Three Worlds Collide by Eliezer Yudkowsky

I'm back and better that ever!  If you like it here, you might also want to mosey on over to my other blog, which is the same thing only for music videos.  www.blogger.com/musicvideoperdiem

Today I review a book published on the internet.  You yourself can read it here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/y5/the_babyeating_aliens_18/

It's not a spoiler at all to say that the first aliens that the humans meet eat their own young.  The title of part one is "The Baby-Eating Aliens" and it mentions those aliens in the description.  These aliens spawn thousands of babies and then eat them when they would be preteens as far as development goes.  It's not like the babies they eat are without intelligence, either.  They're about the same as human children.  Is this some strange fanatic sect on this planet?  No.  It's just how the aliens are culturally.  Their word for "good" translates as "baby-eating".  This is a stark contrast to aliens who have moral systems identical to ours and only have a few cultural quirks.  The author even wrote a separate article about how aliens in most science fiction stories are just human counterparts, no matter how funny-looking they are: http://lesswrong.com/lw/so/humans_in_funny_suits/

The book, of course, deals with rationality, something that the entire rest of the website is about.  The interesting part, though, is how different the two sets of aliens are from us.  It's almost hard to imagine living as one of the baby eating aliens or the super happy people, who are the second set of aliens encountered.  I won't spoil it, but I liked the first ending a lot better than the "true" ending, even though the latter was supposed to be the happy ending.  I really didn't see what was wrong with the... alterations.

All in all, it was a good book.  Impeccably written, Three Worlds Collide told a fun story with aliens who will most likely be on my mind for weeks to come as I try to imagine being among them.