Use of Weapons
The man known as Cheradenine Zakalwe was one of Special Circumstances' foremost agents, changing the destiny of planets to suit the Culture through intrigue, dirty tricks and military action. The woman known as Diziet Sma had plucked him from obscurity and pushed him towards his present eminence, but despite all their dealings she did not know him as well as she thought. The drone known as Skaffen-Amtiskaw knew both of these people. It had once saved the woman's life by massacring her attackers in a particularly bloody manner. It believed the man to be a burnt-out case. But not even its machine could see the horrors in his past. Ferociously intelligent, both witty and horrific, USE OF WEAPONS is a masterpiece of science fiction.
Stats for nerds
78recommend
153mentions
122people
2007–2026years
65% recommend28% neutral7% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I think blog author's point was that even if AI is faster and better at coding, it's still okay to write code yourself - at least as a hobby - because that's something you enjoy.
I'm much more on your side personally though, because first, when you know there's a better and faster way to do something it does take away from the enjoyment of doing it the old way. Some of the enjoyment for me came from being unusually good at something vs. everyone else.
And second, even my hobby projects are always something that I want to make real, more than they are something that I want to do just for the fun of working on them. Even though I enjoyed the programming and puzzle solving process, the end product is still the main goal. So I'll be using AI at home as well (and it is nice to reify projects faster than before).
And all this also ignores the fact that even "only" losing your enjoyment of paid work, and not your hobby work, still sucks!
Having said all that, I recently read Use Of Weapons (1990) by Iain M. Banks and this passage encouraged me about the future:
"Can’t machines build these faster?" he asked the woman, looking around the starship shell. "Why, of course!" she laughed. "Then why do you do it?" "It’s fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out those doors for the first time, heading for deep space, three hundred people on board, everything working, the Mind quite happy, and you think, I helped build that. The fact a machine could have done it faster doesn’t alter the fact that it was you who actually did it." "Hmm," he said. "Well, you may 'hmm' as you wish," the woman said, approaching a translucent hologram of the half-completed ship, where a few other construction workers were standing, pointing inside the model and talking. "But have you ever been gliding or swum underwater?" "Yes," he agreed. The woman shrugged. "Yet birds fly better than we do, and fish swim better. Do we stop gliding or swimming because of this?" He smiled. "I suppose not." "You suppose correctly," the woman said. "And why?" She looked at him, grinning. "Because it’s fun." - It's brilliant and it touches on so many topics worth thinking about; I'm still of two minds re. the ancilliaries, slaves or avatars?
If you like scifi that touches on ethical questions, Iain Banks Culture series is very good in that regard, particularly Player of Games and Use of Weapons. I buddy-reread the last one with an internet friend this year and via our discussions got so much more out of it.
- > Consider Phlebas -- Iain M Banks
I started The Culture series a while ago. I read both "The Player of Games" (amazing book), and "Use of Weapons". Also amazing, with a Memento-like storytelling that was also incredible. I did enjoy both books a lot for different reasons, I can't vouch for any over the other really.
I then moved to "Consider Phlebas" and honestly, got bored to death. So my recommendation is to go for these two as well.
I recently (This month, bought a recent "deluxe edition" of sorts [1]) re read Neuromancer, and then jumped to "Count Zero" but at some point got bored mid way with Gibson's endless descriptions of non things.
- Somebody somewhere here gave a list that had "consider Phlebas" in it.
That particular book bored me to death, but from the same author / series I recently read "Player of Games" and "Use of Weapons" and I can't recommend (both) enough.
Dungeon Crawler, I started the series recently but got bored mid 3rd book. It is quite more denser than the first 2, and it feels like never ending.
- Invisible Women and the Culture series by Iain Banks (Use of Weapons currently). Both really good
- Both Player of Games and Use of Weapons are incredible good books.
I was actually surprised when I finished UoW regarding how different it was from PoG, while maintaining the quality (If not better, but PoG IS THAT GOOD anyway).
For the record, the series was recommended to be by Claude of all things, and it told me that Phlebas was not up to quality but I gave it a shot just for the sake of completeness of the series. Nop, not worth it.
