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Postsingular
It all begins next year in California. A maladjusted computer industry billionaire and a somewhat crazy US President initiate a radical transformation of the world through sentient nanotechnology; sort of the equivalent of biological artificial intelligence. At first they succeed, but their plans are reversed by Chu, an autistic boy. The next time it isn't so easy to stop them. Most of the story takes place in a world after a heretofore unimaginable transformation, where all the things look the same but all the people are different (they're able to read each others' minds, for starters). Travel to and from other nearby worlds in the quantum universe is possible, so now our world is visited by giant humanoids from another quantum universe, and some of them mean to tidy up the mess we've made. Or maybe just run things.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published October 2, 2007
94 people are currently reading
1213 people want to read
About the author
Rudy Rucker
194 books581 followersRudolf von Bitter Rucker is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and one of the founders of the cyberpunk genre. He is best known for his Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which won Philip K. Dick awards. Presently, Rudy Rucker edits the science fiction webzine Flurb.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 137 reviews
February 13, 2009
The author is a ex-drug addict, a Mondo 2000 alumnus, a professor of advanced mathematics, a key figure in the creation of cyberpunk (he preferred the term "Transrealist") a 2 to the 3rd (minus two) descendant of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a multi-PKD award winning novelist and completely obsessed with cuttlefish.
What could possibly go wrong?
What could possibly go wrong?
January 21, 2013
Speculation about the future is often a problem of calibration. It’s difficult to dial in our predictions. Sometimes we are too optimistic, too expansive, allowing our imaginations to run away with the plot. Sometimes we are too cynical, too cautious, and end up failing to see what was so obvious in hindsight. Whatever the mode of the day, however, as a species we remain pretty bad at predicting the future. Where’s my flying car?
Indeed, how often do we see the future coming? Yet we insist on prognosticating. No one is more obnoxious in this regard than the Singularity movement, which believes that we will eventually develop an artificial intelligence of high enough calibre that it will be able to begin improving itself exponentially. At that point, we can no longer predict the future in any meaningful way, because the AI will completely alter human existence. Or so the thinking goes.
As its name implies, Postsingular is Rudy Rucker’s attempt to peer beyond the veil of the Singularity. It’s not so much a straight-up meditation upon a possible postsingular society so much as a bizarre, metaphorical look at the implications of mastering quantum mechanics once and for all. This novel is weird. From the first chapter, with the antagonistic “nants” that threaten the Earth and humanity, Rucker establishes a vocabulary and atmosphere all his own. The next chapter brings in the “orphids”, nanomachines similar to but somewhat more benevolent than the nants. From there, Rucker draws the reader down an infinitely-long, ever narrowing rabbit hole.
The orphids blanket the world in a network of tiny quantum computers, connecting humanity like they’ve never been connected before. It’s fun to watch Rucker explore the implications of this development, from the destruction of privacy and traditional notions of economy and employment to the evolution of literature, entertainment, and reputation. One can watch anyone else by experiencing what the orphids on that person’s body are experiencing. It’s a creepy, voyeuristic consequence of using self-replicating machines to network the world.
It’s also worth noting that the creation of the orphidnet isn’t something initiated by governments or even any one organization. A company develops the orphids, but they get released by one man in a moment of rash optimism—and they change everything. In this respect, Rucker captures the often overlooked fact that critical change can come from the choices an individual makes. New technologies and services spring up from contributions of people who have very little power or influence in the more conventional sense—but because of their pervasive nature and usefulness, they hang on, grow, and soon become essential.
Postsingular runs into problems mostly because, despite all these fascinating ideas, its characters are thinner than the density of orphids in one square millimetre. From the laughably moustache-twirling Jeff Luty to the unsympathetic Ond Lundquist and the rather unimpressive Jayjay and Thuy, Rucker manages to create characters who have very little going for them. I wish I could say that I admired Thuy’s self-possession and determination—for she does possess them—but I was mostly annoyed by the way Rucker kept moving the goal post of the plot in a mistaken attempt at revelation. Foreshadowing was present but patchy at best.
