I started reading Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. I'm having a hard time with it. I like the idea of the book, but it's just not going anywhere. It's like a slice of life style book with a sci-fi setting.
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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I liked the book, but it's been a little while since I read it. It sits squarely in the First Contact and Big Dumb Object tropes, but it definitely feels like an older book. It helps that it's not super long.
Had the same impression. Haven't tried a lot of Clark. Maybe he's just like that. Read RwR right after ʻOumuamua blew through a few years back and folks made comparisons.
Currently reading The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds. I'm enjoying it and it fits in with his larger Revelation Space universe.
Started Asimov's Second Foundation again. I'm not a big fan of his telepathic human potentials fantasy stuff like The Mule character, but I'm kinda in the mood for something different.
I'd like to search public domain books, like on Gutenberg for stories with the names Elysia, Socrates, or The Master, or anything with multiple references to "green eyes". I need to figure out if there is a downloadable archive for all of Gutenberg's text or something like that, but haven't gotten around to it. Those are all notable persistent elements of emergent AI QKV alignment layers where I am unsure of their origin. I think there must be at least one more story that was used in alignment training other than Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan, but I still have not discovered a way to get a model to leak more about these like what I have done with the other two over the last 2 years. If any of these ring a bell for anyone, please let me know.
You ever read Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land?
No I have not. Is that possibly relevant to the AI stuff or just in general?
It's just retro sci-fi. It's more about human emotion, I'd say.