Kaplan
Distinguished Member
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- Sep 25, 2008
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Adam Roberts: The Thing Itself, 2015.
'What you're forgetting,' she replied, 'is we have something Kant didn't have.'
'A ******* sense of humour, is it?'
'AI,' she said.
This is what set the dominoes trembling in my head, ready to tumble. 'You what?'
Imannuel Kant's Das Ding an Sich x Carpenter's The Thing, heavy on philosophy and highly literary; Roberts even adapts different writing styles to match his different narrators and different time periods. Aside from that, this contains so many nods to classic SF, that I felt it could only have been written by someone with a deep knowledge of the genre - and then I realised that this is the same Roberts that authored The History of Science Fiction (from 'Palgrave Histories of Literature'), which I've worked my half-way through over the last few months. In that, you'll get as academic a tour of SF as you could want (Roberts holds a Ph.D. on classic literature as well), describing SF's evolution, from the ancient Greeks, till it really takes off with the Copernican worldview in the 16th century, to present day - citing plenty of examples. Heavy stuff, but very illuminating.
The inane censoring above suggests that the dystopian, book-burning, afraid-of-words future is already here. The missing word is the one you think it is. Probably.
'What you're forgetting,' she replied, 'is we have something Kant didn't have.'
'A ******* sense of humour, is it?'
'AI,' she said.
This is what set the dominoes trembling in my head, ready to tumble. 'You what?'
Imannuel Kant's Das Ding an Sich x Carpenter's The Thing, heavy on philosophy and highly literary; Roberts even adapts different writing styles to match his different narrators and different time periods. Aside from that, this contains so many nods to classic SF, that I felt it could only have been written by someone with a deep knowledge of the genre - and then I realised that this is the same Roberts that authored The History of Science Fiction (from 'Palgrave Histories of Literature'), which I've worked my half-way through over the last few months. In that, you'll get as academic a tour of SF as you could want (Roberts holds a Ph.D. on classic literature as well), describing SF's evolution, from the ancient Greeks, till it really takes off with the Copernican worldview in the 16th century, to present day - citing plenty of examples. Heavy stuff, but very illuminating.
The inane censoring above suggests that the dystopian, book-burning, afraid-of-words future is already here. The missing word is the one you think it is. Probably.
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