I quite liked it. It's definitely more of a space opera than a hard-SF but did hard-SF as a named genre even exist when it was written? Other than the singularity ideas that really took off I found the book peppered with little ideas that are very cool and haven't been widely picked up:
1) The hive mind race in which everyone has 3-5 bodies but can swap them/add more at the cost of personality change was a cool small exploration of what it would be like to be multi.
2) The way space battles worked with the jump drives was excellent, with fleets continually jumping around but predicting their enemy's jumps more and more. Typically jump drives in fiction are treated as a way to get from A to B and then battle commences normally, but this book integrated it really well.
3) The kid's educational laptop having an economic development app that could be fed available resources and spit out a specific plan for how to develop a high tech. Such a good idea that is often overlooked in fiction in favour of giving the blueprint of a specific technology, when in reality that would only be so helpful without the knowledge of manufacturing techniques, logistics and skills needed to make and use it.
4) The focus on interactions with strong superintelligent Powers as being incredibly profitable. A few times it was mentioned how a trivial gift from a Power would be worth billions. It really hammered home the differences in resource capability.
5) The fact that subjectively speaking Powers don't exist very long, maybe about a decade, not because they die but because they're in such a rapid and constant state of change that after a decade for lower level lives the Power has lived through potentially millions of subjective years of change.
All good stuff
Though it also has some hilariously quaint ideas. The fact that the FTL communication system of a galaxy is mailing lists will always be charming, hilarious and insightful to the era in which it was written.
1) The hive mind race in which everyone has 3-5 bodies but can swap them/add more at the cost of personality change was a cool small exploration of what it would be like to be multi.
2) The way space battles worked with the jump drives was excellent, with fleets continually jumping around but predicting their enemy's jumps more and more. Typically jump drives in fiction are treated as a way to get from A to B and then battle commences normally, but this book integrated it really well.
3) The kid's educational laptop having an economic development app that could be fed available resources and spit out a specific plan for how to develop a high tech. Such a good idea that is often overlooked in fiction in favour of giving the blueprint of a specific technology, when in reality that would only be so helpful without the knowledge of manufacturing techniques, logistics and skills needed to make and use it.
4) The focus on interactions with strong superintelligent Powers as being incredibly profitable. A few times it was mentioned how a trivial gift from a Power would be worth billions. It really hammered home the differences in resource capability.
5) The fact that subjectively speaking Powers don't exist very long, maybe about a decade, not because they die but because they're in such a rapid and constant state of change that after a decade for lower level lives the Power has lived through potentially millions of subjective years of change.
All good stuff
Though it also has some hilariously quaint ideas. The fact that the FTL communication system of a galaxy is mailing lists will always be charming, hilarious and insightful to the era in which it was written.
OA Wish list:
- DNI
- Internal medical system
- A dormbot, because domestic chores suck!