I kept thinking I had figured out what was going on. But Postsingular runs into the problem that Charles Stross, another big name in the Singularity circle, has written about at some length (though I can’t quite find a link at the moment). Basically, when a writer extrapolates nanotechnology and mastery of quantum mechanics to the point where it is sufficiently advanced to be magic, they stop writing science fiction and have instead entered the realm of fantasy, albeit with futuristic trappings. Note that there is nothing wrong with this per se. But for addicts of so-called “hard” science fiction like myself, there is something so disappointing about being lured in by the promise of artificial intelligence only to discover a gooier, softer science fiction than one was expecting.
Postsingular is clever and creative and, yeah, quite original. Its writing isn’t great, though, and it suffers from an exhaustion of genre. Just as dystopia has oversaturated the young adult market, the Singularity’s shadow has dominated science fiction for some time now, nudging aside cyberpunk. Although the occasional writer can shine the occasional dim light on a new corner, most of what made the Singularity so fascinating and unique has already been explored (I just haven’t read it all yet!). I confess that I’m a little tapped out. And this book doesn’t do much to get me excited about our machine overlords again.
Indeed, how often do we see the future coming? Yet we insist on prognosticating. No one is more obnoxious in this regard than the Singularity movement, which believes that we will eventually develop an artificial intelligence of high enough calibre that it will be able to begin improving itself exponentially. At that point, we can no longer predict the future in any meaningful way, because the AI will completely alter human existence. Or so the thinking goes.
As its name implies, Postsingular is Rudy Rucker’s attempt to peer beyond the veil of the Singularity. It’s not so much a straight-up meditation upon a possible postsingular society so much as a bizarre, metaphorical look at the implications of mastering quantum mechanics once and for all. This novel is weird. From the first chapter, with the antagonistic “nants” that threaten the Earth and humanity, Rucker establishes a vocabulary and atmosphere all his own. The next chapter brings in the “orphids”, nanomachines similar to but somewhat more benevolent than the nants. From there, Rucker draws the reader down an infinitely-long, ever narrowing rabbit hole.
The orphids blanket the world in a network of tiny quantum computers, connecting humanity like they’ve never been connected before. It’s fun to watch Rucker explore the implications of this development, from the destruction of privacy and traditional notions of economy and employment to the evolution of literature, entertainment, and reputation. One can watch anyone else by experiencing what the orphids on that person’s body are experiencing. It’s a creepy, voyeuristic consequence of using self-replicating machines to network the world.
It’s also worth noting that the creation of the orphidnet isn’t something initiated by governments or even any one organization. A company develops the orphids, but they get released by one man in a moment of rash optimism—and they change everything. In this respect, Rucker captures the often overlooked fact that critical change can come from the choices an individual makes. New technologies and services spring up from contributions of people who have very little power or influence in the more conventional sense—but because of their pervasive nature and usefulness, they hang on, grow, and soon become essential.
Postsingular runs into problems mostly because, despite all these fascinating ideas, its characters are thinner than the density of orphids in one square millimetre. From the laughably moustache-twirling Jeff Luty to the unsympathetic Ond Lundquist and the rather unimpressive Jayjay and Thuy, Rucker manages to create characters who have very little going for them. I wish I could say that I admired Thuy’s self-possession and determination—for she does possess them—but I was mostly annoyed by the way Rucker kept moving the goal post of the plot in a mistaken attempt at revelation. Foreshadowing was present but patchy at best.
I kept thinking I had figured out what was going on. But Postsingular runs into the problem that Charles Stross, another big name in the Singularity circle, has written about at some length (though I can’t quite find a link at the moment). Basically, when a writer extrapolates nanotechnology and mastery of quantum mechanics to the point where it is sufficiently advanced to be magic, they stop writing science fiction and have instead entered the realm of fantasy, albeit with futuristic trappings. Note that there is nothing wrong with this per se. But for addicts of so-called “hard” science fiction like myself, there is something so disappointing about being lured in by the promise of artificial intelligence only to discover a gooier, softer science fiction than one was expecting.
