Are there any "aristocratic" sci-fi works, or is the genre as a whole inherently uninteresting/ridiculous to people who see value in things beyond the material?
Are there any "aristocratic" sci-fi works, or is the genre as a whole inherently uninteresting/ridiculous to people who see value in things ...
JG Ballard
I have a theory about sci-fi, that a big part of its driving force is trying to preserve romantic/aristocratic ideals by completely doing away with even the remnants of their ancient forms, and then reconstructing them within an ultra-modern rationalist framework. You end up with a sort of limited, but possibly more stable form of the original, Ayn Rand instead of Nietzsche, but not necessarily as tragic a fall as that. Our greatest living sci-fi author is of course Eliezer Yudkowsky, who goes beyond reconstructing Heroism and aristocracy to reconstructing religion, with no apparent self-awareness of what he's doing. The guy is a supposed "rationalist" ""AI Researcher"" with no technical training whatsoever who instead goes around preaching about doomsday prophesies, world-saving heroism and theology framed as a computer programming problem. "How can we ensure our future AI god serves humanity? We must must achieve a thorough understanding of the Good, of course. So we can program it into the god we're building. I love Science."
Also check out "longtermism", a futurist philosophical stance promoted by Yudkowsky-associate Nick Bostrom. Longtermism, of course, is about the wholly rational conclusion that in the far future there may be unimaginable numbers of virtual humans spread out across the galaxy living computer-simulated lives far superior to our own today. So of course as rational universalist utilitarians who value the interests of all people equally, we should value the interests of the far-more-numerous future computer people, who we pinky-swear we seriously believe in, and spend our energy building cool technology instead of giving a shit about starving third-worlders or whatever the libs are whining about.
Is this an aristocratic idea? Not if you take it at face value and believe in the AI people, then it's democratic. But is Bostrom (an Oxford academic, much less ridiculous than Yudkowsky) really being totally honest about that, or does he know it's science fiction? Who can tell.
The libs think they can tell, though, because there's been some hilarious seething about it:
https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/nick-bostrom-longtermism-and-the-eternal-return-of-eugenics-2/
>Our greatest living sci-fi author is of course Eliezer Yudkowsky
I can't tell if this is bait but the bar on genreshit is so low you might be right lmao
I'm dead serious, and it's not about the bar being low. The Harry Potter fanfiction stuff is embarrassing of course, but Yudkowsky's sci-fi doesn't stop there. His other story, where a group of heroic nerds bands together to defeat an evil AI god, might have already changed the course of world history. The founder of OpenAI started out as a Yudkowsky fan you know. Musk funded his started because he was one too, and Eliezer was actually there at the meeting. Now he goes around theatrically denouncing Musk for having doomed the world, all it's quite funny.
>a dogshit genre fiction slop author is partly responsible for the doom of the human race
A fittingly ignoble end to the species
I love him. He's our Don Quixote. He sacrifices his dignity to keep the dream of science fiction alive, that there's still room for change and heroism in technology, that the future is still real despite what the "tech industry" has turned into. I don't really buy the AGI superintelligence apocalypse stuff, but the details aren't too important.
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Is there a place where one could read about all of these? I've been hearing about the guy since the late 2000-s but never bothered getting into the details beside glancing over his and his movements wikipedia pages
last time i heard he was leading an unironic cult somewhere in california, wasn't he?
pic unrelated
The "cult" is the Bay Area Rationalists, which these days I think is pretty broad and ranges from culty AI Risk stuff to mainstream-adjacent Effective Altruist orgs, or just like social clubs for super-nerds to talk about Bayes Theorem. There are also "postrationalists", a different nerd club for people who stopped buying into Rationalism but still like the vibe of normie-skeptical intellectualism. Full support for the post-rationalists, great people to follow on twitter.
