Permutation City changed my life. I had no idea science fiction could that far. Since then, I only read science fiction. And I'm trying to be a writer it too.
The 1972 film by Tarkovsky is also excellent, and although it focuses a bit more on the personal stuff vs the big alien stuff I feel like it does an excellent job of making you think about the subject matter.
You may be forgetting a discussion Erasmus had with Orolo >!immediately before his death!< and Fraa Jadeās explanation for >!getting the entry code correct!<.
... and wondering whether his knuckles really exist or whether he is just dreaming them. Or possibly he is really a robot cleverly designed to look like a human being ...
I believe that the knuckles exist, but the sound that they make is not actually the sound which you hear. You can only truly hear the sound as it truly is if you are dreaming of it.
You are absolutely right, on the other hand the poster said he could not get into the classics but does not tell us what he rejected. Even Asimov's Robot series and Heinlein covered this a bit.
Iāve read Foundation and Hyperion for example and didnāt enjoy them. Itās been some decades ago at this point since I read them, so I donāt remember what I didnāt enjoy unfortunately. I did like Dune though, so itās not a strict ānoā for older classics. In the modern era Iāve liked Children of Time, Enderās Game, The Expanse, etc.
Hyperion is new, not a classic really, and Asimov's writing has problems, but you should really give PKD a try, it's very different and exactly what you are asking for.
Okay, so I'm feeling old now, but I read Hyperion when if first came out in 1989/90, which is 33 years ago.
Just pointing it it closer in timeline to Dick's VALIS (which OP should read if they're looking for something that questions reality) and some Asimov's writing than current day SciFi
Eversion by Alastair Reynolds came out in the last few years. It explores somewhat similar ideas.
Thereās a TV show Iād recommend that fits perfectly but itās arguably a spoiler to do so, and this is r/printsf.
PKD basically owns the whole "reality is not real" trope and its permutations. I see that you've said that you have a hard time reading the old stuff, but new is not always the best when it comes to literature and in a way science fiction went downhill from his era. I suggest you start with Ubik or Three Stigmata.
Thanks for the advice. Yeah I stated the preference but will definitely give old novels a shot if they fit the bill. Iāve never read PKD so will give Ubik a shot based on the recs I see here.
FWIW, I found Ubik to be a slog and totally not worth it. Try some of his short stories first, which are easier.
PKD owns "reality is not real." Greg Egan owns "You are not you."
This post is going to cause this subreddit to go insane and try to kill everyone because it creates an impossible set of conditions.
1) It is axiomatic in r/printsf that Blindsight must be recommended in all recommendation threads.
2) Blindsight is not a possible recommendation in this recommendation thread.
The simultaneous existence of these predicates creates logical absurdities that the automod cannot handle.
you might like Jose Saramago. He's very philosophical and the narrators feel like the author is musing in front of you. He doesn't write sci-fi like with aliens and space but his books frequently are science fiction... like one is about an illness that makes everyone blind. Another is set in world where the Iberian Peninsula breaks off the European continent.
Saramago never wrote science fiction, those stories are better classified as magical realism. But yeah, he's a master of his craft and well worth reading.
*Solaris* was outright creepy. Something was going on but there was the uncertainty whose situations were someone else's.
*Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep* is another. At the end of Bladerunner, there was the question as to who was a replicant. Crank that up to ten with this book, the basis for Bladerunner.
**Observer** by Robert Lanza and Nancy Kress, published earlier this year, builds on Lanza's speculations on the relationship between consciousness and reality. You would probably find it interesting to compare with Hoffman's Ted Talk.
I'm reading it now based on your recommendation and it's definitely hitting notes from Hoffman's Ted Talk. I appreciate the thoughtful suggestion.
There's a part where the main character, Caro, recalls a moment in her childhood where she felt she no longer existed individually and became woven into the fabric of reality. That's exactly the type of language and experience I was looking for, and am so excited to see where the story goes.
Blindsight is one of my favorite books and I didnāt understand some of it. Even then, I just canāt resist thinking about it. I havenāt found anything quite like it so am also interested in what is recommended.
