From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Dec 15 1999 - 11:27:15 MST
Impressive thinking; I have always admired Lem's writings. Thanks
Damien for bringing it up, it is often tricky to find translations of
Lem.
Damien Broderick <d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au> writes:
> Lem critiques several aspects of Stapledon's two billion year future
> history, noting almost in passing that its repeated total regressions in
> progress is implausible but constructed for the literary reason that taking
> into account genuinely expectable change would have made it impossible to
> write the novel (as Vinge realized much later):
This problem of exponentials surpassing the writer seems to have been
(subconsciously?) noted by several authors, I'm not sure how
independent they are from Vinge. For example, in very many future
histories the technology is kept at a "reasonable" level by the cliche
of World War III/The Great Disaster/etc that delayed or set back
technological growth a few centuries, just enough so that the author
gets the right technological level in 2500 or so. It is seldom clear
if they did it because they wanted some drama in the history or if
they did it just to keep the story/world understandable, but quite
often it seems to be the later. A good example of the view, in this
case nanotechnology applied to roleplaying settings, can be found at
http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/sfmay99.html Even in the case
where the author deliberately included the full effects, he chose to
make nanotech something only the other side used.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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