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prose-mortem · 1 year

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Book Review: Delta-V by Daniel Suarez

Rating: 5/5 Stars

Delta-V is one of my favorite techno-thriller sci-fi books of 2023! I wish I could erase the plot from my memory just so I could read it again for the first time. I am so glad there is a sequel (Critical Mass), which just came out last month. I came to this book at the perfect time because I don't have to wait to continue the adventure.

James Tighe is a cave diver with a traumatic past who is recruited by a billionaire to (potentially) become an asteroid miner. The technology the billionaire is proposing seems a little ahead of its time, and the mission is kept under wraps from the public. It is presented as a possibility for the future… Not something that will actually be happening in the coming months/years. Tighe must go through intense physical and mental training to be selected as a candidate for the mining operation, which will occur in deep space (farther than any human has gone before). As he accepts the opportunity to make some healthy cash and mine asteroids for resources that could aid deep space travel in the future, he finds himself caught in a web of technological catastrophes, business politics, and a massive secret that will compromise his mission's success.

This book checks all the boxes I want in my sci-fi reads. It is fast-paced, has that yummy but horrifying boot camp style "you have to earn this" experience we all love (the sci-fi version of trials we find in fantasy books), is technologically intriguing, and scientifically educational (this is a hard sci-fi), but it also has heart. In a lot of sci-fi books, it can be hard to really get good characterization and connect with the people you are reading about since some authors focus a little too much on the tech and not as much on the characters. Not so here! Though romance is far from the biggest plot theme, it does make appearances that will punch you in the gut. I truly cared about the relationships among/between characters. Each one received thought and development. Even though this book is heavvvyyyyy on the tech descriptions and challenges, the human aspect is not lost. The challenges will make your heart pound because you love everyone so much and you don't want anything bad to happen to them. (Also, the tech parts are amazing and will make you feel smart even if you know nothing about astrophysics, economics, or geology.) I was on the edge of my seat the entire time! If you love The Expanse, then you will want to read Delta-V, because it is even better. Just FYI you might want to flip to the back of the book before getting into the middle of the story because there are pictures of what the mining shuttle and its components look like. I didn't realize this until the end. There are also great book recommendations at the end, which helped to inspire Delta-V!

This book came out in 2019 and, therefore, is not a NetGalley read for me, but Daniel Suarez will be added to my NetGalley profile as one of my new favorite authors. I want more!!

#delta-v #daniel suarez #scifibooks #hard sci fi #astrophysics #economics #geology #boot camp #cave diver #elyrria'sbookreviews #bookish #reading recs #bookworm #asteroids #billionaires #deep space #mission

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umbralreaver · 2 years

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I am making productive use of my time.

#rain world #delta-v #animation #oculama

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kenaran · 1 year

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3x07 "Delta-V"

I'm trailing behind again by a whopping five episodes and I'm sorry to say that it's not just because RL is keeping me busy. I'm just not very enthralled by the show right now. Which is disappointing because I've been told so many times how great it is, especially where we're at right now. I really, really want to love this show. More to the point where these recaps are concerned - I don't want to be "trashing" something people very clearly love. Anyway, I'll try not to go overboard, but do consider yourself warned: Not too happy right now.

There's a time jump of about half a year between this episode and the one before that. I'm not too fond of these "medium sized" jumps. (BSG did something similar and back then I was pissed and felt cheated out of a whole lot of storytelling, which my poor flatmate would probably still be able to attest to. The boxing episode - the only one I've ever seen that I liked - helped a lot to sell it to me later on.) I will admit it's mostly a personal preference, but I really don't like losing track of the characters' development like that. Big jumps are fine btw. I guess they're just creating enough of a distance for me to not mind the gaps anymore whereas with the medium jumps I feel like I should know things that I don't. I have no idea whether this makes any sense to anyone but me, but there it is.

Chrisjen is general secretary now. Clearly an improvement for Earth, but - as it turns out over the next set of episodes - not for the show. I miss her as a character, I miss her cussing at everyone, but I also think the different perspective her scenes offered did benefit the show a lot. I'm going to assume she'll return. She'd better... The necklace she's wearing during her speech could easily double as a murder weapon.

The jellyfish has built a huge ring.

The Roci (I guess we don't really care about the pine tree renaming at all) is operating as a standard something ship now with three quarters of her crew while Naomi is off following the call of the Belters. To pay for the trial concerning the status of the ship they've taken on a reporter and a camera man, who any normal person instantly recognizes to be blind whereas I was assuming some weird scifi shenaningans.

