Books this year: a book diary

I tried in vain to find a cover to put here that wasn’t all mass-media and space opera, because I know that some of you guys talk trash about “genre fiction”. I failed.

Anyhow, A Fire Upon the Deep was one of the most incredible, thought-provoking books I’ve ever read. The intricate plot is galactic in scale and impossible to summarize, so I’m going to gloss right over the story and talk about the backdrop, which is where Vinge shines. (Who cares about story anyways?)

Vinge believes in writing plausible hard science fiction, but believes that the technological singularity will happen before the middle of this century, making it impossible for anyone to really set a hard science fiction novel very far in the future. In some Vinge’s novels, such as Rainbows End, he stays away from the prediction wall by writing about the near future. In others, like A Fire Upon the Deep,  he’ll invoke a singularity-stopping deus ex machina. In this case, it’s laws of physics which don’t permit AI in our part of the universe.

So the galaxy is stratified. There are slow parts of the galaxy where people can’t get much more sophisticated than we are now. There are other parts where faster-than-light travel and all kinds of fancy AI are possible. Most races, given enough time, colonize the more permissive parts of the galaxy, experience a technological singularity, and then “transcend” into different kinds of existence, becoming angel/demon-like “powers” first, and then disappearing, for reasons that mere mortals could never understand.

And so this story is populated with everything from god-like creatures to unsophisticated bottom dwellers of the universe who make centuries-long voyages in “coldsleep” while civilizations and singularities pass them by.

It’s bewildering. After every two chapters or so I had to put it down and gaze at the wall, glassy-eyed, and contemplate the true possibilities of our future.

Our civilization’s history, mercifully free of planetary catastrophes and other game-changers, has always had me believe in a sort of unilineal cultural history of planets, culminating in a technological singularity and then happiness ever after.

Vinge, with a visionary mathematician’s erudition, took care to demolish my pompous simplicity with a half a dozen compelling examples of the different ways that a planet’s history might turn out incredibly weird. The combinitorics are unfathomable. Who the fuck knows what’s going to happen.

I was sick of the RSS, all out of internets, desperate to find something new, and I did a Google search for a whole lot of things I’m interested in, hoping to find some blog or news article that dealt with them all. I searched for something like “Ron Paul Singularity Esperanto Star Trek Topo Chico.” It wasn’t exactly those words, but it was similar. I found Industrial Society and its Future, which is commonly referred to as “The Unabomber Manifesto”. I got a copy for my kindle, and read the thing in two bewildered days.

The book is amazing. Kaczynski says: (1) Man has been warped by civilization, and is generally less happy than his primitive forebearers (agreed), (2) most careers and modern obsessions are surrogates for the things that we were really made to do (agreed), (3) liberals and conservatives are both wrong, and we need to tear the whole system down (agreed), (4) there is a time coming, 40 to 100 years from now, when we will become something post-human (agreed), and (5) because a compromise between our technological civilization and human dignity and freedom cannot be reached, there must be a revolution, now, before it’s too late, and we must intentionally force another dark ages (disagreed).

This last belief (apparently) is what led Kaczynski to start murdering advertising and computer science people. I can’t help but think I could talk him out of it. I wonder if this he’d write me back if I wrote to him in prison.