From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Sep 14 2001 - 20:05:37 MDT
Ken MacLeod's terrific new novel COSMONAUT KEEP (not yet available, I
gather, in the USA) offers a charming account of the silence in the skies.
An alien-engineered asteroid is found, typical of the Oort cloud manifold
of gods:
==========
`They are like the micro-organisms that produce the calcareous mats which
build up to stromatolites... Except that what they build are not stacks of
stone, but something between a larger organism and a computer, to put it
crudely. To put it delicately, they build quasi-organic mechanisms of
incredible beauty and diversity. The basic unit, the builder, is something
like an extremophile nanobacterium. Obviously these are not the seats of
consciousness, any more than our neurones are. Collectively, though, they
build something greater than themselves.' [...]
`They are not a collective mind as a whole - there are more separate minds
in this asteroid than there would be in, let us say, a human Galactic
Empire, if such a thing could be.' [...]
`...there are billions of the fuckers. There are more... communities...
like this around the solar system than there are people on Earth.' [...]
`They're everywhere?'
He shrugged. `Around a lot of stars, yeah, quite possibly. Trafficking,
communicating, maybe even travelling. They have conscious control over
their own outgassing, they have computing power to die for, and it only
takes a nudge to change their orbits. It might take millions of years
between stars, sure, but these guys have a long attention span.'
`And what do they actually do?'
`From the point of view of us busy little primates, they don't do much.
Hang out and take in the view. Travel around the sun every few million
years. Maybe travel to another sun and go around that a few times.
*Bo*-ring.' He put on a whining, childish voice. `Are we *there* yet? [...]
But from their point of view, they are having fun. Endless, absorbing,
ecstatic and for all I know orgasmic fun. Discourse, intercourse - at their
level it's probably the same fucking thing... They're like gods, man, and
they're literally in heaven. In all their infinite - well, OK, unbounded -
diversity they have, we understand, a pretty unanimous view on one thing.
They don't like spam. [...] As far as they're concerned, we are great
lumbering spambots, corrupted servers, liable at any moment or any megayear
to start turning out millions of pointless, slightly varied replicas of
ourselves. Most of what we're likely to want to do if we expanded seriously
into space is spam. Space industries - spam. Moravec uploads - spam on a
plate. Von Neumann machines - spam and chips. Space settlements - spam,
spam, spam, eggs and spam.'
`[...] Where all this gets political is that it didn't take long for us to
realize that the ultimate engine of spam is capitalism. Endless expansion
is the great capitalist wet-dream, and it's totally incompatible with the
way the universe really is. It's certainly incompatible with what the
overwhelmingly dominant form of intelligent life is willing to accept.
Quite frankly, I'm no Part hack myself but the fact of the matter is that
the Party's aim of a steady-state society with a bit of sustainable,
careful, non-invasive space exploration is the only kind of society tat the
aliens are likely to be happy with. [...] The dream you guys have of
treating the solar system as raw material for orbital mobile homes, guns
and beer-cans is *right out*.'
=================
Screams of outrage and pain should be directed to
Ken MacLeod <ken@libertaria.demon.co.uk>
from whose novel I quote without permission; bear in mind also, as usual,
that *MacLeod* did not make the statements cited above, his *fictional
characters* did. I strongly recommend the book, and look forward to its
sequels (and how often can you say that about sequels?).
Damien Broderick
[spam, perhaps, in the great scheme of things]
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