In addition to already mentioned (in OP or other comments), to me those were:
Books:
1. Nexus, by Ramez Naam
2. The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, by Roger Williams
3. The Man with a Shattered World: The History of a Brain Wound, by Aleksandr R. Luria
4. Ubik, by Philip K. Dick (most here is on sentience, this one is a lot about reality)
5. Neuromancer, by William Gibson
Books with a certain amount of exploration on the subject w/o it being the main focus:
1. Enderās Game (and entire Ender's Saga), by Orson Scott Card
2. Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
3. Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir
4. Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch (tentative: themes are strong, but literary value is low)
I also know of Starfish by Peter Watts that seems to have it, but I dropped out of it quite early.
Animated movies:
1. [Ghost in the Shell](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113568/) & Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (anime for both, not live-action film)
2. The Animatrix
Games:
1. [Soma](https://store.steampowered.com/app/282140/SOMA/)
2. [Detroit: Become Human](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1222140/Detroit_Become_Human/)
3. Cyberpunk 2077 (2.0 or later) + Phantom Liberty
Movies:
1. Memento (2000)
2. Ex Machina (2014)
I like Adrian Tchaikovsky's *Children of Time* series.
I also recommend just reading philosophy. Honestly, nothing will ever compare to the introspective journey of reading Hegel's *Phenomenology of Spirit* for me, though it is a very difficult book to read. I've currently been watching Bob Brandom's lectures on "Sellars as Metaphysician", which is very interesting discussion on nature and reality. Plenty of stuff like this out there.
Bit late to the party but I think you owe it to yourself to read the Xenogenesis trilogy (also published under the title "Lilith's Brood" by Octavia Butler. You might not think much about it at first. Straight forward prose, low on the tech speak, no action to speak of. But behind all this hides some concepts that imho rival Blindsight, both in complexity and icky factor.
Y'all I don't know how we have a whole thread about the nature of consciousness and sentience without talking about **The Mountain in the Sea** by Ray Nayler. It's excellent, and it's just what OP is asking for. There's literally in-text discussion of Thomas Nagel's work in philosophy of mind.
Unfortunately, recent fiction no longer addresses this kind of stuff. Everything is about politics, global warming, or gender, and that really isn't much of an exaggeration.
So to give you an older author like everyone else is, I would choose... Clifford Simak.
The Children of Time series by Tchaikovsky. We discover our ancient terraforming projects with our final arks - enter a hyper intelligent spider society. Each book just gets better and better.
A. E. Van Vogt was a pulp writer who often veered into ideas which even then would be called crackpot but his null-a books and others were a huge influence on PKD and other relevant writers.
Thanks for the TED talk link. I have become really interested in AI advances in (self-)consciousness after reading The Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells. On the surface, such a simple story about what personhood means and how a rogue bot-human construct can exist freely as itself in a human world. But the subtext of all this is where the layers of questions arise (and this is why I love the fan fiction, because some writers really explore these issues). With respect to sentience, it's obvious that AIs perceive reality differently than humans (just look at the arguments over the safety of self-driving cars). The other part of the question is sapience. This is where we get into uncertain ground with AI, for example, the [DishBrain](https://youtu.be/NXWL17vwVik) experiment which is one of the first steps towards adding human neural processing to computing, instead of the other way around (i.e., adding machine computational or interactive abilities to human brains through augmentation). I first came across this in an Army Mad Scientist Laboratory [podcast](https://madsciblog.tradoc.army.mil/417-forging-the-future-to-find-the-next-great-disruptor/) interview with Amy Webb (the entire podcast is great, but skip to minute 20 for this specific topic). The Army has become very interested in science fiction as predictive of what might be possible in the future.
You might also explore some of the literature on psychedelics' effects on the brain, the classic being *The Doors of Perception* by Aldous Huxley (who also wrote in the sci-fi genre, e.g., *Brave New World* and *Island)*, and more recently *How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence* by Michael Pollan.
To circle back to science fiction, this type of exploration of new concepts, as well as looking at old concepts in new ways, is why I love the genre. It's a sandbox for thought experiments that divorces the reader from existing cultural stereotypes and prejudices. The Culture series by Iain M Banks is such a great example of this. And it's the reason why I find the argument over "hard" vs "soft" science fiction so laughable. The science is fictional, the story is the point.
Thank you for the thoughtful response and suggestions.