Postsingular is clever and creative and, yeah, quite original. Its writing isn’t great, though, and it suffers from an exhaustion of genre. Just as dystopia has oversaturated the young adult market, the Singularity’s shadow has dominated science fiction for some time now, nudging aside cyberpunk. Although the occasional writer can shine the occasional dim light on a new corner, most of what made the Singularity so fascinating and unique has already been explored (I just haven’t read it all yet!). I confess that I’m a little tapped out. And this book doesn’t do much to get me excited about our machine overlords again.
November 28, 2010
The first chapter should have warned me away. Half the dialogue amounted to:
"Let me tell you what cool things this tech we've been working on together can do!"
"I know. Now let me tell you something else!"
"Isn't this fantastic that we can keep telling each other things we should both already know so we can bring the audience up to speed!"
This kind of obvious exposition is one of my pet peeves of bad writing, largely because it pushes the reader out of the story. The writing got better as the book moved along, but not by much. It is rather flat throughout the entire novel. Rucker seems desperate to convince his readers that the science in his science fiction is plausible so he spends more time on that than on developing characters and giving them convincing emotions and motives. Unfortunately, his sacrifice of characters for tech gained him nothing because the more he tried to convince me that this tech was possible and could really happen some day, the more I was convinced it was completely impossible and he was just trying too hard. All this debating over the plausibility of his science repeatedly pushed me out of the story so I could never get lost in the book and just enjoy his characters and plot (which isn't bad and the reason I went with 2 stars rather than 1). If he had convinced me of the technology, it might have made this a three and a book worth reading as a thought piece despite its flaws as a novel, but he never did that and then in the end resorted to something that, in my opinion, amounted to magic, completely invalidating the one thing I thought he was most trying to do.
"Let me tell you what cool things this tech we've been working on together can do!"
"I know. Now let me tell you something else!"
"Isn't this fantastic that we can keep telling each other things we should both already know so we can bring the audience up to speed!"
This kind of obvious exposition is one of my pet peeves of bad writing, largely because it pushes the reader out of the story. The writing got better as the book moved along, but not by much. It is rather flat throughout the entire novel. Rucker seems desperate to convince his readers that the science in his science fiction is plausible so he spends more time on that than on developing characters and giving them convincing emotions and motives. Unfortunately, his sacrifice of characters for tech gained him nothing because the more he tried to convince me that this tech was possible and could really happen some day, the more I was convinced it was completely impossible and he was just trying too hard. All this debating over the plausibility of his science repeatedly pushed me out of the story so I could never get lost in the book and just enjoy his characters and plot (which isn't bad and the reason I went with 2 stars rather than 1). If he had convinced me of the technology, it might have made this a three and a book worth reading as a thought piece despite its flaws as a novel, but he never did that and then in the end resorted to something that, in my opinion, amounted to magic, completely invalidating the one thing I thought he was most trying to do.
October 13, 2019
This was one bizarre novel. Earth and Mars are dismantled by nanomachines and then put back together again in the first dozen pages, and then things get even weirder. There are a lot of neat ideas, and Rucker seems to know his new-age physics (his technobabble game is strong), but the idea of was a bit too much for me. Or maybe I don't take enough drugs. Interestingly, Rucker doesn't seem to be a fan of the now-fashionable idea of uploading minds to a computer simulation:
The writing is unsophisticated (it felt like reading a Young Adult novel), but as an English learner this suited me just fine.
The author has kindly provided this novel free of charge under a Creative Commons license. Thank you!
The writing is unsophisticated (it felt like reading a Young Adult novel), but as an English learner this suited me just fine.
The author has kindly provided this novel free of charge under a Creative Commons license. Thank you!
September 29, 2008
This book took me months to read and I'm not sure whether that's a mark of acclaim or disparagement. This was quite the imaginative story, one that offered a very keen look at a world overrun with nanomachines capable of rewriting reality at the cellular level and the risks and benefits associated with the singularity (ask a physicist).
However, what took me so long to read this book was that Rucker was so focused on the wonders of the technology and the possibilities for it that the story itself lags behind and the characters seem shallow and one-dimensional. I never cared about the young and autistic Chu, I never wanted to know the results of Thuy and Jay-jay's on again/off again love affair because they weren't people. They were constructs used to move the setting along so that Rucker could expound on the next technological wonder that he'd thought up.
