Yeah it didn’t have clearly defined morality, just groups fighting for resources or conquest. Gravity waves were for propulsion iirc and how they discovered FTL, like that demo the woman did in the bathtub with the soap and water. The coolest part imo was how they played with the dimensions and sizing of subatomic particles if you remember that, or the spying mechanism using quantum-entangled light speed particles. How the “dark forest” theory was fleshed out made scary amount of sense. Very fresh as far as the sci in scifi goes, much different from the usual tired “are robots really alive??” tropes and such.

I’ll say if you’re a physics “hobbyist” of any kind it flows. I watch surface level videos on quantum and astrophysics and nothing in the book was a slog. Actually extremely enjoyable, he has some very fresh takes on science. There’s an insane part on computer engineering I’ll probably remember forever

And to add to your list of what it does well, there’s a lot of good psychology, on human, community and societal level. The way he fleshes out available options in situations and how decisions are contemplated is crisp and deep. For example the two ships with the resource problem, the humans as a whole facing a problem, and the one man and woman with the immense responsibility come to mind

It builds up a lot of contexts. Like the beginning is dedicated to learning math stuff for example. It can often feel like a textbook, but it’s good if you like to learn

I’ve got the penguin classics edition, already had it so it was too late to pick the best. I did get P&V’s Crime and Punishment though :)

Agh yeah u fortunately the goofyness seems to get lost in the confusion, although couple parts did make me chuckle.

Gotta grow some chest hair and read it in Russian, just that my reading level has fallen to around grade 4 probably (or fourth class of gymnasium as they’d say)

Thanks! Yeah I’ve heard about the last minute reprieve, how that affects a person must be nuts.

Definitely going to search up that movie!

This is a really good insight, thank you!

I vaguely suspected this too, thanks

Yeah it’s fun for sure

If that’s the reason then that’s the reason, just making sure I’m not missing anything 😛

Another old example is Brothers Karamazov, although it was a tad later. Dostoyevsky is a bit less rigid with the POVs but they’re definitely distinct enough

Agreed re learned skill. I think most people pigeonhole themselves saying so and so doesn’t vibe with them, but it’s likely that their brain is just new to it and needs to habituate

That said, I can’t hang onto an audio narrative to save my life and it would likely take a lot of practice to do so

It's not necessarily insidious but it's not fear-mongering either. Substantial reason many apps exist is to scrape data and sell it. It is a constant invasion of any data they can get their hands on, and only recently have there been efforts (by Apple mostly) to fight back against it by giving you notices when apps are tracking location, adding "ask app not to track" popups (for tracking data across other apps !!), etc

At one point a friend of mine looked up his google data, it could literally tell when you lay down, when you lay down and are on your phone, location history, etc. Right now it's all commercial and I do admit I don't much care, but our phones are basically little spy implants.

Kind of a tangential rant. I also use GR just for keeping tracks of books, TBR and such.