Drummer is captain of the Behemoth and kindly asked to take on Irish vibes guy (looks it up: Ashford) as her First Officer, who also brings "you need to get laid" guy (looks that up again too: Diogo). Naomi is chief engineer because of reasons. (I'm a bit miffed we only get part of those way later, but I'll get to that at that point.)

Anna is on board of a ship near the ring as well. Because that's what you do when your family is expecting you back home. More on that later as well - right now she's dancing the line to what is still fine with me.

We get some Amos back story: He won his education spot in a lottery. Nice system there, Earth. And apparently his documentation is less than complete. Which is shady though I heartily approve in the context of this episode because I don't like the reporter.

The Mormon special place on the ship they were looking for previously turns out to be the command center. Thanks for clearing that up.

And some lady named Melba places a bomb on a support ship. Which also means she needs to kill nice tech guy invoking some kind of super powers to do so. To which a heartfelt HUH?!

Crazy ass slingshot pilot makes very unappealing exit from the show thereby activating the ring.

And Miller turns up. With hat.

Jump to next episode

#kenaran watches the expanse #the expanse #3x07 #delta-v

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lewbornmann · 1 year

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Moving Outward

It seems to me…. “… And when he (man) has conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning. And if we’re no more than animals we must snatch each little scrap of happiness and live and suffer and pass, mattering no more than all the other animals do or have done. It is this or that: all the universe or nothing… Which shall it be?” ~ H.G. Wells[1] from…

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cyberkn1fe · 10 months

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yea

#soma #soma game #v #the gif was deltas request and then people in pathos linked the spinning seal video. so i added music to it #both loop seamlessly :)

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dinobeates · 9 months

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Next set of Vivosaurs, from #021 to #030!

#fossil fighters #fossil fighters: champions #fossil fighters: frontier #neo #compso #sopteryx #delta #tro #nychus #m-raptor #u-raptor #v-raptor #breme #dinosaur #vivosaur #raptor #dromaeosaur #dromeosaur

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elbiotipo · 29 days

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Someone once said in the tags on one of my posts that "Asimov was the serious science fiction guy and Heinlein was the whee space opera guy" and I almost deleted my blog.

#THEY WOULD NOT SAY THAT #IF HEINLEIN CATCHES YOU WRITING ABOUT A SPACESHIP WITHOUT CALCULATING ITS DELTA-V HE WILL BURN YOUR NOVEL #yes it was the one hijacked by that stupid 'Tolkien vs. Lewis' meme #cosas mias

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oldgamemags · 3 days

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The new definition of speed 'Delta V' PC

#Delta V #PC #Hyper 11 #October '94

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prototypelq · 6 months

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The Most Unreliable Narrator I Have Ever Seen

soooooo I had a Cyberpunk-obsessed phase pass recently, and this time Johhny Silverhand's character caught my eye. His story, more specifically, and how... inconsistent he seems, depending on each source.

In the game, Johhny acts like a bastard for most of the game. He panic-rages on his first meeting with V, throws many threats around, but is later beaten into the background with the blocker pills Misty gave to V. Even Johnny's friends' are well, they react Loudly to his return. Y'know, make it known his presence alone provokes a lot of anger from them.

Even during his first appearance, when V gets thrown into Silverhand's memories of his SAMURAI concert, the only real thing V recalls is the all-consuming rage that he felt, which he tried to shout out through the microphone, but it never felt like enough.

And doesn't this sound weird then, that the only thing Johnny does throughout the game after that first meeting is help V out? He learns about the Smasher guy hideout at the docks (he does that through dubious means but that's Johnny for you), he helps V out when the seizures become worse, he calmly agrees to Any decision V makes, despite V clearly Not being in any real state to oppose him in the finale of the game, he plans the whole thing with "Alt" so V can get his body back at Johnny's own expense, from the beginning, and he doubles down on that claim at the end of the game.

Do you see the dissonance? The egoist rockerboy that admitted to using his friends to getting what he wants, and the downright self-sacrificing hero and a friend that is Johnny at the end of the game? People change, sure, but this divide is very massive and too sudden, so I wanted to dig into that. And what I've stumbled upon, with the help of canon Cyberpunk materials like the Red sourcebook (or, more specifically, LayedBackGamers' reading of the canon books and his lore videos on different topics), is that

Johhny Silverhand from Cyberpunk 2077 is the Most Unreliable Narrator I've Ever Seen.

