From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Sun Apr 07 2002 - 18:46:15 MDT
I see on boing-boing.net that list member Charlie Stross has a new
short story collection published, Toast: and Other Rusted Futures.
The boing-boing site has an excerpt from one of the stories, Jury Service,
co-written by Cory Doctorow, which I thought sounded pretty good:
Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first
century.
Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most
part, they are happy with their lot, living in a preserve at the bottom
of a gravity well. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining one
or another of the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar
system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the
sun. Except for the solitary lighthouse beam that perpetually tracks
the Earth in its orbit, the system from outside resembles a spherical
fogbank radiating in the infrared spectrum; a matrioshke brain, nested
Dyson orbitals built from the dismantled bones of moons and planets.
The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar-system has largely sworn
off its pre-post-human cousins dirtside, but its minds sometimes
wander nostalgiawise. When that happens, it casually spams Earth's
RF spectrum with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies
that emulsify whole industries, cultures and spiritual systems.
A sane species would ignore these get-evolved-quick schemes, but
there's always *someone* who'll take a bite from the forbidden Cox
Pippin. There's always someone whom evolution has failed to breed
the let's-lick-the-frozen-fencepost instinct out of. There's always a
fucking geek who'll do it because it's a historical goddamned technical
fucking imperative.
Whether the enlightened, occulting smartcloud sends out its missives as
pranks, poison or care-packages is up for debate. Asking it to explain
its motives roughly as pointful as negotiating with an ant colony to
get it to abandon your kitchen. Whatever the motive, humanity would
be much better off if the Cloud would evolve into something so smart
as to be uninterested in communicating with meatpeople.
But until that happy day, there's the tech jury service: Defending
the earth from the scum of the post-singularity patent office.
This scenario is a bit reminiscent of the Ken MacLeod books where SIs
on Jupiter were beaming toxic viral memes towards the earth. Only here
they are less obviously malicious, perhaps meant to goose the Luddites
on Earth into taking the Big Leap. The disparaging characterization
of those receptive to these messages seems a little unfair, but perhaps
reasonable from the POV of a culture which has evolved a strong defense
mechanism against the techno utopia which lies just offshore.
I don't know how much of this is Cory and how much Charlie, but the
writing here sounds strong and imaginative. Charlie has a blog at
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blosxom.cgi, and the book is available
at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154137/charlieswebsi-20.
Hal
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