As a book about the exciting possibilities of nanotechnology, Rucker has succeeded admirably. As a story though, it leaves a lot to be desired.
However, what took me so long to read this book was that Rucker was so focused on the wonders of the technology and the possibilities for it that the story itself lags behind and the characters seem shallow and one-dimensional. I never cared about the young and autistic Chu, I never wanted to know the results of Thuy and Jay-jay's on again/off again love affair because they weren't people. They were constructs used to move the setting along so that Rucker could expound on the next technological wonder that he'd thought up.
As a book about the exciting possibilities of nanotechnology, Rucker has succeeded admirably. As a story though, it leaves a lot to be desired.
January 26, 2010
This book is a disaster!
I can barely form a coherent reveiew after reading such a waste of ideas. And the truly depresing aspect of the situation is how much potential those ideas had to be explored.
Above all, story and science aside, the characters had no dimension. In character-driven story telling, as this novel attempted to be, this is unacceptable in fiction. The characters were given adult problems and situations to deal with, just pleading for some well written prose and dialogue to fully flesh them out, and instead Rucker presents us with banal speech and character development that is so sparse it might as well be non-existent. In addition, Rucker's presentation of an autistic child as a pivitol character is insulting! Using austism as a plot devise may be excusable if you actually develop your character. Creating a characature of a mental illness is in incredibly bad taste.
Not only are the characters despicably simple, but the prose is unoriginal, the vocabulary is small, and the plot devices feel forced. And to top it all off the "science" is basically a spin of mainstreem buzzwords like "nano" and "quantum" into a nonsensical story that feels more akin to a poorly written Alice in Wonderland than to well written science fiction. When Rucker tries to tackle bigger themes, such as evil, sex, and addiction, it comes accross as being ripped from a script for teaching elementary school children about the ways of the world. Contradictions abound; I stopped asking why and how very early in the book.
Reading writing this bad makes me depressed.
I can barely form a coherent reveiew after reading such a waste of ideas. And the truly depresing aspect of the situation is how much potential those ideas had to be explored.
Above all, story and science aside, the characters had no dimension. In character-driven story telling, as this novel attempted to be, this is unacceptable in fiction. The characters were given adult problems and situations to deal with, just pleading for some well written prose and dialogue to fully flesh them out, and instead Rucker presents us with banal speech and character development that is so sparse it might as well be non-existent. In addition, Rucker's presentation of an autistic child as a pivitol character is insulting! Using austism as a plot devise may be excusable if you actually develop your character. Creating a characature of a mental illness is in incredibly bad taste.
Not only are the characters despicably simple, but the prose is unoriginal, the vocabulary is small, and the plot devices feel forced. And to top it all off the "science" is basically a spin of mainstreem buzzwords like "nano" and "quantum" into a nonsensical story that feels more akin to a poorly written Alice in Wonderland than to well written science fiction. When Rucker tries to tackle bigger themes, such as evil, sex, and addiction, it comes accross as being ripped from a script for teaching elementary school children about the ways of the world. Contradictions abound; I stopped asking why and how very early in the book.
Reading writing this bad makes me depressed.
September 7, 2015
When I was twelve or thirteen years old, I worried about the ecological death of the planet, because that was when ecological concerns were beginning to get a lot of media attention. And it didn't help that I read a lot of science fiction dealing with man-made environmental catastrophes. That was when I learned that science fiction could be scary. (The quasi-documentary "The Hellstrom Chronicles," about the eventual--and according to the movie, inevitable--takeover of the earth by insects scared the heck out of me.)
I hadn't had that feeling of getting the stuff scared out of me since then, but a couple of years ago, when I read Vernor Vinge's essay "The Coming Technological Singularity," was the first time since I was in junior high that I felt deep anxiety from the possibility that the human race was too smart for its own good, and the possibility that we were going to cause our own extinction was not just likely, but according to Vinge, was an almost certainty.