Count with me here:

Johhny's personality in general. No matter what your interpretation of him his, it's impossible to ignore that Johhny is very much a people person and he exploits that knowledge and charisma to suit his own goals. If you choose to trust him, then you might have already been played.

2) Johhny has been alone, only his lovely self for 50+ years inside the Arasaka chip. Don't ask me how he is still even remotely sane, I haven't got a clue (hopefully the time as a construct without outside stimulation flies differently and he hasn't felt those 50 years in real time). The thing to mention here, however, is that, being alone with your thoughts and emotions for a long time, having nothing else for entertainment, is a great opportunity to rewrite your own memory of events or emotions you've felt.

3) Lack of a body. The aforementioned constant rage, that was the dominant emotion is Johnny's life (before Alt, at least, if Never Fade Away is anything to go by, and I mean, that's literally a love ballad), is a symptom of his PTSD from his too-young years serving in the corpo war, same as his signature silver hand. I'm not a specialist here, but I do know PTSD, especially for war veterans, is a physiological illness just as much as it is a mental one. Johnny's body literally had trouble living normally after that experience, and knowing this bastard - he never managed to treat that. Existing as a personality construct frees him from the many bonuses of being corporeal, but it also free him from the physiological side of PTSD. His day-to-day existence is fundamentally different from that of the Johnny Silverhand that the world knew 50 years ago, so yes, as a 'time traveler' or a source of information and comparison about the 70's and 20's of cyberpunk world Johhny is not a good source.

4) The chip with Johnny is literary inside the head of another person. The characters in game question, multiple times, just which decisions is V making on his own, and which of them might be Johnny's doing. Not consciously, no, but V and Johnny are clearly not your simple neighbours. They are not your 'close friends that start subconsciously copying each other' too. It is quite possible that the chip with Johhny is adapting to the 'hardware' it is running on, so it is specifically implementing parts of V's personality into Johnny, to minimize the 'friction' between the personality and the body it is supposed to inhabit. Everyone say hi to existential horror)

5) How does Soulkiller ever work? Is there data on how much the resulting engram actually resembles the person it tried to copy? How did the process of copying Johnny go? I can answer the last one - very badly.

Death of Johnny is told in excruciating detail in the Cyberpunk sourcebooks. Johnny died on the floor of Arasaka tower, torn in two by a shotgun blast from Smasher. There is no information on how much time it takes Soulkiller to create the engram from the brain, but it better have finished doing that before Johnny's brain started dying from a lack of blood and oxygen, and he clearly didn't have much time either, considering bisection is not the best for bodily fluid preservation, so it's a wonder the engram even works properly. Plus, during the initial heist to steal the chip with Johnny, the chip was damaged further before the idiots decided to stick an unknown harddrive into their heads to preserve it. Basically, it's nothing short of a miracle, that engram-Johnny is actually a whole damn person, that he can function, think and feel properly (well, as much as Johnny can do those things)

It is very sad that V can't talk to Johnny about this, as the man does blame himself over things he hasn't even done, and he had done enough emotional damage to himself and people around him without that kind of burden on top of it.

6) Johnny's memories are literally false. The attentive reader had to pick this up in my previous point - didn't Johnny die in the hands of Arasaka after they interrogated him? Nope. Nope, and I can say that confidently because,

(drumroll please)

Cyberpunk tabletop sourcebooks! Mike Pondsmith, the creator of the Cyberpunk universe and the TTRP series of games, has worked closely with CDPR writers during the production of the 2077. He oversaw everything, and he says that 2077 is in the same cyberpunk universe too, it's not an 'alternate reality' or anything.

Johnny Silverhand died while trying to buy time for his friends to escape, from a shotgun shot from Adam Smasher. That's it, he died on that floor, there was noone to interrogate, no rooftop helicopter he ran for.

The sequence of 'memories' we see from Johnny's POV in the game is a mishmash of two different assaults on the Arasaka towers, yes towers there were two of them. There is a great video explaining all the small and Major details Johnny's version of events got wrong, because we have the sourcebooks and the text inside. You may accuse me of holding a 'holy canon' argument ... and well, yeah, this is kind of holy knowledge, as it was written for gamemasters.

