Murderbot, Mickey 17, and other TV notes First a gripe. This week Amazon Prime announced that they were canceling The Wheel of Time. Amazon is in business to make money, and it makes sense to cancel shows that don’t get viewership. But it seems like a... selfawarepatterns.com/2025/06/01/mur…

Is quantum immortality a real thing? In discussions about the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics, one of the concerns I often see expressed is for the perverse low probability outcomes that would exist in the quantum multiverse. For example… selfawarepatterns.com/2025/06/07/is-…

Mickey 7 A couple of weeks ago I reviewed the movie Mickey 17, which I found fairly intelligent. That movie is based on a book, Mickey 7, by Edward Ashton. The book turned out to be on Kindle Unlimited and didn't look long, and I needed a break from… selfawarepatterns.com/2025/06/10/mic…

The Agent Cormac series A few weeks ago I reviewed Neal Asher's new book Dark Diamond. It takes place in his Polity universe, a future interstellar society ruled by AIs, where everyone is effectively immortal, but in a dangerous universe. That book… selfawarepatterns.com/2025/06/14/the…

The Forever War For some reason I had never read Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, and recently decided to remedy that. Like most classic sci-fi novels, it's a quick read, much shorter than most contemporary novels. It's often been called a... selfawarepatterns.com/2025/06/19/the…

Not Till We Are Lost Not Till We Are Lost is the fifth Bobiverse book by Dennis Taylor. I’ve been following these books for years. Although there’s usually a delay in reading new releases because they’re initially exclusive to Audible. I do listen to... selfawarepatterns.com/2025/06/21/not…

A reread of Consider Phlebas Iain Banks’ Culture setting is probably the closest thing to outright paradise in science fiction. It’s an interstellar post-scarcity techno-anarchist utopia, where sentient machines do all the work and the humans hang... selfawarepatterns.com/2025/06/29/a-r…

Shroud I was initially leery of picking up Adrian Tchaikovsky’s latest book Shroud. It seemed to have a space horror vibe, and while I’ve enjoyed a lot of Tchaikovsky’s work, I’m not a horror fan. I don’t mind if a story has elements of it, but... selfawarepatterns.com/2025/07/12/shr…

The Left Hand of Darkness The other day I came across a video of Hank Green comparing Ursula Le Guin’s Ekumen civilization to Iain Banks’ Culture one. (I discussed the Culture a few weeks ago). It reminded me that I had never gotten around to reading... selfawarepatterns.com/2025/07/19/the…

The Algebraist When I picked up Iain M. Banks’ book The Algebraist, I thought I was starting a Culture novel overlooked until now. (The way Amazon listed the book encouraged this belief.) However, while it is space opera on a grand scale similar to... selfawarepatterns.com/2025/07/30/the…

What physicists believe about quantum mechanics As part of the Quantum Centennial (the celebration of 100 years of quantum mechanics) Nature has done a fairly large survey of the community of quantum researchers with over 1100 respondents. The results... selfawarepatterns.com/2025/08/02/wha…

Against the Fall of Night and its progeny Against the Fall of Night was Clarke’s first novel (really a long novella) which he wrote between 1936 and 1948. In it, Diaspar is the last city on Earth billions of years in the future. It’s a paradise with... selfawarepatterns.com/2025/08/09/aga…

Schild’s Ladder It’s been a while since I’ve read a Greg Egan book. I often love the ideas he explores, particularly in Diaspora. But I sometimes find his stories difficult to get through. That was definitely true of a previous book I read... selfawarepatterns.com/2025/08/15/sch…

Sister Alice Multiple people have recommended Robert Reed’s books over the years. I started to read his Greatship stories many years ago, but got distracted and never made it back. Recently I came across a recommendation for his book, Sister Alice, as... selfawarepatterns.com/2025/08/23/sis…

The Greatship In the last post I said I’d get back to Robert Reed’s Greatship series. This week I read the main story collection for that series: The Greatship. This is a collection of novellas and novelettes, which seems to be the format Reed really... selfawarepatterns.com/2025/08/30/the…

Optimism for interstellar exploration There’s been some attention lately to a contest on designing an interstellar generation ship, a large scale ship that humans live in for generations while it crosses interstellar space to another solar system. As... selfawarepatterns.com/2025/08/31/opt…

The Technician I’ve described Neal Asher’s Polity universe many times. It’s a future interstellar civilization ruled by AIs, who took over in a basically bloodless “Quiet War”, but who seem to rule humanity more or less benignly, providing a... selfawarepatterns.com/2025/09/07/the…

Exodus: The Archimedes Engine, and a different take on mind uploading I recently finished reading Peter F. Hamilton’s book: Exodus: The Archimedes Engine. It takes place in a far future where humanity has fled the solar system in relativistic ark... selfawarepatterns.com/2025/09/15/exo…

The Shattering Peace, and aliens who have consciousness as an augmentation For people looking to dip their toe in the sci-fi literary genre, John Scalzi is often a good place to start. A lot of sci-fi literature assumes certain knowledge from the... selfawarepatterns.com/2025/09/20/the…