I don't know where you could find a full catalog on all rationalist and Yudkowsky lore, which might run to the hundreds of pages, but if you want the rundown on some specific thing you could try searching r/slatestarcodex. His original blog is lesswrong.com, where his original writing appears as "the sequences". Before that he wrote on Robin Hanson's site (Hanson is pretty interesting, very smart fringe-libertarian economist from GMU, interested in futurism, severely autistic), before they split on the AI apocalypse question after a big public debate. Nick Bostrom was a well-known and respected futurist philosopher at Oxford who got his start earlier than Yudkowsky, but apparently knew him from way back and has done a lot to boost his mainstream credibility.
With the recent wave of GPT hype the guy had a moment in the mainstream. A lot of his terminology ("AI alignment" etc) started being used in news articles, he did some podcast interviews, wrote an article on AI Doom for Time Magazine, and signed a big public letter telling everyone to stop building AIs. Now he goes around saying it's over, we're all almost definitely going to die, that's the current story arc I think. Curious to see what's next.
>Curious to see what's next.
>Inb4 he turns out to be correct, true AGI is created in the late 2020s, immediately takes the reigns from Biden/Drumpf/Putler/Xi/That poo moron tea seller and then genocides most normalgays and many non normalgays as well
Kino....
>Global Nuclear Devastation
>>Mass civilian casualties
>>GPU shortage
Frick off Eliezer, buy an add if you want to shill so bad. Also those claims are exaggerated, Elon didn't found anything he just bought some stock a few years back to have his name in something with AI, doubt he even recognize him. Eliezer is just a reddit mod, even if he was in meetings there is no way he could have any influence since he can't do shit but write embarrasing schizophrenic rants. Didn't he got kicked as well?
>even if he was in meetings there is no way he could have any influence
Well, true. His influence was beforehand, providing the narrative to make the whole thing happen. Once at the meeting he apparently tried to convince Elon that funding OpenAI would be too dangerous, and was obviously ignored because the superintelligence story was never really about "safety." If someone can be convinced that something that cool is still possible, as Elon apparently was, he's going to want to be the one to do it himself.
absolutely seething. show us your sci fi media empire you cuck lmao
He's not wrong as so-called rationalist thinking is Religion by way of Science fiction. Statistical models and Bayesian Inference are Numerological rituals carried out by the Prophets of Data
>No! unlike religion, AI/Singularity is proveable and true!
Only according to followers of AI End Times Technotheology. Yet another artifact inherited from their mechanistic Protestant Forbears
>Our greatest living sci-fi author is of course Eliezer Yudkowsky, who goes beyond reconstructing Heroism and aristocracy to reconstructing religion, with no apparent self-awareness of what he's doing.
.....The Harry Potter fanfiction writer?
actually a bit of a shameful question, since Dune exists and there's no way you haven't heard of it
Come to think of it there's really no part of longtermism that isn't pretty much straight from Dune. "There's an infinitely valuable far future outcome which can only be seen by a few superior people, so those people are justified in anything that helps bring it about". Probably just true in the abstract btw, only talking about the details makes it silly.
> infinitely valuable far future outcome which can only be seen by a few superior people, so those people are justified in anything that helps bring it about
Reminds me of Dostoevsky’s grand inquisitor, except that there, we have a far future that’s far worse than anyone can imagine, and the few superior people who know it are justified in doing whatever it takes to keep everyone else happy and ignorant.
I should have added "in the 21st century" to my OP question. Settings like Dune, Battletech, Warhammer, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, etc make more sense to me (on the spiritual level) than settings that depict the future as an extension of today, like The Expanse.
Sounds like you're being very pretentious about something that doesn't really deserve it. Nothing wrong with that but just say "based" next time and you'll get better answers.
god that recent movie with that israelite faced rat kid was bad.
Ernst Jünger wrote “aristocratic” sci-fi but maybe not in the way you mean. For example, the main character in Eumeswil doesn’t go to war or manage an estate or serve in a regal court. He basically takes his aristocratic sympathies and goes “underground”. So the author has a different sense of what aristocracy looks like in sci-fi than you might expect.