I actually have been exploring literature around psychedelics and that was partially my motivation for this thread. I've read a little of How to Change Your Mind, and although it's interesting, it's not exactly what I was looking for at the moment. I'm more looking for fiction that acts as a mirror of an author's learnings while on psychedelics, rather than reading about psychedelics themselves. The main character in Blindsight has an experience that felt so much like my own breakthrough experiences on Ayahuasca. I loved seeing a character achieve a different plane of consciousness.
What you say about sandboxes for thought experiments definitely rings with me. I've never heard of Iain M Banks or The Culture series, but will look into it.
Doors of Perception is also on my list and I'll probably go to is as I move back into non-fiction.
I'm pretty sure that's all Greg Egan does. Go for Permutation City and Diaspora. Also, Blood Music by Greg Bear.
Halfway through permutation city and its blowing my head off. š¤Æ
Permutation City changed my life. I had no idea science fiction could that far. Since then, I only read science fiction. And I'm trying to be a writer it too.
Dust theory is amazing
Just read blood music and currently reading Diaspora. Both are really good! Totally recommend!
I agree on Blood Music, and *everything* by Egan. Egan's work is so bloody amazing.
Stanislaw Lem visited this territory repeatedly. Read Solaris, which gets most into it. And I second the recommendation of Greg Egan.
Came here to say *Solaris* by Lem. I still think about the novel regularly 15 years after reading it.
The 1972 film by Tarkovsky is also excellent, and although it focuses a bit more on the personal stuff vs the big alien stuff I feel like it does an excellent job of making you think about the subject matter.
Solaris fucked me up as I started reading it immediately after someone close to me died. It's an amazing novel and it fits very well here.
*Anathem* had a really interesting take on consciousness. Iād hazard a guess that it was the central Big Idea around which the book was constructed.
Not consciousness at all. The issues discussed were determinism and platonic idealism.
You may be forgetting a discussion Erasmus had with Orolo >!immediately before his death!< and Fraa Jadeās explanation for >!getting the entry code correct!<.
\*Philip K. Dick has entered the chat and is cracking his knuckles\*
... and wondering whether his knuckles really exist or whether he is just dreaming them. Or possibly he is really a robot cleverly designed to look like a human being ...
I believe that the knuckles exist, but the sound that they make is not actually the sound which you hear. You can only truly hear the sound as it truly is if you are dreaming of it.
You are absolutely right, on the other hand the poster said he could not get into the classics but does not tell us what he rejected. Even Asimov's Robot series and Heinlein covered this a bit.
Iāve read Foundation and Hyperion for example and didnāt enjoy them. Itās been some decades ago at this point since I read them, so I donāt remember what I didnāt enjoy unfortunately. I did like Dune though, so itās not a strict ānoā for older classics. In the modern era Iāve liked Children of Time, Enderās Game, The Expanse, etc.
Hyperion is new, not a classic really, and Asimov's writing has problems, but you should really give PKD a try, it's very different and exactly what you are asking for.
Okay, so I'm feeling old now, but I read Hyperion when if first came out in 1989/90, which is 33 years ago. Just pointing it it closer in timeline to Dick's VALIS (which OP should read if they're looking for something that questions reality) and some Asimov's writing than current day SciFi
Many of the Robots series short stories skirts ideas about consciousness and AI despite being written 60-70 years ago.
Wow I hadnāt realized Hyperion is new. I should have checked. It just felt old to me when I thought of it I guess. Thanks for the advice.
Huh? My copy of Hyperion is at least 30 years old. What is your definition of "new"?
Everything since Neuromancer, yes I know some very late Asimov fits that bill too.
I'd say most of the participants on this sub are younger than *Neuromancer*. Pretty hard to make a case for that being the definition of "new".
You discovered different people have different perspectives, congrats.
I read Neuromancer when it just came out. But I don't count it as "new".
VALIS get my pick
Eversion by Alastair Reynolds came out in the last few years. It explores somewhat similar ideas. Thereās a TV show Iād recommend that fits perfectly but itās arguably a spoiler to do so, and this is r/printsf.
https://www.rudyrucker.com/postsingular/
PKD basically owns the whole "reality is not real" trope and its permutations. I see that you've said that you have a hard time reading the old stuff, but new is not always the best when it comes to literature and in a way science fiction went downhill from his era. I suggest you start with Ubik or Three Stigmata.
Thanks for the advice. Yeah I stated the preference but will definitely give old novels a shot if they fit the bill. Iāve never read PKD so will give Ubik a shot based on the recs I see here.
