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Read Dark As Day (2003)

Dark as Day (2003)

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Rating
3.8 of 5 Votes: 1
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ISBN
0812580311 (ISBN13: 9780812580310)
Language
English
Publisher
tor science fiction

Dark As Day (2003) - Plot & Excerpts

Why I read this book: Fictionwise/eReader released their software as a free download for iPhones, and I was pleased to be able to read books I hadn't look at in years. Dark as Day seemed particularly interesting, so I checked it out from the MCPL as well. Charles Sheffield was my favorite American Hard SF author from the late 1990s until his death in 2002. (The only other likely candidate is Ted Chiang, but he's a lot less prolific.) Like Stephen Baxter, he packed his books with interesting ideas; unlike Baxter, he did a good job of creating likable characters, and he portrayed politics that make sense outside of fever dreams.My only real complaint about Sheffield is that in one book (which I won't name for fear of spoilage), he set up some fascinating problems and then cheated on the solutions. This is particularly anathema to me in Hard SF. I think it put me off him a little.Like most modern SF books, the story is told in multiple threads. In this case, there are three threads, two of them centered around women. I don't recall women having such a high profile in Sheffield before (except for Jeanie Roker, the narrator of the McAndrew stories), and was amused by a quote on page 330: "It would seem that all the major actions in your life are entirely dictated by women."Dark as Day was particularly interesting to me because it deals with attempts to predict the future of civilization with computer models; a very good friend of mine is working on a nonfiction book on similar themes, and reading my friend's book has changed my view of such efforts. Indeed, I found it hard to suspend my disbelief until I reached the end of the book.The book ends well; I found it more and more difficult to put down, to the point that I was afraid to pick it up at night because I might stay up too late. (I was right; I was incredibly tired last night but couldn't stop.) There are some nitpicky problems, and it can be argued that Sheffield cheated a little, but I didn't mind.(Finished 2008-09-05 0:28EDT.)

What do You think about Dark As Day (2003)?

By far the most interesting and ultimately disappointing part of this book is the detection and attempt at decipherment of a SETI signal. Sheffield made a genuine, if novice attempt at presenting the challenges such a task would require.(view spoiler)[Milly Woo discovered the signal by visually analyzing a signal flagged by an automated system. Then she joined a team of smart people collaborating to decode the message. So far so good.For some reason, the structure of the message was such that it had no clear beginning, just a circular jumble of chapters, in no particular order. This is not what a SETI message would contain. A SETI message would start at a prominent beginning, like a book. Like characters in linear a story, it would introduce all concepts in an order that allows the reader to follow along. Starting with numbers, moving to arithmetic, etc. Sheffield mentions this ramp-up approach to decoding, but for whatever reason ignored the lesson when he imagined his message.He also ignored many basics from computer science. Instead of being separated by a short terminator, like the null terminator of a C-string, his message chapters are delineated by both a start and a stop codon, like DNA. This is pointless because DNA has exons, where as an alien message would not.Finally, the reader never learns ANYTHING important from the message! After the final reveal, the alien message is shown to have been completely unimportant to the plot! (hide spoiler)]
—Gendou

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