Starfish by Peter Watts (1999)

https://www.rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm#prelude

by zetalyrae • 1 month ago

145 65 1 month ago

rifters.com

condwanaland• 1 month ago

Have not read this series (yet), but Watt's Blindsight is an absolute masterclass in literary sci-fi

number6• 1 month ago

Starfish ... It's very good bit also very hard on the reader very devastating

arronax• 1 month ago

What's notable is that the Rifters trilogy just progresses in intensity and in the overall gloom. Starfish is light reading compared to Behemoth, which is sitting for me on the last chapter, because I couldn't finish it.

literalAardvark6• 1 month ago

I've read his works, in general all his first books are awesome, the sunflowers series is all awesome, and the rest can get a little hard to read (but I still liked them)

belio_armont• 1 month ago

This is also very good but man it is dark.

jauntywundrkind• 1 month ago

I need to give this a re-read. I really enjoyed my Blindsight re-read recently. But Starfish and Maelstrom after it are such uhh, not to pun to hard but, such high pressure intense sci-fi stories. Amazing ambiance, creeping horror, in such incredible backdrops.

Watts just kept going with his universe. It was and is so good. Such an incredible reflection of the world at the time of writing, and I've found it's lost so little of it's capturance. That it gets so many of the plights of the over-civilized world, and the perils lurking in the economic and governmental an attention systems of the planet. From the old site (https://www.rifters.com/attic.htm) to the new site (https://www.rifters.com/), Watts just really, across mediums, wanted to get his world out, to show it's timelines. Incredible.

Starfish is where it all started, and I remember it as both a slow burn, but also so hard core, so real. In a world both so our own but so far away, so separated (insert follow up deep joke here), but still within the world, still immersed (pun!) in the Earth of the story. Maelstrom, the second book, is also incredible, in very different ways. Watts reflected on Maelstrom 18 months ago, and it captures some of the amazing titular sceneage, of an overrun net, a howling wasteland from accelerated technological adversarialism. Incredible book. He goes to talk more to his own background, biology, but upon re-reading it, I think of LLMs, of the GPU milleniums burned recently, doing not that far askance competitive training, forcing our own gradient descents in ever increasing numbers upon the world. Thanks Peter; your visions are cherished. https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=11220

Tarq0n• 1 month ago

Recently finished the Starfish quadrilogy and adored it as well. One thing I particularly like is how this theme of evolutionary pressure applies to everyone alike; characters, software, ideologies, neural nets.

Also Watts manages to conjure this feeling of future shock I've only previously felt with Charles Stross' work.

roryirvine• 1 month ago

Honestly, I thought the Behemoth pair dragged a bit - I suspect it might have worked better as a more tightly-edited single volume.

(Sue Burke's Semiosis trilogy is worth a read, too, in a similar evolutionary SF vein.)

madrox2• 1 month ago

No one has ever made me feel horror and despair like Peter Watts. His books stare directly into the abyss. I think it's what makes the hope you feel at the end seem earned.

If you haven't read his work but you spend time thinking about HCI, you should.

AnthonBerg3• 1 month ago

I see people differently after reading Blindsight; The picture is much darker, concretely more accurate, with what light is there geared to all hell and so much brighter. I'm better for it and at a greater peace.

ViscountPenguin2• 1 month ago

Eh, I love blindsight, but I really think it oversold the case against consciousness and for belligerent intelligent life.

cdrini• 1 month ago

I quite enjoyed Blindsight, but that was not my takeaway at all :P How do you see people differently after reading it?

dreamcompiler2• 1 month ago

"Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2308s

donw• 1 month ago

Have you tried contacting Google for customer service? I’ve found that to be a sure-fire cure for whenever I catch a case of optimism.

mrec• 1 month ago

He's very proud of having been rejected by a Russian publisher for being "too dark".

UncleOxidant• 1 month ago

I haven't read anything from Peter Watts, but I have read Cormac McCarthy and what you're describing sounds like that.

subscribed2• 1 month ago

Oh man, no, no, it's a different experience entirely. Not as shredding as McCarthy (The road or Blood Meridian alike).

Start from Blindsight and read the afterwords.

xarope• 1 month ago

I've read blindsight and echopraxia, but not starfish, so thanks for the reminder.

If starfish is even despairing than blindsight and echopraxia, then this should be "fun"!

gpderetta3• 1 month ago

it starts despairing. Then it gets worse.

attheicearcade• 1 month ago

If you like his work, you can donate to “The Niblet Memorial Kibble Fund”. I did after reading Blindsight, and received a friendly thank you email from him afterwards because so few people do.

literalAardvark6• 1 month ago

Doubly worth doing as aside from writing some of the best modern hard Sci-Fi half of them are released for free on his page.

world2vec2• 1 month ago

The whole Rifters trilogy (quadrilogy?) is amazing, Starfish is actually my least favourite of the Rifters' books but still really good.

The villain Achilles Desjardins (I don't think he shows up in Starfish? been some time since I read it) is possibly one of the most villainous and sociopath characters I've ever read in a book.

Noah_Body• 1 month ago

His Sunflowers series is great too. Maybe my favorite (after Blindsight, of course).

