Klarok

Actually, as an emergency call responder, you should do an AMA for sure. There are a lot of misconceptions about what actually happens when an emergency call gets placed.

Hi David

Thank you very much for doing this AMA. I'm sorry that it didn't get the attention it deserved but hopefully you'll be able to respond to some of the questions that may appear now that the AMA is properly highlighted. Maybe you could get back to them tomorrow, I know I'll check back!

Anyway, I am a definite fan of your works and Kil'n People is my favourite book. I loved the mystery set in a world where personal time is not a scarce commodity. It intrigued me greatly so I do thank you for the entertainment. Of course I loved the Uplift books as well - the first trilogy more so than the second which I found somewhat more dry and less exciting than the first.

Anyway, on to the questions if you have time:

• You've done some excellent work and thinking on SETI. What are your thoughts on the ideas espoused in Orson Scott Card's Ender series which looked at the possibility of "varelse", an alien species which was so foreign that we could never communicate with them? (Apologies if you haven't read it but the short summary should give you the basic idea)
• There have been a lot of 'solutions' proposed to the Fermi Paradox. One of the most interesting (to me) was proposed by Charles Stross that species stayed close to their stars of a post Singularity conversion of much of their solar system's mass to computronium. What idea(s) do you find most compelling that explain the Fermi Paradox?
• What are your opinions on the concept common to many novels of future society that reputation will eventually become currency?

Thanks in advance!

Is that what YOU want

Absolutely not :) I read Ender's Game and, because I can't read just one book of a series, read through the rest of them. Ender's Shadow was also very good but on the whole I didn't really appreciate the other books.

I can't comment on the dating habits of SoCal mallrats but I did find that the varelse concept of those books to be extremely far fetched. I believe that we are far more likely to have difficulties with species that we can communicate with but who have fundamentally different universe views (as you describe in Startide Rising) or reproductive strategies (as in Mote in God's Eye). The idea that two starfaring races could never communicate just doesn't seem plausible.

The only way it could be possible for a complete inability to communicate is if each species did not even recognise the other as life; which would hark back to the Skylark series (from EE Smith) and the beings made from pure energy. At that point it wouldn't really be an inability to communicate but more a lack of realisation that communication was even possible - probably akin to how contemporary humans don't bother to try to talk to bacteria.

What I want are more books like Kil'n People where an author says "what if" then builds a detailed world to explore that question. It's that type of SF that keeps me hooked and one that has been a theme in many of your books.

Thanks! When I'm not at work (Aussie here), I'll head on over.

In Kil'n people though, you still note that people have to reintegrate which (presumably) is somewhat time-consuming which would just push the attention problem out a bit further.

One of the things that publicly available reputation would hopefully accomplish is to make it difficult to cheat or lie. The reason why it doesn't work right now is that, as we see on sites like this one, it is possible to pay anonymous people to assist a powerful person to cheat because the anonymous people don't care about reputation.

So, in order for reputation to be meaningful, we would have to remove or severely curtail anonymity. Neal Asher goes into this aspect a lot in his books but, then again, he also had the Quiet War where AIs took over everything.

We're currently having issues with that as we see the arguments over employers searching Facebook to keep tabs on their workers or using Google to obtain data that the person may not have wanted to have revealed.

I think that, in the end, lower personal privacy will become the norm. It's hard to envision how it will be maintained with the level of information saturation that is already prevalent.