A Hardness of Minds
Community Rating
Description
(35 Chapters >70,000 words, edited version available onAmazon)
A Near-Future Hard Sci-Fi about Data, War, and First Contact in our Solar System.
Life exists under Europa’s ice, but there’s doubt in the data.
For fifteen years, probes have hinted at life under Europa's ice. An eccentric mogul— bent on expanding his legacy—funds and launches his probe to Jupiter. The robotic submarine can reach the ocean floor and return by an expertly trained AI. But Earth smack in the Misinformation Age; tensions flare between the United States and China and scientific data is under attack. Meanwhile, Dalton, a self-sabotaging synthetic data engineer, longs to make a name for himself in the scientific community, even at the cost of beinginfamous.Unknown to Earth, aliens led by Ice-Driller have explored 'up' and penetrated the ice and have researched 'Nullworld,' the mysterious ether beyond the ice from which no sonar returns. Meanwhile a hydrothermal vent has gone cold and tensions in their global society have escalated as city-states fight for survival. Now the military caste is in control, halted all research, and pressed capable scientists and engineers into militia service. Ice-Driller must escape and bring back research he hopes will diffuse tensions: the revelation of another water world.The novel intertwines perspectives of Earth and under Europa as all search for truth.This is the second hard sci-fi novel by authorEric Kay(No Lack of Sunshine). It explores issues of data integrity in the age of adversarial information warfare, moving minds away from the brink of war, and experience versus knowledge by proxy.
Information
- Status
- Ongoing
- Year
- 2022
- Author
- EricKay
Tags
Royal Road Stats
- Rating
- 4.2/ 5.0
- Followers
- 16
- Views
- 3,380
Chapters(8 total)
Reviews
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Community Reviews(3)
- Entitled InfracaninophileRoyal Road★★★★★ 5.0First of all, I liked reading this story very much. Many thanks to the author, and overall five stars as a thank you for writing and sharing your story. I especially liked the ending, and the defensive coding perspective.
Of course there are weaknesses, for a hard SciFi story. First, the odds of the synchronicity of the happenings on Earth and on Europa are astronomical. Not even remotely realistic. Also, the aliens are similar to Earth physiology (too much even if explained by panspermia), to a human way of thinking (though that could be explained by the way intelligence and consciousness would evolve in parallel), to our senses ( but ultrasonic makes sense). Another issue is that AIs are far too primitive for 2041. Technology level on Earth in general seems too simple for a story supposedly playing 19 years from now. Basically, they still have the same car, phone, AI, and computer network, programming, and general technology we have now, maybe a tiny bit more advanced. It all is more on the level of 2026 or so. One more thing is that in the story the ocean floor area is implied to be rather smallish, since there are very localized wars for the hot vents that seem to have recently become scarcer. However, the ocean floor area of the Europa moon is around three times the size of the US, which would seem comparatively large enough.
Anyway, probably my expectations for hard sci-fi are too high, so, sorry for the nitpicking, but the story is still very entertaining if you can look over its issues.
The story itself is gripping and made me binge it. Well done! Nice level of chaos and suspense. The trillionaire's level of paranoia seems plausible and warranted, though it is unlikely that the employed methods to safeguard the science team would be sufficient.
Regarding grammar. Well, nothing really bad. There are only issues that could have easily been avoided using any kind of checker in very little time. They are not frequent, but disrupt the flow of reading. Unnecessar - LsshinRoyal Road★★★★ 4.0You gotta love to see racism as one of the first things that the story has to show. I like that it keeps it real and hold no punches. At the same time I also like that er are thrown into an ongoing world with even a trial to boot. Maybe itll slow down later, but the quick start is always good to grab attention and make the world feel more real. At least to me.
- chiliparkRoyal Road★★★★ 4.0A pretty good first contact sci-fi story told from both sides of the contact, the data angle with the whole software data scientist training AI by fooling it or something who is the earth-side story is in my opinion unecasery, clunky and I find myself skimming through those parts just to get to the good stuff. Might be hard to read for some but there is a good story here.