Permanence
Young Rue Cassels of the Cycler Compact—a civilization based around remote brown dwarf stars—is running for her life from her bullying brother, Jentry, who has stolen her family inheritance and threatens to sell her into slavery. Fleeing in a shuttle spacecraft from the sparsely populated and austere comet-mining habitat she has lived in her whole life, she spots a distant, approaching object, and stakes a legal claim to it. It is not the valuable comet she hoped for but something even more wonderful, an abandoned Cycler starship. Since the discovery of a faster-than-light drive, unfortunately operable only between larger stars, the Cycler Compact civilization has gradually dwindled. It's much cheaper for the star-based civilizations of the new Rights Economy to bypass the stops that can't be made with the new technology, and the civilizations of the brown stars are gradually sinking into anarchy and chaos. It has been decades since the last Cycler ship passed anywhere near the system in which Rue grew up. Her discovery unleashes a fury of action, greed, and interstellar intrigue as many factions attempt to take advantage of the last great opportunity to revitalize-and perhaps control—the Compact. This is the story of Rue's quest to visit and claim this ship and its treasures, set against a background of warring empires, strange alien artifacts, and fantastic science.
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What Hacker News says
- Permutation City is not "far more interesting", it is a complementary exploration of consciousness and the nature of reality. Both are excellent (also both very relevant i-pumps). Permanence by Karl Schroeder is another really good complementary exploration of the idea of consciousness as transitory, a symptom of not being good at the thing that is being consciously cogitated. A cat is so good at being a cat, it does not need to waste resources on clumsy meta-aware calculations on how to cat.
- By Karl Schroeder, who wrote Ventus[1] and Permanence[2]. (One of my favorite sci-fi authors!)
I always thought this reviewer quote on the front of Ventus was pretty funny:
> “Dramatically effective and a milestone in science fiction about nanotech and fine-grained distributed systems.” – Vernor Vinge
- There have been stabs in that general direction, though I'm not aware of anything exactly like what you're describing.
Check out The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster, Unauthorized Bread by Cory Doctorow, Permanence by Karl Schroeder.
- 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.
- There have been a number of such works. Olaf Stapledon's Starmaker takes a somewhat poetic approach to the idea. And restraining oneself to an Einsteinian universe where nothing exceeds C was a hallmark of "hard-sci-fi" although even Arthur C. Clarke fudged and went for hyperspace when the plot was otherwise going to drag for a few millennia.
For a more recent take on the topic check out Karl Schroeder's Permanence [1] which is a damn fine read and doesn't run the hyperspace cheat and is all the more operatic for that.
- So I'm expecting any successful civilisation to start colonising the spaces between the stars, rather than the star systems themselves.
Before you start writing your book, you might want to familiarize yourself with the prior art in the field: start with the short story "Swarm" by Bruce Sterling, then the novel "Permanence" by Karl Schroeder, "Blindsight" by Peter Watts, and maybe "Diaspora" by Greg Egan. That's assuming that by "planning a book" you're thinking in terms of fiction rather than SETI-oriented non-fic, but even if you're writing non-fic it's worth noting that we SF authors have been all over the topic for decades. (As for non-fic, the prior art goes all the way back to J. D. Bernal's "The World, The Flesh, and The Devil", if not further: I don't read Russian but I gather Nikolai Federov wrote on the subject, as did Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.)
