From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Jul 11 2002 - 19:50:27 MDT
At 12:47 AM 7/11/02 -0700, Max wrote:
>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.
True, but that's not really *uploading*, it's just storing frozen patterns.
Someone else's reference to *2001* is more relevant, but that was just a
throw-away line rather than integral to the plot. And as I mentioned
several years ago, the idea of mapping minds into machine storage and then
`energy fields' was deployed at least as early as J.G. Ballard's amazing
story `The Waiting Grounds' (1959):
Deep Time: ...Now they have left the Milky Way... have extended their
physiological dependence upon electronic memory banks which store the
atomic and molecular patterns within their bodies, transmit them outward at
the speed of light, and later re-assemble them.
Deep time: ...Now, too, they have finally shed their organic forms and are
composed of radiating electromagnetic fields, the primary energy
sub-stratum of the universe, complex networks of multiple dimensions, alive
with the constant tremor of the sentient messages they carry, bearing the
life-ways of the race.
To power these fields, they have harnessed entire galaxies riding the
wave-fronts of the stellar explosions out toward the terminal helixes of
the universe.
Deep Time: ...They are beginning to dictate the form and dimensions of the
universe... The universe is now almost filled by the great vibrating mantle
of ideation, a vast shimmering harp which has completely translated itself
into pure wave form, independent of any generating source.
As the universe pulses slowly, its own energy vortices flexing and
dilating, so the force-fields of the ideation mantle flex and dilate in
sympathy, growing like an embryo within the womb of the cosmos, a child
which will soon fill and consume its parent.
But again, that just mentions the vista; it doesn't *use* it. (Arguably, my
own book only just *barely* uses it...)
Damien Broderick
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