From: Max More (max@maxmore.com)
Date: Thu Jul 11 2002 - 01:47:47 MDT
At 02:09 PM 7/11/2002 +1000, Damien wrote:
>And speaking of the upload meme, it occurred to me that the first novel
>with an explicit use of general mind uploading to an artificial substrate
>might be my 1980 sf novel THE DREAMING DRAGONS (now with the preferred
>title THE DREAMING), when it turns out there's a sort of Akashic records
>device, a `gluon lattice denser than neutronium', that has been
>realtime-archiving all human minds since we first evolved. Can anyone think
>of earlier uses in sf of this idea? (I wouldn't be surprised if Lem or
>Stapledon or Wells did so decades ahead of me.)
Surely Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars would count? Although it
was published in that form in 1956, the Encyclopedia of SF suggests that he
began working on the story in 1937.
In that novel's city of Diaspar, the residents of the enclosed, unchanging
society lives for millennia then store their memories for a later
computer-mediated reincarnation.
Max
In the city of Diaspar, we have a totally enclosed and static society,
where people live for a thousand years, then store their memories for some
later computer controlled reincarnation, where anything outside the city is
not only totally ignored, its very existence is practically denied.
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