From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Fri Jul 12 2002 - 10:12:56 MDT
Damien Broderick wrote:
>...
>
>but
>the invaluable John Clute says:
>
>`a carefully written, slow-moving story of humans who, having received from
>aliens the gift of IMMORTALITY and a capacity to reinhabit
>imaginatively-through a kind of VIRTUAL REALITY--various epochs of world
>history... find themselves less and less capable of responding to their
>experiences' (ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCIENCE FICTION).
>
>Damien Broderick
>
>
That's not a very good description. The people were totally severed
from their prior bodies (though a few were kept frozen(?) in case
repairment were needed, or someone wanted to return). The people lived
in an artificial world, with sufficient detail to be, if they choose,
indistinguishable from the external world. It starts with a boy and a
girl, appearantly living in a mid-west farm. Fairly quickly they
discover how to split away from their programmed actions (a "zombie" is
left behind to continue, so that other players won't notice anything).
Soon they are teleporting to Honolulu, materializing money ad lib, etc.
Then their imaginations become less traditional. Basically, they can
live in any world they can imagine in sufficient detail for the
underlying computer to create a scenario for. And it's good at putting
together acceptable worlds. They even make one interstellar trip (at
slow time... the ship computer is less powerful and busy) and make
contact with aliens. Who are also living in virtual reality, but also
made a physical trip ... no violation of light speed is assumed, but
lots of nano-tech must underly those computers and the memory storage.
Calling it Virtual Reality is a misnomer. That generally refers to an
reality constructed by providing an alternate feed into the senses.
These folk are more accurately though of as programs inhabiting a
computer, where the I/O channels have been configured so that the
environments that they live in are analogous to those which they
experienced when operating a physical body. And the scenes experienced
are clearly fictions, not historical recreations, though some of the
scenes are historical fictions. You would be more likely to encounter
the 3 Musketeers than any actual frenchman of the period.
They don't become less and less capable of responding to the external
world. They are totally severed from it, and don't even know that it
exists unless they go looking HARD for things like the answers to "Where
did we come from". If they look hard enough, the computer will reveal
the information. As they enter each life, they choose which memories to
take with them. It's more like incarnation than anything else, except
that the computer will tell you what's really going on if you really ask
it to. Unless you REALLY told it to keep things secret from you back
when you knew better how to operate the system. And within this system
it's possible to create viable offspring. But it requires years of
attention, or they will zombie as soon as you depart.
OTOH, I don't know how one could have been fair to it in a brief entry.
The handling of the concepts was a lot different than anything else I
ran across, and it still doesn't have a lot of company, even though we
seem to be headed more or less in the direction he was talking about.
(More or less.)
P.S.: The two central characters spend their time trying to find
something REAL to do with their lives. They don't succeed. Most of the
folk are happy, but the author wants us to identify with the ones that
weren't. Well, possibly that just made a better story.
-- -- Charles Hixson Gnu software that is free, The best is yet to be.
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