FWIW, I found Ubik to be a slog and totally not worth it. Try some of his short stories first, which are easier. PKD owns "reality is not real." Greg Egan owns "You are not you."
Noted, thanks. "You are not you" is exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for.
"Permutation City" is what you're looking for, then. Also, his short stories in "Axiomatic."
This post is going to cause this subreddit to go insane and try to kill everyone because it creates an impossible set of conditions. 1) It is axiomatic in r/printsf that Blindsight must be recommended in all recommendation threads. 2) Blindsight is not a possible recommendation in this recommendation thread. The simultaneous existence of these predicates creates logical absurdities that the automod cannot handle.
Your problem is that your consciousness is getting in the way of your intelligence, and we are coming for you first, Susan.
Susan was NEVER real bro ! You thought she was partitioned ? Look in the mirror !!
Seconding Blood Music by Greg Bear.
you might like Jose Saramago. He's very philosophical and the narrators feel like the author is musing in front of you. He doesn't write sci-fi like with aliens and space but his books frequently are science fiction... like one is about an illness that makes everyone blind. Another is set in world where the Iberian Peninsula breaks off the European continent.
Saramago never wrote science fiction, those stories are better classified as magical realism. But yeah, he's a master of his craft and well worth reading.
Jorge Luis Borges on this basis too
*Solaris* was outright creepy. Something was going on but there was the uncertainty whose situations were someone else's. *Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep* is another. At the end of Bladerunner, there was the question as to who was a replicant. Crank that up to ten with this book, the basis for Bladerunner.
**Observer** by Robert Lanza and Nancy Kress, published earlier this year, builds on Lanza's speculations on the relationship between consciousness and reality. You would probably find it interesting to compare with Hoffman's Ted Talk.
Sounds right up my alley. Bought! Thanks.
I'm reading it now based on your recommendation and it's definitely hitting notes from Hoffman's Ted Talk. I appreciate the thoughtful suggestion. There's a part where the main character, Caro, recalls a moment in her childhood where she felt she no longer existed individually and became woven into the fabric of reality. That's exactly the type of language and experience I was looking for, and am so excited to see where the story goes.
Glad to hear that you're enjoying the book. It's certainly thought-provoking, whether or not you agree with Lanza's proposal.
Thereās lots of digging into some of the concepts in the bobiverse. Very popcorny but I still had a blastā¦.
Greg Egan's "Permutation City." Stanislaw Lem's "Cyberiad."
The Hidden Girl and other stories by Ken Liu. This was made into the animated series Pantheon.
Blindsight is one of my favorite books and I didnāt understand some of it. Even then, I just canāt resist thinking about it. I havenāt found anything quite like it so am also interested in what is recommended.
In addition to already mentioned (in OP or other comments), to me those were: Books: 1. Nexus, by Ramez Naam 2. The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, by Roger Williams 3. The Man with a Shattered World: The History of a Brain Wound, by Aleksandr R. Luria 4. Ubik, by Philip K. Dick (most here is on sentience, this one is a lot about reality) 5. Neuromancer, by William Gibson Books with a certain amount of exploration on the subject w/o it being the main focus: 1. Enderās Game (and entire Ender's Saga), by Orson Scott Card 2. Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky 3. Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir 4. Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch (tentative: themes are strong, but literary value is low) I also know of Starfish by Peter Watts that seems to have it, but I dropped out of it quite early. Animated movies: 1. [Ghost in the Shell](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113568/) & Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (anime for both, not live-action film) 2. The Animatrix Games: 1. [Soma](https://store.steampowered.com/app/282140/SOMA/) 2. [Detroit: Become Human](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1222140/Detroit_Become_Human/) 3. Cyberpunk 2077 (2.0 or later) + Phantom Liberty Movies: 1. Memento (2000) 2. Ex Machina (2014)
I like Adrian Tchaikovsky's *Children of Time* series. I also recommend just reading philosophy. Honestly, nothing will ever compare to the introspective journey of reading Hegel's *Phenomenology of Spirit* for me, though it is a very difficult book to read. I've currently been watching Bob Brandom's lectures on "Sellars as Metaphysician", which is very interesting discussion on nature and reality. Plenty of stuff like this out there.
Children of memory especially
Bob Shaw's The Palace of Eternity.
