The Affinities
After becoming a part of the Tau, one of twenty-two large global network Affinities in the near future, young Adam Fisk thinks his life has improved for the better until the different Affinities begin to go to war with one another -- in a conflict that will change Adam's world forever.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
5mentions
4people
2015–2022years
60% recommend40% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- You might find the novel The Affinities by Robert Charles Wilson interesting:
https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Affinities.html?id=...
- 'The Deadline: A novel about project management' by Tom DeMarco
Critical Chain by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
The Unicorn Project by Gene Kim (sequel to the Phoenix Project)
Makers by Cory Doctorow
Daemon & Freedom™ by Daniel Suarez
The Affinities by Robert Charles Wilson
Zodiac by Neal Stephenson
The Blue Ant trilogy (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History) by William Gibson
Omnitopia: Dawn by Diane Duane
Walkaway by Cory Doctorow
Autonomous by Annalee Newitz
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Reamde by Neal Stephenson
Lock In by John Scalzi
Rascal Money by Joseph Garber
- Robert Charles Wilson is one of my favorite authors. He has some of the most amazing plot lines I've ever seen in SciFi. The guy is a font of amazing ideas.
Reading the reviews on The Affinities (the recommended book on the EFF page), makes it seem like it's not like his other novels. The Spin series is excellent. I can recommend A Bridge of Years, Blind Lake and The Chronoliths.
- In the novel The Affinities, Robert Charles Wilson had a sort of secular religion that grouped similar people together in tight social groups based on a cluster analysis of genetics and personality traits. To be clear, I'm not recommending this in real life and I don't think Wilson would either. But it is a thought provoking concept of an alternative to organized religion.
- Fiction, mostly:
- Reamde, by Neal Stephenson. What a let down, very formulaic.
- Vortex, by Robert Charles Wilson (sequel to Spin and Axis). Spin is a must-read, Vortex was quite pleasant and brings a satisfying closure to the series.
- Permanence, by Karl Schroeder (re-read). Lots of awesome tidbits (property, rights, AR, anthropocentrism) scattered through an entertaining semi-hard sci-fi space opera.
- La Zone du Dehors, by Alain Damasio. A spiritual sequel to 1984.
- Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury (finally!)
- The Affinities, by Robert Charles Wilson
- La Horde du Contrevent, by Alain Damasio (in progress). A fantastic, ontologic, poetic story about the wind.
As well as a couple non-fiction:
- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! This is made of pure awesomesauce and perfectly captures the kind of spirit at the root of hackerdom.
- Pale Blue Dot, by Carl Sagan (in progress). Humbling.
- Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson. Surprised me in many ways.
