Reseña de ARC: The Outside

 +e-ARC gently provided by Netgalley and Angry Robot in exchange for an honest review+

The Outside 

by 

Ada Hoffmann

400 pages

Published June 11th 2019 by Angry Robot

ISBN: 0857668137 (ISBN13: 9780857668134)

Edition Language: English

BLURB:  Humanity's super-intelligent AI Gods brutally punish breaches in reality, as one young scientist discovers, in this intense and brilliant space opera.
Autistic scientist Yasira Shien has developed a radical new energy drive that could change the future of humanity. But when she activates it, reality warps, destroying the space station and everyone aboard. The AI Gods who rule the galaxy declare her work heretical, and Yasira is abducted by their agents. Instead of simply executing her, they offer mercy - if she'll help them hunt down a bigger target: her own mysterious, vanished mentor. With her homeworld's fate in the balance, Yasira must choose who to trust: the gods and their ruthless post-human angels, or the rebel scientist whose unorthodox mathematics could turn her world inside out.

3.5 the truth is not always there stars

 

En "The Outside" la autora explora el espacio y más allá bajo la mirada de una cientifica autista lesbiana, con elementos lovecraftianos aunados a una sociedad futurista donde unas Inteligencias Artificiales han ascendido al estatus de dioses encargados de dirigir el destino de la humanidad y les han llevado a las estrellas.

Esto conlleva a un planteamiento del pensamiento y como es la realidad del universo.

Yasira esta probando un nueva forma de energia creada por humanos en 2791, a diferencia de la tecnologia que es manejada solamente por los dioses (antiguas megacomputadoras que de alguna forma alcanzaron una conciencia hace mucho tiempo) , cuando se cumple su presentimiento de que algo va a salir fatal .

Es entonces que se ve separada de todo lo conocido y los angeles de Nemesis, la diosa que castiga a los herejes, encabezados por Akavi le dan la mision de descubrir el paradero de su antigua mentora y detener esta destrucción provocada por The Outside.

La verdad es que se me hizo pesado el libro, no es que sea malo, sino que hay que estar muy en onda de meterse en el tema de lo que es no realidad y toda la seudociencia que aparece por aqui, pero más que nada fue que en ningun momento consegui que me simpatizara la protagonista: Yasira. Y coincido de paso con lo que dijeron otros comentaristas que ella no parece realmente que fuera autista como se publicita tanto (pese a que la autora comparte esto).  Todo el estres no es más que el que sentiria cualquiera al verse enfrentada a situaciones semejantes. Otra cosa que molesta bastante en este personaje es que a su pareja, Tiv, se refiere durante tooodo el libro como "una buena chica" en tono ironico y hasta me parece que peyorativo.

Lo que si me intersó , por otra parte en este libro , fue la idea de los dioses artificiales (aunque, vale , la idea no es que sea tan nueva puesto que los autores como Asimov ya se lo planteaban en 1950s, y varias series de los 60s ya lo ponian), pero me hubiese gustado que se extendieran más con eso. Akavi tambien me parecio un personaje interesante, al igual que como se planteaba su realacion con los su supervisora y los otros angeles bajo su comando como Elu y Enga.

Merece que le den una oportunida y a ver que les parece.

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original review in english:

Yasira Shien is a scientist working in a new human tech in a spacial station in 2791 when all goes terrible wrong. Now the gods and angels give her another assignment.

It is not a bad book, but in my case it made me go uphill to finish reading it. It is probably because my neurons were not on par with the pseudoscience that appears here, but in large part it was because I could not connect at any time with the protagonist: Yasira. It didn't matter to me what happened to her. What would have interested me to know more about me was about the computer system and the angels.

Supercomputers as gods is not something new in the world of science fiction. Asimov employed several of them in stories of the 50s managing Humanity. These AIs took humans to the stars to poblate other planets. They still need humans.

The Gods rewarded people when they died; that was part of the point of Gods. They collected souls and sorted them. Souls were somewhat diffuse, and even Gods couldn’t data-mine all the specific details of a single life. But souls took on patterns, and the Gods’ technology could recognize those patterns. They could discern the deepest passions that had driven a person through their life. And when the Gods chose souls to become part of Themselves, to keep Themselves running, they chose by matching the soul’s pattern to the most appropriate God. Hence Aletheia, who took the people driven by a thirst for knowledge. Techne, who took engineers and artists, people devoted to creation in its every form. And so on down the list, from Gods like Arete who took brave heroes, to Gods who took the worst of the worst.

Here the 'Angels' are the gods little helpers.

Angels themselves were another thing entirely. More than half of an angel’s brain was God-built, the old neurons burned away in favor of something immortal and impartial. To become an angel, a human abandoned everything. Went off into the sky and lived out that long life doing only and entirely the Gods’ bidding.

The Outside menace all.

Like any other aspect of the universe, the idea of Outside appears in many non-human cultures. Often this is not apparent at first glance: the requisite concepts are frequently taboo, esoteric, or situated in the guise of myth and fiction. However, any culture studied in sufficient detail will yield up a word, and often a fairly sophisticated system of safeguards and protections, for the things in this universe which are inherently incomprehensible to sentient minds. The semantics of the word chosen can be culturally informative. My favorite, of course, is the spider term: Îsîrinin-neri-înik, or that which eats reality.

-About Yasira: I agree with other reviewers that the fact that Yasira was autistic is not consistent with how she faces the events in the plot of the story, although perhaps it is intended to demonstrate on the other hand that this makes her more able to think differently from the rest or more susceptible to the Outside. Besides, it grate on that Yasira kept referring to her partner -Tiv- all the time as a 'good girl'. It's been a while since I've been mad that the media insists that all good people are idiots.

In another hand, Akavi (the angel of Nemesis) is very interesting, as well as his interactions with the oversees, Elu, and Enga (whom stole the plot a couple of times).

And the Outside, well, the mumble grumble about warped reality, and the apatic monsters in the deep, and all depends of perception were interesting too, but sort of repetitive at the end.

At the end, I sort of wished that they eliminate /SPOILER--->the evil scientist but maybe it will be a next book, I don't know<---SPOILER/[the evil scientist but maybe it will be a next book, I don't know. (hide spoiler)]

Not bad, not bad at all.

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