A signal shattered
by Eric S. Nylund · first published 1999
60% recommend40% neutral
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> it's from "A Signal Shattered" by Eric S. Nylund. What a great book. I read it before I read the book that it's a sequel to. Maybe I'll re-read them this week.
on “Weird Nonfiction” ↗The book is Signal to Noise and its sequel A Signal Shattered by Eric S. Nylund. A personal favorite of mine! Wheeler is such a convincing villain, and the existence of such a character as an explanation of the Fermi paradox is eminently believable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Nylund
on “Frosted glass from games to the web” ↗…with their reckless energy extraction. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I will merely advise anyone interested in a story with similar themes and content to read Signal to Noise and its sequel A Signal Shattered by Eric S. Nylund. You may know him from his work on the Halo franchise or other popular games. I don’t really know his other work, since I first discovered him via his original works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Nylund
on “Underwater turbine spinning for 6 years off Scotland's coast is a breakthrough” ↗In a thematically similar but very different vein, Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series was an enjoyable read. I also recommend Eric Nylund's work, specifically Signal to Noise and A Signal Shattered. Edit: Well, there you go, Children of Time had 23 mentions now that I've read down further. Disappointed to see Eric Nylund's work fade into obscurity, I rate him up with Neal Stephenson.
on “Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025” ↗Toss "Signal to Noise" and "A Signal Shattered" both by Eric S. Nylund into the pot - interesting conceptual things around biotech/selfmodification singularities in addition to the more common computational singularities.
on “Accelerando (2005)” ↗Eric Nylund's "Signal to Noise" and "A Signal Shattered" posits something similar - they're out there, and they're out to get you - but FTL communications exist and the others are more rabidly mercantile than invasive. (To be fair, I've only read The Three…
on “Transit Detection of a Starshade at the Inner Lagrange Point of an Exoplanet” ↗I think i enjoy hard sci-fi, if my username is any indication of the genre - it's from "A Signal Shattered" by Eric S. Nylund. However i am curious what sort of Sci-fi you meant, where it's plausible but there's SCP/analog horror elements. Evidently a prior comment in the thread about memetics wiped an edge…
on “Weird Nonfiction” ↗Eric Nylund: Signal to Noise, A Signal Shattered
on “Sci-fi books that you may never have heard of, but definitely should read” ↗