These Science Fiction Novels Will Take You on an Epic Journey
For me, it is the science fiction cloaked in myth that carries the most power. Lest your mind careen toward elves on spaceships, let me clarify: I'm not talking about a subgenre here, or about cross-pollination with fantasy. For me, myth is a tone, imbued with the gravity of fate and eternal truth. Whether a lullaby of mankind's ancient cradle or a requiem for the collapse of stellar empires, these tales sing out from the mist to remind us of our nature.
For the most part, the heroes of these novels inhabit dark, decaying worlds. Their epic journeys through that darkness have often helped me find the light. Here are a few of my favorites.
The Book of the New Sun
Wolfe's four-part saga feels like a relic of another epoch — scribbled in the midnight hollows of an abbey by a mad theologian, or summoned into being by the high priest of some fallen empire and beamed back to us across the millenniums. Set on a distant, dying Earth, the book (which was actually written by a Korean War vet living in Illinois in the 1980s) follows Severian, a torturer's apprentice exiled for the crime of mercy, as he wanders a world so far in the future that it has relapsed into medievalism. Science has become sorcery. Spaceports crumble to ruins.
I have read this book at least five times and still struggle to succinctly sum it up. It is dense, archaic, feverish and beautiful — a meditation on the tragedy of mortals on an immortal stage that will haunt you long after its final page.
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There is a huge debate going on regarding LLM foundational models that are claimed to be using 'reasoning' versus whether they are still potentially doing heads-down next-token prediction, see my coverage on the lively dispute at the link here. Taking Next Steps The overarching aim to see if we can properly ground cognitive computer-based computational simulations in a more psychologically plausible way is exciting. No doubt about that. The researchers also noted that there might be entirely different AI architectural approaches that might be better for us to pursue, beyond the somewhat conventional infrastructures currently dominating the AI realm right now. As a heads-up, some ardently believe that our prevailing LLMs and AI architecture are not going to get us to artificial general intelligence (AGI) or artificial superintelligence (ASI). You see, the trend right now is to mainly power up prevailing designs with faster hardware and more computational running time. 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