Which bring me to Rudy Rucker's novel Postsingular. Set as it is during the technological singularity that Vinge posits, it's encouraging to read a thoughtful and imaginative sf writer's take on this phenomenon, and to see that he can chart a hopeful (and humorous) path through what is at worst an extinction-level event, and at best, a disaster with totally unknowable consequences. Essentially (I hope this isn't a spoiler), the human race perseveres because it's too sneaky and too random--which is a weird kind of endorsement for our species. But hey, it works.
I hadn't had that feeling of getting the stuff scared out of me since then, but a couple of years ago, when I read Vernor Vinge's essay "The Coming Technological Singularity," was the first time since I was in junior high that I felt deep anxiety from the possibility that the human race was too smart for its own good, and the possibility that we were going to cause our own extinction was not just likely, but according to Vinge, was an almost certainty.
Which bring me to Rudy Rucker's novel Postsingular. Set as it is during the technological singularity that Vinge posits, it's encouraging to read a thoughtful and imaginative sf writer's take on this phenomenon, and to see that he can chart a hopeful (and humorous) path through what is at worst an extinction-level event, and at best, a disaster with totally unknowable consequences. Essentially (I hope this isn't a spoiler), the human race perseveres because it's too sneaky and too random--which is a weird kind of endorsement for our species. But hey, it works.
November 22, 2009
It is difficult to write a review of such a work of unremarkableness. The story is forgettable, the writing unsalted, unbuttered grits, and the science is at best that warped nonsense promulgated by the modern media.Given the credentials of the author, disappointing. He can do better.
January 31, 2019
I only finished this in the sense that I'm not going to read any more. I've liked other books by this author, so disappointed. The characters are caricatures, the "science fiction" is far more fiction than science, in the sense that he invents what ever is needed for the plot, such as it is. In the first chapter, nano machines take apart Mars and Earth, assemble them into super-powerful computers and then put them back exactly how they were, to the point where the people who were turned into both a cloud of nano-dust and a computer simulation are reassembled into themselves thinking the thoughts they had at the time of their dissolution.
Boring.
Boring.
May 30, 2020
The book had its moments, and I’ve read worse; but it started to completely go off the rails about halfway through. What started out as a believable, creative, thought-provoking idea degenerated into utter nonsensical deus-ex-machina moment after moment. By the end, the unbelievable absurdity of everything ruined the creative impulse underlying its initial conception.
January 27, 2020
eh...
March 27, 2009
Damn, but this is a weird book. In one of the first chapters, a fairly typical weird scientist character uses sentient nano-machines to deconstruct the planet Mars, turning it into a giant super-computer shaped like a Dyson sphere. As a result, the entire sky-view of Earth is now in effect the inside of the sphere. One of the scenes in this book that positively gave me the creeps was a description of that sphere being used as a gigantic Imax screen for political propaganda. Imagine looking up to the sky and seeing an enormous politician projected there. The stuff nightmares are made of...
This book is filled with absolutely wonky post-singularity technology. In the same chapter mentioned above, the sentient nano-machines also decide to turn Earth into computronium, using the resulting computing power to generate a virtual version of Earth (yep: Vearth) where everyone can live forever as a virtual simulation. Thankfully, yet another nutty scientist's autistic son has managed to memorize thousands of lines of code that basically throw those nano-bots in reverse, so when the nano-beasties virtualize him, it sets off a chain reaction that negates the whole process and out pops good old Earth again. The kid's nutty scientist dad then develops another variant of sentient nano-beasties that cover everything and everyone on Earth and effectively turn everyone more or less omniscient and telepathic. All of this happens in the first 2 or 3 chapters. It gets weirder after this --- characters traveling to different dimensions and so on --- but I think you get the idea.
In the end, I gave the book just 2 stars. For one, I thought that some of the characters' reactions to all this post-singularity weirdness was way too casual. Most ordinary mortals would have gone into catatonic shock. Even worse, I found the prose style enormously annoying. The book is basically written in the same choppy tone as your average YA novel. The contrast between this style and the subject matter created so much dissonance that I just couldn't focus on the story and ended up skip-reading through the last 50 pages or so. There's a lot of good stuff in this book, and some really interesting characters and concepts, but in the end I couldn't help thinking that a more skilled writer could have done so much more with all those nifty ideas.
