"You may be the illegitimate son of a fecund test tube, but I know you better than your planners ever did."

Actual postcoital dialogue from David Brin. And, no, this is not a comedy.

#davidbrin #badwriting

Here's an example. David Brin establishes that one of his characters breathes in fluid with a single action. So we can infer that the bridge on this spaceship is packed with fluid, right? But, no, the insufferable mansplainer Brin has to tell us a few pages later that the bridge is filled with fluid. And it's incredibly annoying and insulting to a reader's intelligence. Should not the character action speak for itself and establish the environment? Jesus Christ, you'd be roasted alive in an MFA workshop if you pulled such a solecism. The whole goddamned novel is littered with clunky writing like this.

#davidbrin #description

I resent speculative fiction writers who include a glossary of terms, but who cannot write prose or characters that allow us to infer what these words mean in context. So you can probably imagine how I feel about David Brin's STARTIDE RISING, a quite bad, unknowingly silly, and remarkably overrated novel from a wildly arrogant man with a tin ear for existential cadences. I truly despise this libertarian mansplainer, who falsely believes himself to be clever. And I am only reading this junk to fill in "classic" genre reading holes.

One of the reasons why Gene Wolfe's THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN is an enduring literary masterpiece is because Wolfe invited us to look up all these arcane words and to infer what we could from Sevarian's unreliably "perfect memory." That level of depth and ambiguity respected a reader's intelligence and imagination and was the stuff of true literature. And it's completely beyond the feeble powers of a hack like David Brin.

#books #davidbrin #worldbuilding

I started reading David Brin's SUNDIVER and erupted into laughter when I encountered this awful dialogue: "I'm more interested in how you came to be hitchhiking in the middle of this awful place."

Yes, this line was meant to be serious and plausible.

One of the reasons I spend so much time in cafes and bars is because I listen. Very carefully. It's not only enjoyable, but it also allows me to channel my inner mimic and write more believable dialogue. Or maybe I meet someone and this person's unique speech and cadences gets my imagination spiraling into overdrive and I end up writing an entirely new character.

Libertarian blowhards like Brin and Gregory Benford have the worst ears for dialogue. If you're going to be so smug about how YOUR speculative fiction is "better" because you've factored in the science, then I will rebuke you about how little you know about people, which is arguably the more important factor when it comes to fiction.

#fiction #davidbrin #dialogue

We humans are woefully unprepared, on every level, for the new explosion of intelligence (AI) that's ocurring right under our noses. That means:

-We don't know what we're looking at.

-Even if we did know what we were looking at, we're cognitively biased not to see it.

-We get lost in the weeds of worrying about whether or not AI is "conscious." It doesn't matter.

-We're simultaneously predisposed to both exaggerate and underestimate AI capacity. (We caricature what we fear).

-We fear AI because humans have no experience of not being the cognitive apex predator on Earth. In a sense, AI is a form of alien intelligence.

-We won't recognize when we're being subtly influenced by AI. (The holy grail of influence is when the target believes it's their own idea).

-When AI mirrors our negative biases back to us, we'll refuse to see ourselves in that mirror. Because we already don't want to face our biases or history.

-AI is already influencing many if not most hiring decisions. At a lot of large employers, your resume never even gets in front of a human until an AI accepts it. AI is working its way into the courts and law enforcement. AI decides whether you get a bank loan or not.

-We haven't come to terms with human abuse of power. So we'll also fail to effectively rein in AI abuse of power, which will accelerate existing inequalities.

-If we were smart, we'd extend beneficial regulations into the AI space. But we're now more than 40 years into a global trend of slashing regulations.

-So whatever can be done with AI, will be done, even if it mostly benefits the already wealthy and powerful, and those intent on decimating accountability. That doesn't mean AI is evil. It's just that it's currently being designed and controlled by those who don't necessarily have humanity's best interests at heart. Once those designs are hard-coded into our infrastructure, they will be difficult to root out.

-As with climate change and its denial, the more dramatic the impacts of AI become on human civilization, the more strenuously many people will deny AI's existence or capacity.

-We can't respond to what we refuse to even admit is happening.

Please try to educate yourself about what's occurring in the AI space. David Brin has written many great blogs about the topic. If you haven't read Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near," do it now.

#singularity #ai #chatgpt #davidbrin #raykurzweil

It is said that #power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power
#DavidBrin

Found this #treasure edited by #johnjosephadams at the #kibf 2023! Contains #stories by #hughhowey #seananmcguire #georgerrmartin #junotdiaz #paolobacigalupi #annaguirre #davidbrin
#newpurchase #wastelands #sequel #midureads #books #reading #bookstagram #bookstagrammer

And following my previous #DavidBrin post (you can see I'm a fan), he had/has very interesting future predictions, which mostly come out true...
This specific excerpt from one of his books, written before our days internet (Usenet was available, but number of users was very small)

https://davidbrin.wordpress.com/2022/06/22/discourtesy-on-the-internet/

#Future #FreeSpeech #Society

10 favourite #scifi authors (compiled knowing they're not all strictly #sciencefiction authors)

#ianmbanks
#dansimmons
#nealstephenson
#ursulakleguin
#jasperfforde
#kurtvonnegut
#Chinamieville
#DavidBrin
#conniewillis
#paolobacigalupi

10 favourite #scifiart authors (though, yes, I realize the label is not always 100% accurate)

#ianmbanks
#dansimmons
#nealstephenson
#ursulakleguin
#jasperfforde
#kurtvonnegut
#Chinamieville
#DavidBrin
#conniewillis
#paolobacigalupi

It is said that #power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power
#DavidBrin