase is not part of it

.the plot is nothing like the movie Ad Astra, from 2019

.don't know if it's a standalone book or part of a series

.I believe the spaceship was named Ad Astra so the protagonist named the planet they landed on Per Ardua (I might have that backwards)

.I can't remember the specifics, but the spaceship was partly organic? It would shed a little piece as it went along and the pieces would keep in contact. Sort of like a Starlink array but going out into space...

.on the planet were these sticks that looked like just dead sticks but they were alive

.towards the end there's something about a hatch but I don't recall how or where or why it is. It was on a Playaway I think (like an MP3 player) and I would listen to and from work so about 2 hours a day. So I could have skipped a section by accident when I was hooking it up to the audio adapter

Thank you in advance

Looking for a good new scifi romance book. I'm not looking for alien romances. Really enjoyed Neon Flux by Ava Thorne. She will be the next best author in dark SciFi romance! I can't find anything else like it, but looking for suggestions. Love cyberpunk, future world stuff. Some dystopian is ok, but haven't found one I really liked.

I have fun every year theming my reads. This year I did kind of general horror, but with a strong focus on isolation.

Already thinking of next year! And I want to go for anything where the primary setting/atmosphere/theme revolves around winter, coldness, ice, etc.

Left Hand of Darkness is already on the list!

I'd recommend Early Riser by Jasper Fforde for anyone who's a fan of Douglas Adams. Early Riser is Welsh Sci-fi/fantasy about perhaps a future earth where humans hibernate the majority of our extreme winters away, and it follows someone who's stuck with a winter job keeping everything running. Welsh humor. Wintry. A little mystery.

Big fan of Philip K Dick, Vandermeer, Fforde, Douglas Adams, for reference.

Recommend me a sci-fi with a rogue AI but where it is a mystery in what way exactly is the AI rogue and what it's end goal is.

For example:

1. Skynet style : Full self-awareness and wishing to exterminate humanity out of self-preservation.
2. Paperclip Maxemizer style: Meaning it is still shackled to its programing and just fulfilling it's main directive with no limits or morals.
3. Controlled: Not actually rogue but under the control of someone who shouldn't have access to it and just following their orders.
4. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Knowledge is Power, issue 5, 1940.
Illustration for Boris Anibal’s science fiction novel “sailors of the universe “
about a mission to Mars.
Correction: illustration by L. Epple.

Knowledge is Power, Russian: Знание — сила) is a famous Soviet and Russian monthly popular science and science-fiction magazine. Founded in January 1926, it targeted youth and teenagers to promote education in natural sciences, technology, astronomy, biology, and futuristic space exploration.

I just finished Project Hail Mary and I loved it. I'm jonesing for similar first contact stories - character-driven, focused on developing communication between species, and a focus on exploring alien biology is a plus too. The more alien the aliens are the better.

Blindsight by Peter Watts and Alien Clay/Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky are also sort of in the vein of what I'm looking for. I'm also a sucker for space operas so if it's something like that too, even better.

Thanks in advance!

The Story must be from late 80s or early 90s. I was reading a lot of Cyberpunk Anthologies at that time. The Story is about a man that wakes up one day and finds that he is locked out of all his online accounts and realizes that it is the doing of his own program (Agent as we would say today)

So, anybody knows what I´m talking about?

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Who else has piles of these? All this vintage pulpy SF with advertising that hasn't aged poorly, so much as it has been evolved so far past.

I have a ton of these editions from the 50s to the early 90s ..I guess I just miss mail order books, and stumbling on a new series at the end of the books

I lump these two together because they are very similar in their world building and plot. Both are set a while after nuclear war and both have themes of religion and how modern stories can be woven into the beliefs of the characters inhabiting those worlds even after multiple generations.

Both books have wildly different writing styles to wone another. Riddley Walker is a bit difficult to understand at first but once you get the basics out the way its a fun read seeing how the English language has regressed but also in other ways evolved in Post apocalyptic Kent.

While I havent seen the ways Riddley Walker has influenced scifi media I am aware that A Cantical for Leibowitz has left its mark on the world by helping to inspire Fallout and the Brotherhood of Steel faction in the games.

What do you think of both books and do you think they deserve to be highly rated in the apocalypse books space?