This book is filled with absolutely wonky post-singularity technology. In the same chapter mentioned above, the sentient nano-machines also decide to turn Earth into computronium, using the resulting computing power to generate a virtual version of Earth (yep: Vearth) where everyone can live forever as a virtual simulation. Thankfully, yet another nutty scientist's autistic son has managed to memorize thousands of lines of code that basically throw those nano-bots in reverse, so when the nano-beasties virtualize him, it sets off a chain reaction that negates the whole process and out pops good old Earth again. The kid's nutty scientist dad then develops another variant of sentient nano-beasties that cover everything and everyone on Earth and effectively turn everyone more or less omniscient and telepathic. All of this happens in the first 2 or 3 chapters. It gets weirder after this --- characters traveling to different dimensions and so on --- but I think you get the idea.
In the end, I gave the book just 2 stars. For one, I thought that some of the characters' reactions to all this post-singularity weirdness was way too casual. Most ordinary mortals would have gone into catatonic shock. Even worse, I found the prose style enormously annoying. The book is basically written in the same choppy tone as your average YA novel. The contrast between this style and the subject matter created so much dissonance that I just couldn't focus on the story and ended up skip-reading through the last 50 pages or so. There's a lot of good stuff in this book, and some really interesting characters and concepts, but in the end I couldn't help thinking that a more skilled writer could have done so much more with all those nifty ideas.
November 4, 2013
This book is a trippy, zippy neo-science fiction. Something that combines the campiness of old with the technology of new. I don't really like that sort of thing. It's like what Cory Doctorow writes and what "Snow Crash" evolved into. I don't like my science-fiction in my fantasy, especially when you start as one and migrate to the other.
The story is about a possible "singularity" (look it up). In this case, the singularity is all of us becoming computers, or basically the world becomes an Internet somehow. I don't really get it. It's half technobabble and half stifled dialogue. Meanwhile, an autistic boy finds a parallel reality that doesn't much like us by using the World Internet. This reality is populated by slow giants who like cuttlefish.
I don't get it. There's parts of it that seem researched enough to be a Crichton novel, and then junk like alternate reality giants with Japanese gardens. Then you bring in some fresh-faced teens, an autistic boy, and a big benevolent AI who wants to take over. Everything just seems mish-mashed with hip cyberpunk terms and illogical human behavior. But the most important thing is that the characters are no one you want to care about.
The characters seem blocky, and more concerned about everything else besides their own relationships. This is my big problem with a lot of science fiction, and why I don't read the generic stuff. The authors know technology, but not people. He uses addicts and affairs as a side story, when that's a profound trait that needs to be explored. And when I say side story I mean it's practically forced in there, as if there needed to be something to keep the women readers occupied. People have sex at the drop of a hat, have affair after affair with the affected looking the other way, and no thought for their children, who wander out of the house and get high on A.I. Everyone acts like a kid, especially the adults.
I don't know whether he's trying to be Neal Stephenson or Phllip K. Dick, but I can't think of any reason to read this book. The story is just cyberjunk with wooden characters and pithy motivations. Maybe that's the nature of the beast when we all turn into computers.
The story is about a possible "singularity" (look it up). In this case, the singularity is all of us becoming computers, or basically the world becomes an Internet somehow. I don't really get it. It's half technobabble and half stifled dialogue. Meanwhile, an autistic boy finds a parallel reality that doesn't much like us by using the World Internet. This reality is populated by slow giants who like cuttlefish.
I don't get it. There's parts of it that seem researched enough to be a Crichton novel, and then junk like alternate reality giants with Japanese gardens. Then you bring in some fresh-faced teens, an autistic boy, and a big benevolent AI who wants to take over. Everything just seems mish-mashed with hip cyberpunk terms and illogical human behavior. But the most important thing is that the characters are no one you want to care about.
The characters seem blocky, and more concerned about everything else besides their own relationships. This is my big problem with a lot of science fiction, and why I don't read the generic stuff. The authors know technology, but not people. He uses addicts and affairs as a side story, when that's a profound trait that needs to be explored. And when I say side story I mean it's practically forced in there, as if there needed to be something to keep the women readers occupied. People have sex at the drop of a hat, have affair after affair with the affected looking the other way, and no thought for their children, who wander out of the house and get high on A.I. Everyone acts like a kid, especially the adults.
