From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Jul 11 2002 - 20:24:41 MDT
At 09:12 AM 7/11/02 -0500, steve van sickle wrote:
>I could only get about half-way through before giving up in disgust,
>precisely because I *didn't* think it thought things through.
>I started making up a list of weapons that would not be effected:
>non-conventional weapons not currently in use that are more deadly and
>indescriminant than those used now, such as nerve gas and nuclear weapons.
Some of this is addressed in the part of the novel you didn't read. It's
550 pages long. They were unlikely to put all the ideas in the first half.
>I cannot see how it would be a happier world.
I think this badly misunderstands the nature of sf novels intended to
explore a `novum' (Darko Suvin's term for a radical sf disruption in
conventional experience).
It might be that Clarke and K-Mac had designs of this kind on the readers
(their parody of gun-fanciers suggests this strongly), but the point is
reiterated in the novel that *the discovery is accidental*. It's not a
novel about a coven of `liberal gun haters' who set out to find a way to
snatch the god-given weapons of free men. Rather, it asks: what happens if
one of the accepted *realpolitik* verities of our culture is removed by a
chance technological finding. For a long time in the narrative, it's just
an empirical quirk, something nobody even begins to understand using any
principled science. When that understanding finally emerges, then indeed--
But I won't spoil the ending.
My reason for mentioning the book here is that it takes an apparently zany
idea--like `what if we could upload our minds from flesh to silicon', or
`what if we have machines the size of large molecule that can *make
anything we want*, including free food, clothing and poison gas'--and runs
with it, placing the projected events in a moderately detailed thought-out
realistic political/military setting. (I found myself reading parts of it
as THE WEST WING GOES TO MARS.)
Damien Broderick
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