From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Fri Jul 12 2002 - 03:31:40 MDT
On Thu, Jul 11, 2002 at 02:09:30PM +1000, 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
> might be my 1980 sf novel THE DREAMING DRAGONS (now with the preferred
> title THE DREAMING)
John Varley used it explicitly in his novelette "Overdrawn at the Memory
Bank" which, IIRC, was published in 1974. I'm not sure he used uploading
into an artificial substrate -- as opposed to recording memories for later
replay into a cloned body -- in his 1976 novel, "The Ophiuchi Hotline",
but it wouldn't surprise me.
Part of the problem with pinning down the first appearance of the
upload meme in SF is that John W. Campbell had a tendency to fall for
junk science, from dianetics to the Dean drive by way of psionics;
thus, much SF published in the 1960's-early 1970's had an emphasis on
humans with non-physically-mediated super powers such as telepathy.
(Can we call telepathy a junk meme? When defined in traditional terms
as a form of ESP, then almost certainly yes: but if you think uploading
is possible, some form of machine-mediated mind to mind communication
ought to be possible, if not desirable ... direct mind access _is_ the
ultimate user interface, after all.)
-- Charlie
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