I don't know whether he's trying to be Neal Stephenson or Phllip K. Dick, but I can't think of any reason to read this book. The story is just cyberjunk with wooden characters and pithy motivations. Maybe that's the nature of the beast when we all turn into computers.
October 21, 2010
It's not often that I abandon a book, but this one I just couldn't finish. (I might have forced myself to read a few more pages, but then the new Iain Banks book downloaded to the Kindle, so that was the end of that.) The science part of the sci-fi just felt unbelievable to me. Now, I can suspend my belief as much as the next man, unless the next man is a politician. But, it just didn't feel like it made any sense. I like sci-fi where the ideas are followed logically and the author creates interesting situations out of them. Or at least creates big anti-matter explosions. The ideas in this book seemed tired, their consequences either unexplored or unexplicable. As for the fiction part of the sci-fi, this book felt like a total failure. More than anything, the characters just didn't work - they felt like automata proceeding on their own (mostly stupid) paths with little thought or reaction to anyone or anything else. They have a penchant for making up weird names for things. Why? I don't know. Maybe the idea was that they were all on massive doses of valium - this would explain why they essentially just continued on with what they were doing even as the entire world was permanently changed. (OK, most of them kind of whined about it, but if I want to hear people whining I can watch the news.)
So, that's that - no more of this book for me. I'll go continue reading Surface Detail - three chapters in and already two grisly murders and the destruction of several thousand spacecraft with requisite antimatter explosions (OK, technically the latter was just a simulation, but it was pretty cool anyway - did I mention the antimatter explosions?).
So, that's that - no more of this book for me. I'll go continue reading Surface Detail - three chapters in and already two grisly murders and the destruction of several thousand spacecraft with requisite antimatter explosions (OK, technically the latter was just a simulation, but it was pretty cool anyway - did I mention the antimatter explosions?).
June 13, 2013
I possibly came into this one with overly high hopes. Rudy Rucker is often mentioned as one of the key authors writing about the Singularity, a concept I find endlessly fascinating. I think I was kind of expecting another Accelerando, but this wasn't up to that level.
Postsingular tells the tale of a few folks who live through a very simplistic Singularity, and how they cope with the new always-networked world populated by artificial intelligences and strange beings from a parallel universe (specifically, another brane different from, but very close to our universe). Some of the ideas are really very interesting, but it's all very deus ex machina, and reads more like a cheap fantasy novel (our heroes go to a magical land to bring back a magical artifact to save the world from a villain who wants to destroy it and remake it to bring back his lost love). Many parts of it were very cartoonish, and it suffered from one of my least favourite tropes, the Amazing Author Whose Creativity Can Change The World.
So overall, I was a bit disappointed. I think I'll start looking at Vinge to get my Singularity hit, and keep hoping Charlie Stross will jump back on that horse.
Postsingular tells the tale of a few folks who live through a very simplistic Singularity, and how they cope with the new always-networked world populated by artificial intelligences and strange beings from a parallel universe (specifically, another brane different from, but very close to our universe). Some of the ideas are really very interesting, but it's all very deus ex machina, and reads more like a cheap fantasy novel (our heroes go to a magical land to bring back a magical artifact to save the world from a villain who wants to destroy it and remake it to bring back his lost love). Many parts of it were very cartoonish, and it suffered from one of my least favourite tropes, the Amazing Author Whose Creativity Can Change The World.
So overall, I was a bit disappointed. I think I'll start looking at Vinge to get my Singularity hit, and keep hoping Charlie Stross will jump back on that horse.
Read
February 10, 2009Rudy Rucker starts a reported trilogy with a book about nanotechnology remaking the world, and the consciousness of the world's inhabitants right along with it.
In fact, the world is remade at least twice in the book, first in a freak experiment, and then in a phreakier one. The law of unintended consequences is the law of the land in Rucker's re-re-imagined Earth, where a global, semi-organic network of sentient helper tech grants everyone a form of omniscience, and taps into other dimensions.
