Revisiting one's influences

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Fri Mar 30 2001 - 10:53:17 MST


http://web.csuchico.edu/~ah24/day_million.htm

I just came across Frederik Pohl's short story _Day Million_ (1966),
and realised it was one of the sf stories that I read as young that
built my transhumanist view of humanity. It is a nice little story of
boy-meets-girl (almost), and the fun part is that it is both quite
antiquated in our own discourse and still manages to Get It:

        " Go ahead, glare and grumble. Dora doesn't care. If she
        thinks of you at all, her
        thirty-times-great-great-grandfather, she thinks you're a
        pretty primordial sort of brute. You are. Why, Dora is farther
        removed from you than you are from the austra- lopithecines of
        five thousand centuries ago. You could not swim a second in
        the strong currents of her life. You don't think progress goes
        in a straight line, do you? Do you recog- nize that it is an
        ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponen- tial curve? It
        takes hell's own time to get started, but when it goes it goes
        like a bomb. And you, you Scotch-drinking steak- eater in your
        relaxacizing chair, you've just barely lighted the primacord
        of the fuse."

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y



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