Junger was a bourgeois rat
>t. commie pinko/christcuck
> t. crypto-Buddhist/Muslim occultist LARPer
Jünger had a sincere conversion to Catholicism. Cope and seethe all you want, but it happened. He read the Bible, his favorite author was Leon Bloy, and never once in his life acted in an insincere manner.
Dune is the closest thing to what you're looking for I believe
I think what you are interested in is possible, but authors haven't been as interested in exploring it
Why is Moby Dick not an adventure novel? It has whales and ships and a quest - because although those elements are core to the book, it's not really ABOUT any of them.
Most Sci-fi is only interested in staying within the confines of its genre. I am interested in seeing authors take concepts that are used in sci Fi and use them for literature
I don't know whether the culprit is a lack of interest or lack of vision
> I am interested in seeing authors take concepts that are used in sci Fi and use them for literature
Well there's Kurt Vonnegut, Kazuo Ishiguro, probably a bunch of others like that, then various dystopian novels, some debatable cases where a "literary" book is set slightly in the future or something, or a talented sci-fi author would be considered "literary" if others would grant them the distinction. Jack Vance was a fantastic prose stylist, for example. Then there's sci-fi which stays in the sci-fi bin because the prose is bad, but is still perfectly good at what it's trying to do. Ultimately I think sci-fi and fantasy settings work best for certain kinds of stories and can be a handicap for others. If you want to write a book with any kind of serious "message" that's relevant to the present day, using a highly unrealistic setting is sort of cowardly.
genuinely, what do you mean by aristocratic?
He's a 20 year old that took a passing interest in Evola probably.
LOGH
>Starship Troopers
About as laconic as one can reasonbly ask of the genre and Boomers writing it. This
Has anyone ever examined Heinlein through the lens of elitism? I've just realized it's probably the one throughline that intersects with all of his work (aside from talking about how hot women can be)
Saying that something won't happen because it sounds like a religion is a dubious argument, because it doesn't deal with the merits of the prediction itself, only the prediction's 'vibes'.
Here are some other arguments: https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm
Basically, even if something like superintelligence is possible, it just doesn't seem likely to me that the situation is exactly as Yudkowsky describes it, where we need to "solve the alignment problem" ahead of time or we all face certain death. It's a really specific picture based on a bunch of separate assumptions. But who knows, maybe he's right. What do you think?
Wolfe obviously. The entire BotNS series is about a post-historic aristocratic feudal world. It's like Dune except with actual literary merit.
>It's like Dune except with actual literary merit.
I guarantee you haven't read enough books to actually make such a judgement
Dune is easily the most ambitiously intertextual science fiction novel ever, and quite possibly the most ambitiously intertextual novel of the 20th century, period
I was referring to Herbert's dog awful prose, but sure, Dune is pretty great too.
>I was referring to Herbert's dog awful prose
you mostly get no argument from me on that score, though I would say, in most cases, it's strictly the dialogue/songs/poetry he writes that is very poor
Are there any "wizard" romance novels? Or are romance novels exclusively for wretches unmoved by the famous wizardly virtues? I'm assuming you all of course know what I mean by a book having a wizard-like quality.
There are definitely aristocratic wizard novels
Or plays, originally, see The Tempest and Faust. Jack Vance's wizards are definitely in that tradition, and D&D wizards are more Vance than Tolkien.
Every prior poster in this thread seems to be not only poorly read, but also genuinely stupid. Par for IQfy, I know, but still disheartening to see.
My posts in this thread are really good, actually. You should read them and respond.
it would just be legend of galactic heroes shit set in officer school, plus however far you want to be able to test the limit of why you're not wrong
imagine thinking a fricking tranime based on a pulp fic derivative of star wars is "aristrocratic" lmaooooo
esp. in the world where stanislav lem and arthur c clark existed ahahahahahahaaaa