Perilous Waif
Mar. 26th, 2018 09:30 pmWelcome to more random ebook reviews. This is by someone who also wrote a couple of books which were a bit more male-geek-wishfulfilment-y become-powerful-mage-by-munchkin'ing have lots of women throwing themselves at you, where I enjoyed some of the ideas, but cringed a lot at some of the bits. This had some of the downsides, but a lot of interesting stuff.
Alice is fitting in poorly in the orphanage in an authoritarian get-back-to-nature world. Her body is extensively enhanced beyond human with various implausibly space-opera-ish enhancements, but most have not grown in properly without the right nutrients, which no-one has been giving her. She escapes just ahead of some brainwashing (which might expose, well, if her brain is not-exactly-traditional-human either) and ends up eventually hitching a ride on an independent merchant ship and getting into many further scrapes from there.
I enjoy the "protagonist has all the awesome superpowers" thing but there's a reasonable amount of "does she learn to leverage her advantages well" which is what I enjoy even more. Nice although not super memorable secondary characters and overall plot. Some reasonable resolved mysteries.
What I found interesting was the physics -- the premise is several layers of hyperspace, in each of which a position corresponds to a known position in our space, but in which distance is progressively smaller. Each has its own variant of physics based on the same principles, but possibly with different universal constants or initial distribution of matter. Alpha layer is normal-ish. Beta is mostly anti-matter (which is ok in deep space, the space opera deflector shields are quite good). Gamma is used for travel by ships which aren't powerful enough to manage the final transition. Delta has reversed gravity and is full of plasma because matter never formed. There are also several *sub* layers where distances are *longer*, which are studied but not usually used. Spaceship tactics include managing layer transitions.
And the society too. Super-human (level 5+), human equivalent (level 4), and intelligent-but-more-limited-than-human AI (level 3) exist in various combinations (human brains uploaded or transplanted into mechanical or biological android bodies, or AIs in that variety of body, etc). Human-equivalent AI have the same rights as humans in many places but are not always treated that way. Level 3 are treated as an underclass most places (the protagonist is not ok with this!) Level 2 are treated like animals or machines (which seems about right). Level 5 are banned after a bunch of wars about it. People expect it to be possible to make ever-more-powerful AIs but no-one has yet. But all this just exists, putting much more weight behind moral questions about the subject than many books which obsensibly tackle the subjects more head on.
Alice is fitting in poorly in the orphanage in an authoritarian get-back-to-nature world. Her body is extensively enhanced beyond human with various implausibly space-opera-ish enhancements, but most have not grown in properly without the right nutrients, which no-one has been giving her. She escapes just ahead of some brainwashing (which might expose, well, if her brain is not-exactly-traditional-human either) and ends up eventually hitching a ride on an independent merchant ship and getting into many further scrapes from there.
I enjoy the "protagonist has all the awesome superpowers" thing but there's a reasonable amount of "does she learn to leverage her advantages well" which is what I enjoy even more. Nice although not super memorable secondary characters and overall plot. Some reasonable resolved mysteries.
What I found interesting was the physics -- the premise is several layers of hyperspace, in each of which a position corresponds to a known position in our space, but in which distance is progressively smaller. Each has its own variant of physics based on the same principles, but possibly with different universal constants or initial distribution of matter. Alpha layer is normal-ish. Beta is mostly anti-matter (which is ok in deep space, the space opera deflector shields are quite good). Gamma is used for travel by ships which aren't powerful enough to manage the final transition. Delta has reversed gravity and is full of plasma because matter never formed. There are also several *sub* layers where distances are *longer*, which are studied but not usually used. Spaceship tactics include managing layer transitions.
And the society too. Super-human (level 5+), human equivalent (level 4), and intelligent-but-more-limited-than-human AI (level 3) exist in various combinations (human brains uploaded or transplanted into mechanical or biological android bodies, or AIs in that variety of body, etc). Human-equivalent AI have the same rights as humans in many places but are not always treated that way. Level 3 are treated as an underclass most places (the protagonist is not ok with this!) Level 2 are treated like animals or machines (which seems about right). Level 5 are banned after a bunch of wars about it. People expect it to be possible to make ever-more-powerful AIs but no-one has yet. But all this just exists, putting much more weight behind moral questions about the subject than many books which obsensibly tackle the subjects more head on.