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A review by dr_ju
Firefall by Peter Watts
5.0
“I am naked as I type this. I was naked writing the whole damn book”. I have to comply with the protocol when writing the review too.
- “Living fourteen thousand years didn’t make me a genius, I just had time.
- Time... You can’t see it, you can’t hear it, you can’t weight it, you can’t... measure it in a laboratory. It’s a subjective sense of... becoming what we are instead of what we were a nanosecond ago, becoming what we will be in another nanosecond. The whole piece of time is a landscape existing, we form behind us and we move, we move through it, slice by slice.
- Clocks measure time.
- No, they measure themselves; the objective referee of a clock is another clock.
- All very interesting, but what has it go to do with...”
- This book? “Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain, and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but he got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind, and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy, He thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off, and a tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across the thousands of generations. And after a while everyone was seeing tiger in the grass even if there weren’t any tigers because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because neutral selection favors the paranoid. Even here in the twenty first century you can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now. We are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.
And it came to pass that certain people figured out how to use that. They painted their faces or they wore funny hats, they shook their rattles and waved their crosses and they said: << Yes, there are tigers in the grass, there are faces in the sky, and they will be very angry if you do not obey their commandments. You must make offerings to appease them, you must bring gold and grain and altar boys for our delectation or they will strike you down and send you to the Awful place.>>
And people believed them by the billions, because after all, they could see the invisible tigers.”
- I can see what you mean; every slice of our history is marked by chickenshits and tigers.
- “At some point in our evolution we started to make decisions consciously, and we’re not very good at it.
- Identity changes by the second; you turn into someone else every time a new thought rewires your brain. You’re a different person than you were ten minutes ago.”
- That was my line, Steve, I am the smart guy and you play the apprentice.
- I wrote those lines. You are just standing there naked taking credit for them. “You’re a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae. I stand between the Wizzard of Oz and the man behind the curtain. I am the curtain. All kinds of animals come here, occasional demons too.” You are the demon that steals my ideas to post them sometimes on Goodreads.
- What do you want me to tell them, about sci-fi stuff, rewiring the brain in every way you can’t imagine? It’s not just the mundane sensory stuff; it’s not just feeling colors and tasting sounds. They can literally see time. Sci-fi is overrated, proving you can’t think outside the box is trending now; every time someone says “think outside the box” what he really means is “think bigger boxes”. Empty space scares us, dark always put fear into man, we build boxes and call them homes, and we invent names like stratosphere and call it Earth. We put mirrors inside our boxes and we look at ourselves, how we work, what consciousness is. We cannot imagine what is outside our tridimensional box. But you could get an idea by reading this book.
- “Living fourteen thousand years didn’t make me a genius, I just had time.
- Time... You can’t see it, you can’t hear it, you can’t weight it, you can’t... measure it in a laboratory. It’s a subjective sense of... becoming what we are instead of what we were a nanosecond ago, becoming what we will be in another nanosecond. The whole piece of time is a landscape existing, we form behind us and we move, we move through it, slice by slice.
- Clocks measure time.
- No, they measure themselves; the objective referee of a clock is another clock.
- All very interesting, but what has it go to do with...”
- This book? “Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain, and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but he got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind, and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy, He thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off, and a tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across the thousands of generations. And after a while everyone was seeing tiger in the grass even if there weren’t any tigers because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because neutral selection favors the paranoid. Even here in the twenty first century you can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now. We are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.
And it came to pass that certain people figured out how to use that. They painted their faces or they wore funny hats, they shook their rattles and waved their crosses and they said: << Yes, there are tigers in the grass, there are faces in the sky, and they will be very angry if you do not obey their commandments. You must make offerings to appease them, you must bring gold and grain and altar boys for our delectation or they will strike you down and send you to the Awful place.>>
And people believed them by the billions, because after all, they could see the invisible tigers.”
- I can see what you mean; every slice of our history is marked by chickenshits and tigers.
- “At some point in our evolution we started to make decisions consciously, and we’re not very good at it.
- Identity changes by the second; you turn into someone else every time a new thought rewires your brain. You’re a different person than you were ten minutes ago.”
- That was my line, Steve, I am the smart guy and you play the apprentice.
- I wrote those lines. You are just standing there naked taking credit for them. “You’re a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae. I stand between the Wizzard of Oz and the man behind the curtain. I am the curtain. All kinds of animals come here, occasional demons too.” You are the demon that steals my ideas to post them sometimes on Goodreads.
- What do you want me to tell them, about sci-fi stuff, rewiring the brain in every way you can’t imagine? It’s not just the mundane sensory stuff; it’s not just feeling colors and tasting sounds. They can literally see time. Sci-fi is overrated, proving you can’t think outside the box is trending now; every time someone says “think outside the box” what he really means is “think bigger boxes”. Empty space scares us, dark always put fear into man, we build boxes and call them homes, and we invent names like stratosphere and call it Earth. We put mirrors inside our boxes and we look at ourselves, how we work, what consciousness is. We cannot imagine what is outside our tridimensional box. But you could get an idea by reading this book.