Still, some of the things in Johnny's version are Major, and while the media certainly covered the whole story extensively with corpo propaganda (oh, btw, Johnny didn't bomb anything, he probably didn't even know there was a nuke involved, he is literally just a scapegoat), there are some holes that a citizen of this world might know and wish to poke. The aforementioned Two Arasaka towers, or the absence of the legendary solo Morgan Blackhand from Johnny's story. Interestingly enough, there is a radiostation of Maximum Mike in-game, who is actually just pretty much Mike Pondsmith, and he does propose a couple of questions the 'official' version of the attack doesn't cover (like, where would a rockerboy even get a nuke, he might have been popular, but that's not just something you find without military contracts, and that means corporations). Another thing is that since Arasaka owns Soulkiller and has had the engram for a couple of decades, it is quite possible they are the ones responsible for messing with Johnny's memories.

So uh, yeah, Johnny is the Most Unrealible Narrator I have ever seen. Johnny of 2077 is most certainly not the Johnny of 2020's, but this might be a good thing. Maybe the 'real' 2020's Silverhand could never have made the progress the engram did, or become such a good friend and companion for V, or maybe he could have done those things too. We'll never know. I really love this story anyway.

#thanks for reading #johnny totally deserves a second chance at life after this why cant he and johnny show alt the finger and delta out of there #so v could live out his days and then johnny would take over #on the other hand johnny is a great example that being an engram is not the end so maybe v could come back in some sort of form later #after giving alt the finger #btw thats not alt either that's probably just an ai that caught little wind of actual alt and just calls itself her #also alt herself might be alive but that story is WEIRD so no idea #cyberpunk lore is great i had an amazing time listening to it and discovering new things #mike pondsmith is also amazing heard a cyberpunk red campaign he mastered and listening to him has been a blast he is a true storyteller #cyberpunk 2077 #cyberpunk red #legends of night city #mike pondsmith #johnny silverhand #phantom liberty #this is the first and last time I praise cdpr after that back to hate for the ps4 version of the game i go #and for refusing to update the game for that platform and for not releasing the dlc for it and for upping the system reqs even higher #ill live to see actual 2077 before I get access to hardware that can run that shit #btw existential horror enjoyers I sure do hope you have heard of SOMA )))#oh i also dont think johnny was that bad in life either like he was bad but rogue and kerry are clearly happy to have him back so the game #must've shown just a very low time for him he had to be a good friend to earn that kind of loyalty still could behave like a bastard tho

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vurelly · 2 years

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i got a new pen and im drawing oc content with it

#my art #oc #delta #wyre #i hAD A BLAST WITH THIS #I KNOW MOST OF YALL DONT CARE ABOUT MY OC CONTENT BUT I COULD GIVE A RATS ASS ABOUT THAT #THIS WAS V FUN AND I LOVE MY OCS

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arojenniferwalters · 1 year

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The Expanse 3x7 V-Delta (2018)

#The expanse #frankie adams #bobbie draper #roberta w draper #theexpanseedit #3x7 v delta

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jsbashirmd · 1 year

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[[ semi-plotted starter for @lietwice

Julian had set it all up months ago. Sisko had been more than unsupportive, and it had turned into a fight which he assumed Garak had noticed, since he'd been so incredibly sweet about soothing him every time he came back to Garak's quarters, all wound up and frustrated by the difficulties xenophobia, politics, and cultural misunderstandings had added to the process. He'd used the services of two different lawyers and made sure everything was airtight. But for all his assumptions about Garak knowing what he was doing, he hadn't ever said a word to him about it. Somehow, that would have felt like more of a declaration than filing the documentation was.

And it hadn't come up, until now.

But now... It couldn't be more obvious that Julian has granted him and subsequently ensured protection of every right that the Federation might give to a spouse. He's lying unconscious, tended to mostly by his Bajoran staff, all of whom look absolutely furious about being forced to allow Garak's presence and to consult him about decisions. Does he want them to try to wake Julian up? His liver took heavy damage and isn't healing well--should they attempt further biological intervention, replace it with a synthetic organ, or wait? It's left up to Garak whether family should be contacted and when. It's Garak who is granted entry into his quarters to take care of any plants or pets he might have (though there aren't any) and who's allowed to stay with him in sick bay past visiting hours. it's Garak who Sisko seeks out to explain the accident and apologize for the bad news.

And it's Garak that Julian calls out for as soon as he finally wakes enough to do so, though the name is garbled by his dry throat and the weakness of his muscles.

#lietwice. garak #c. julian #new thread #s.s. enjoyable company #medical tw #v. main #t. bright young doctor #I'm picturing julian trying to help on a delta quadrant planet and his medical tent getting bombed for his efforts

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