Read for free on his webite: https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_TheIsland.pdf

Or collected in The Freeze-Frame Revolution here: https://www.amazon.com/Freeze-Frame-Revolution-Peter-Watts-e...

tialaramex• 1 month ago

I should read his long form stuff, I don't do anywhere near enough long form reading these days. I read "Malak" in Engineering Infinity years ago and it's very good indeed.

tensegrist• 1 month ago

blindsight is really something

kibwen• 1 month ago

Years ago I read the entirety of Starfish on the gloriously Geocities-ass website linked here, and I highly recommend it. Even as someone who has a hard time keeping focus, it sucked me in.

literalAardvark6• 1 month ago

Blindsight and Starfish are both awesome.

Blindsight in particular will also blow your mind.

It'd say Starfish is a great read but it doesn't quite get to mind blowing.

They will, however, drain your trust in humanity to deeply negative levels.

u1hcw9nx• 1 month ago

Peter Watts is PhD marine biologist. Deepwater biology in the Rifters trilogy (Starfish, Maelstrom, βehemoth) is interesting.

vlachen• 1 month ago

These are the books I read when I feel like I'm too optimistic about world affairs. The dark themes that seem so close to being possible help boost my cynicism and level me out.

GCUMstlyHarmls2• 1 month ago

Peter Watts Amazon "About the Author".

https://www.amazon.com.au/stores/author/B001H6Q2TE/about
This is awkward and a little creepy. They tell me I have to do it for promotional purposes, but I've already got a blog. I've already got a website. Being told that setting up an author page on fcuking Amazon is essential to success? A company that treats us all like such goddamn children it doesn't even allow us to correctly spell an epithet with a venerable history going back 900 years or more? That just sucks the one-eyed purple trouser eel.
Also the bio information above is fucked. For example, my work has only appeared in 36 BoY collections, not 350; the noms and awards info is out of date too, but apparently it was all written by some publishing house and I can't change it from this interface.
Still, here I am. But if you're really all that interested, go check out my actual blog/website. Google is not your friend (any more than Amazon is), but at least it'll point you in the right direction.
I'm the one on the left, by the way.

Hell yeah brother.

Wonder when it was written and what it would say if written today.

pseudalopex• 1 month ago

A company that treats us all like such goddamn children it doesn't even allow us to correctly spell an epithet with a venerable history going back 900 years or more?

This meant what?

GCUMstlyHarmls2• 1 month ago

author page on fcuking Amazon is essential to success
information above is fucked. For example

I imagine at some point writing "fucking" was rebuffed, or maybe you can write "fucked" but not "fucking", or there was some time between those paragraphs.

RupertEisenhart2• 1 month ago

Watts is truly remarkable. I also recommend the Sunflowers series, just a brilliant conceit w.r.t humans in deep time plus a sound understanding of dealing with ASI.

Wikipedia has it down as:

The chronological order within the Sunflower universe is: "Hotshot", The Freeze-Frame Revolution, "Giants", "Hitchhiker", "Strategic Retreat", "Remora", "Outtake", "The Island".

Just realizing I didnt see that list before I there are a few I haven't read.. brb

literalAardvark6• 1 month ago

Chimp is very much not ASI, by design. Humans have ASI but the risk of value drift was too great so they downgraded him to 4.8

Verdex• 1 month ago

Chimp isn't, but at the end of freeze frame Sunday addresses one who she thinks is. [Not sure if that was the original intent in this thread, though]

joshmarlow• 1 month ago

His Blindsight is one of my all time favorite novels (sequel is good to). His short story Malak - about a military drone given a prototype ethical program - is so good.

pokstad• 1 month ago

ASI = Artificial Super Intelligence?

I read Freeze Frame Revolution and drew blank seeing that acronym.

poopchute• 1 month ago

ASI = Artificial Sentient Intelligence

LogicFailsMe• 1 month ago

Blindsight and Echopraxis are two of my favorite novels. Hope he writes a third one in that series. Both really ahead of their time.

world2vec2• 1 month ago

According to his blog, Peter Watts is currently writing the 3rd book of the Firefall Series. It'll be titled "Omniscience", no release date has been set yet.

Schlagbohrer• 1 month ago

His Rifters books had some interesting tech in them that I want to see in the real world (for positive uses): dirigibles using vaccuum for buoancy rather than hydrogen or helium, and abiotic food production ala the "Calvin Cyclers" he has in the book. Abiotic food production using only minerals, water, and air as inputs would be tremendously helpful for space colonization and also for scarcity scenarios on earth, like living in the arctic, at sea, or in the desert.

aaroninsf• 1 month ago

Every time Peter Watts comes up, it bears repeating:

TRIGGER WARNINGS APPLY

The Rifters series, which has some spectacular images and conceits, is also author-insert misogynist sadism gratification-porn.

Didn't have to be that way. Shame that it was as IMO it renders the series and indeed Watts un-recommendable.

subscribed2• 1 month ago

Meh, seriously. Write a better book instead of flailing about the dark themes.

If someone is mature enough to read his book, they'll be able to process the less palatable parts themselves.

BTW,

We present the results of a meta-analysis of all empirical studies on the effects of these warnings. Overall, we found that warnings had no effect on affective responses to negative material or on educational outcomes. However, warnings reliably increased anticipatory affect. Findings on avoidance were mixed, suggesting either that warnings have no effect on engagement with material or that they increased engagement with negative material under specific circumstances.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21677026231186625

Hortinstein• 1 month ago

One of the sequels "Maelstrom" has some incredibly prescient descriptions of the Internet as this overwhelming useless medium that was taken over by bots and ai...back when llms started to take off and post everywhere I'd always think back to this book. Great author

Starfish by Peter Watts (1999)

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