I guess I am showing my age in wanting there to be a plot, but in the end I was somewhat relieved that it was relatively short. The other stories are also remarkable but I think I will leave that for you to discover and form your own conclusions. You'll be whisked away into a world of robots, machine learning, overindulgence, and societal bliss and in one way, the book will be a regress on the dystopic utopian vision optimistic futurists hold. We’ll see some untypical things along the way, meet some untypical folk: galactic lighthouses from the distant future, alien tombs from the distant past, murderers, emperors, archaeologists and drunks; mad mathematicians attempting to wake the universe itself up. All I can do is make a ripple and delude myself that I knew what the consequences of that ripple would be and take ownership of the changes caused.

A neat little anthology of stories detailing the discovery of the Fifth Science and how it causes humanity's demise. Exurbia's relationship with language as a tool has always been able to convey that powerful sense of wonder that exists in the intersection of consciousness as an "oh my god I'm alive and I don't know how or why" moment and fully realizing the beauty of the universe and futurism at the same time. Ed MacPherson is your college whiz-kid hyper-scientist: wormholes, time travel, heavy stellar engineering. This book made me think about stuff I never thought about before in a very fundamental and beautiful way. You don't mean to break up a marriage, but if breaking it up might let you sleep like a normal person again, suddenly you start considering it.Whatever happens, however clever we eventually become, there will be an end to our trials and projects. In an afterward he describes the term “panpsychism” as “the aspects of consciousness can’t be explained in terms of our current physical frameworks, or we haven’t managed it yet anyway”. My other concerns are ones probably more endemic to the genre itself—flat characterization, long expanses of expositionary dialogue, plots that more serve as an opening to offer pre-determined philosophy than develop themselves.

They began rendezvousing in that disgusting traditional way, eating breakfast off of each other, spending long mornings in bed, pretending they were the first humans to ever discover sex. Frame 12 asserted that Ertia was a backwards culture, an orb of excess and stupidity, and nothing short of total annexation could correct its inevitable slide towards self-destruction. with an authentic little paragraph how each story entered Exurb1a's mind and how he approaches writing. I haven't read anything new in a while, around everything I have to attend to I don't get much time to spend on diving into something literary, but at the moment I realised Exurb1a had published a new short story collection I put everything else on pause. Spoiler alert: these traits ultimately cause the collapse of the empire however by the time this happens, many have opted to become part of the Fifth - which is a human derived discovery or invention of enabling inanimate objects to develop consciousness.Exurb1a's style is distinctly different from Asimov, however the thematic and philosophical undertones of the narrative reminded me of Asimov. And when it's perfect, when they've built the perfect home and everything's just right, do you know what they do? While reading this book, perhaps by complete happenstance, I was introduced to machine learning as an academic pursuit.

A few years back, a site has been set up for the purpose of providing an informative approach to make the Fifth Science known. The modern classic of space opera that began with Children of Time continues in this extraordinary novel of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet. You motivate yourself using one frame and then if you fail; you summon a different frame in which you can make peace with your failure.

Materials and other resources that will help in achieving a universal understanding of the core logic of the Fifth Science are encouraged. I keep coming back to the ideas in the story - Be Awake, Be Good and imagining that I had read it in Axiomatic.