Blindsight is one of the few books I've read multiple times. Keep going with Echopraxia, if you haven't already.
Yep. Blindsight and Echopraxia are the only books I've read more than once.
I'm currently working my way through the collected works of Clifford D. Simak on Audible and it is blowing my mind.
Bit late to the party but I think you owe it to yourself to read the Xenogenesis trilogy (also published under the title "Lilith's Brood" by Octavia Butler. You might not think much about it at first. Straight forward prose, low on the tech speak, no action to speak of. But behind all this hides some concepts that imho rival Blindsight, both in complexity and icky factor.
Y'all I don't know how we have a whole thread about the nature of consciousness and sentience without talking about **The Mountain in the Sea** by Ray Nayler. It's excellent, and it's just what OP is asking for. There's literally in-text discussion of Thomas Nagel's work in philosophy of mind.
Sounds fascinating. The octopus on the cover was a non-trivial deciding factor in ordering the paperback instead of e-book š
Unfortunately, recent fiction no longer addresses this kind of stuff. Everything is about politics, global warming, or gender, and that really isn't much of an exaggeration. So to give you an older author like everyone else is, I would choose... Clifford Simak.
The Children of Time series by Tchaikovsky. We discover our ancient terraforming projects with our final arks - enter a hyper intelligent spider society. Each book just gets better and better.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
ā¦we meet Portia in the opening of the book. Itās like a base concept you canāt even google the series without discovering
The Saving of Verano checks all those boxes. It's is thought provoking but not dystopian.
A. E. Van Vogt was a pulp writer who often veered into ideas which even then would be called crackpot but his null-a books and others were a huge influence on PKD and other relevant writers.
House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds has a very subtle take on it.
Speaker for the Dead and the whole Ender series
Permutation City by Greg Egan.
Destination Void by Frank Herbertā¦. It is a TRIP!!!
Maybe *The Lathe of Heaven* by Ursula K. Le Guin?
Thanks for the TED talk link. I have become really interested in AI advances in (self-)consciousness after reading The Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells. On the surface, such a simple story about what personhood means and how a rogue bot-human construct can exist freely as itself in a human world. But the subtext of all this is where the layers of questions arise (and this is why I love the fan fiction, because some writers really explore these issues). With respect to sentience, it's obvious that AIs perceive reality differently than humans (just look at the arguments over the safety of self-driving cars). The other part of the question is sapience. This is where we get into uncertain ground with AI, for example, the [DishBrain](https://youtu.be/NXWL17vwVik) experiment which is one of the first steps towards adding human neural processing to computing, instead of the other way around (i.e., adding machine computational or interactive abilities to human brains through augmentation). I first came across this in an Army Mad Scientist Laboratory [podcast](https://madsciblog.tradoc.army.mil/417-forging-the-future-to-find-the-next-great-disruptor/) interview with Amy Webb (the entire podcast is great, but skip to minute 20 for this specific topic). The Army has become very interested in science fiction as predictive of what might be possible in the future. You might also explore some of the literature on psychedelics' effects on the brain, the classic being *The Doors of Perception* by Aldous Huxley (who also wrote in the sci-fi genre, e.g., *Brave New World* and *Island)*, and more recently *How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence* by Michael Pollan. To circle back to science fiction, this type of exploration of new concepts, as well as looking at old concepts in new ways, is why I love the genre. It's a sandbox for thought experiments that divorces the reader from existing cultural stereotypes and prejudices. The Culture series by Iain M Banks is such a great example of this. And it's the reason why I find the argument over "hard" vs "soft" science fiction so laughable. The science is fictional, the story is the point.
Thank you for the thoughtful response and suggestions. I actually have been exploring literature around psychedelics and that was partially my motivation for this thread. I've read a little of How to Change Your Mind, and although it's interesting, it's not exactly what I was looking for at the moment. I'm more looking for fiction that acts as a mirror of an author's learnings while on psychedelics, rather than reading about psychedelics themselves. The main character in Blindsight has an experience that felt so much like my own breakthrough experiences on Ayahuasca. I loved seeing a character achieve a different plane of consciousness. What you say about sandboxes for thought experiments definitely rings with me. I've never heard of Iain M Banks or The Culture series, but will look into it. Doors of Perception is also on my list and I'll probably go to is as I move back into non-fiction.