What is your favorite type of sci-fi? For me since Ive always been interested in life in the universe/space exploration, anything regarding that. I love golden age sci-fi and reading what they thought we would do in space back in the 40s and 50s
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Hard sci fi that attempts to deal with the implications of greater-than-human intelligence. Not in the sense of 'shucks this blue-head alien temporarily outsmarted us!' but more along the lines of extra-terrestrial strong AI, godlike entities, tech singularity, matter being optimised for consciousness and such. Stuff like Iain M. Banks Culture series (which I actually can't remember very well), but my favourite treatment is by Vernor Vinge in A Fire Upon the Deep, (Vinge being the guy credited with coining the term 'technological singularity' in the first place).
I feel like the more that one's thought experiments veer off in this direction, the more interesting the ideas become for the technological implications for consciousness. This correlates with Vinge being exceptional for writing different-to-human intelligence and aliens who think and see things differently to humans too, eg. in Fire, a race of dog-like pack-mind aliens who only reach human-like sentience when they assemble as a pack of 4-6 doggos. They do this as part of their natural development and each pack is treated as a separate functioning individual. When writing from the perspective of this race, it's as if it's just an unremarkable story that could be from any human's perspective, until elements of their difference leak into it, such as the way they manipulate tools; the impact on their consciousness of losing a pack member; the living status of pack discards and packs with too few members; and the existence of controversial eugenics-like science on their world where packs are torturously pruned and reassembled to create super-soldiers, or where others engage in multi-generational pack incest in order to preserve the pack consciousness.
Have you read "Protector" by Larry Niven?
It is a first contact story, where an alien ship enters the Sol system with a single occupant.
It turns out the pilot is a super-intelligent humanoid on a mission. The alien is soon dead, but the Belter who made contact with him is changed forever and becomes the Protector of the human race.
It is an older book and from early in Niven's career before he discovered swinging and got weird. At the height of his power Niven was a great author, and this is one of his better works.
Nope, thanks for the rec. I see Niven mentioned a bunch, so worth a try for when I finally buy another novel.