From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Thu Jul 11 2002 - 11:35:49 MDT
Damien Broderick 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..
>
>Damien Broderick
>
>
Someone has already mentioned Arthur C. Clarke's The City and The Stars (there was an earlier version, but I can't remember it's name). The city was called Diaspar in both versions, but I'm not sure that the original version had as much uploading. In these books the uploaded personalities are not active, but only stored.
The first story where I noticed uploading as a major theme of the story was "The Eden Cycle", I don't remember the author, it was from the mid-60's to early 70's. The uploaded personalities lived in a virtual reality so complete that they essentially lost all contact with the external reality. The story revolves around the incarnations of a couple that decide that they want to return to the exterior world. At the end of the book, they have failed in an attempt, and are at the start of the next attempt. (They actually got out, but then the woman was severely hurt in an accident, and there was nobody except her partner to help, so back into simulation where she could be saved, for another series of incarnations so that they would be better prepared.) Time appearantly ran much faster within the virtual reality than in the exterior world, as there were still many traces of the prior civilization when the characters emerged from the upload state, and that had been a large (uncounted, but large) number of lif
etimes ago.
-- -- Charles Hixson Gnu software that is free, The best is yet to be.
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