Ramex Naam’s Nexus Arc has become wildly popular since I read the first installment back in early 2013. I’ve enjoyed this series and would recommend it to pretty much anyone interested in near-future scifi, but I have to admit that Apex was a rather lukewarm finale. While Naam has created a vibrant speculative landscape full […]
“Su-Yong Shu died in pieces. Li-hua watched in fascination as the diagnostics became more and more erratic, as her simulated brain became aware of what was happening, as activity spiked, even as each fragment of her was collapsed and written in triplicate to the waiting diamondoid cubes. What are you thinking in there? Li-hua wondered. […]
Having worked my way through almost all of Neal Stephenson’s novels, I’ve come to recognize a phenomenon I call The Stephenson Guarantee: You don’t know what any Stephenson book will be like before you crack it open, but you can be assured it won’t be like anything else. The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s […]
“The ‘Blight,’ that was the other common name for the Perversion, and closer to Old One’s view. For all the Perversion’s transcendence, its life style was more similar to a disease than anything else. Maybe that had helped to fool Old One. But now Pham could see: the Blight lived in pieces, across extraordinary reaches […]
Max More and Natasha Vita-More’s The Transhumanist Reader is probably the single best source for readers interested in a crash course in transhumanist philosophy. It presents more than forty essays addressing myriad aspects of transhumanist theory, with a good mixture of classic (i.e. pre-21st-century) papers and contemporary ones. It is a dense text containing a […]
There are plenty of reasons why I should hate (or at least vehemently dislike) Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, but I was surprised by this novel’s ability to ingratiate itself to me despite propounding a set of perspectives and values that seem anathema to mine. I am neither a military enthusiast nor a scholar of […]
“The mind’s a weird piece of business.” ––Runaway: Stories, by Alice Munro, pg. 308 “If you can accept that a person without a penis can peaceably live life as they please (including as a man), then you should be able to accept that a person without a physical form can peaceably live life as […]
“That is what happens. You put something away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of […]
“This is our birthplace though, this is what we deserted long ago. This is where we used to live, on balls of dust and rock like this. This is our home town from before we felt the itch of wanderlust, the sticks we inhabited before we ran away from home, the cradle where we were […]
I came to this book by way of science fiction author Peter Watts, whose excellent novel Blindsight was influenced by Thomas Metzinger’s philosophy. The Ego Tunnel is the best book I’ve read about consciousness since Antonio Damasio’s Self Comes to Mind. Damasio and Metzinger have much in common, but I ultimately prefer Metzinger’s approach; as a neuroscientist, […]