SoLongThx4TheFish

I think the oxygen is down to less than a day now, starting from a best case scenario of 96h when contact was lost.

The third book was so bad. I loved the first and actually enjoyed the second (it was the first time i heard about “the dark forest” theory), but the third just annoyed me.

From the moment the MC failed her task because of her motherly instincts or some bs like that to the last 100+ pages that were just the author masturbating over his ideas of how ultra high-tech-civilizations could develop, there was nothing that made sense or was really compelling about it.

You missed nothing stopping midway through book 3.

I don’t know how common the trope is, but since reading Accelerando i love the idea of extending your mind with computers. It starts with the MC sending AI-Agents to research tasks in the beginning of the book (something thats not that unrealistic nowadays), to most of a humans “thinking power” being outside their head.

“The precursor” is also always great. I loved the “broken earth” trilogy for that, most of what i remember from it is about finding out what the precursors did and how their artefacts worked.

What I dislike isn’t really a trope, but it’s when an author expects me to believe that future populations are stuck in the present cultural climate. A lot of old scifi books have aged really poorly because their authors could not imagine society moving forwards at all, so their societies of the future just seem dated. “The stars my destination” is like this imo.

For the second concern i like the two Hainish Circle books i have read, “The dispossessed” and “The left hand of darkness”. They mention that something like earth exists, but it’s not even a plot point, it’s just another planet. But then again these books are social commentar / thought experiment first and foremost, they just happen to be in a Sci-Fi setting.