True to human nature, these newfound abilities and insights lead to nothing so much as more of the same. Like Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan comic series, Rucker's novel is formulated on the thesis that technological improvements lead not necessarily to an improved society, but to one in which the same faults and foibles, lusts and needs, are magnified. It's told with constant humor, endless goofy neologisms, and Rucker's trademark sense of calm despite the waves of societal and technological change.
In fact, the world is remade at least twice in the book, first in a freak experiment, and then in a phreakier one. The law of unintended consequences is the law of the land in Rucker's re-re-imagined Earth, where a global, semi-organic network of sentient helper tech grants everyone a form of omniscience, and taps into other dimensions.
True to human nature, these newfound abilities and insights lead to nothing so much as more of the same. Like Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan comic series, Rucker's novel is formulated on the thesis that technological improvements lead not necessarily to an improved society, but to one in which the same faults and foibles, lusts and needs, are magnified. It's told with constant humor, endless goofy neologisms, and Rucker's trademark sense of calm despite the waves of societal and technological change.
October 29, 2007
Gonzo sci-fi at its best. Quantum computing, networked consciousness, self-aware evolving artificial intelligence. It's easy enough to get through. But there are a few times when I feel a little too much of deus ex machina, and that the focus of the story is on the technology.
Good writing should always be about the characters, and at some point in "Act III", this book loses sight of the people and you find yourself distracted by how Rucker's technological universe works. That is, until you recall Arthur C. Clarke's adage: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." So if you can suspend disbelief long enough to take parallel universes and quantum-entangled nanotechnology on faith, this is an entertaining story.
Good writing should always be about the characters, and at some point in "Act III", this book loses sight of the people and you find yourself distracted by how Rucker's technological universe works. That is, until you recall Arthur C. Clarke's adage: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." So if you can suspend disbelief long enough to take parallel universes and quantum-entangled nanotechnology on faith, this is an entertaining story.
February 10, 2009
I like Rucker's books a lot but it's been a while since I've read one. Fortunately my brother gave this to me as a gift. I found that it was a really fast read - Rucker is very good at presenting his conceptual material in a rapidly absorbable manner.
I think that there is something for other writers to learn from his plotting - each character actually has two plotlines - the goals of their ego and the goals of their id or libido.
And another element of the book that appealed to me is that it's set in a San Francisco not too much different from the present-day one. There is also sort of a meta version of gentrification explored, where rich people can afford to live in a more hi-res and memory-intensive manner than poor people.
I think that there is something for other writers to learn from his plotting - each character actually has two plotlines - the goals of their ego and the goals of their id or libido.
And another element of the book that appealed to me is that it's set in a San Francisco not too much different from the present-day one. There is also sort of a meta version of gentrification explored, where rich people can afford to live in a more hi-res and memory-intensive manner than poor people.
July 18, 2009
At once painfully awkward and mind-blowingly imaginative. The narrative is almost embarrassingly bad, but the scale of ideass on display make up for it... just barely.
Don't read this for its story telling, read it for its inventiveness. This book is way ahead of its time. Rudy Rucker will be remembered as some kind of prophet- i am sure about that.
Don't read this for its story telling, read it for its inventiveness. This book is way ahead of its time. Rudy Rucker will be remembered as some kind of prophet- i am sure about that.
January 13, 2014
This was exactly what I expected out of a Rudy Rucker book after having read Spaceland: A Novel of the Fourth Dimension. Someone please take away his writing license.
April 3, 2014
This book is the most unbelievable and fantastic (as in remote from reality) that I have ever read.I gave up on page 221 of 320. I just didn't care enough to finish. The first 94 pages are insane enough that I can actually recommend you read them. Then YOU can say you read the most insane story ever. The book devolves after chapter 5. Don't bother.
December 1, 2012
TL;DR: Wuuuut
January 27, 2015
review of
Rudy Rucker's Postsingular
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - January 26, 2015
For the complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
At 1st this just seemed like reruns to me. The "nants", life-as-we-know-it-threatening nanotechnology intent on eating the Earth & its inhabitants & recreating them virtually in order to create a super-computer more in keeping w/ the nants's own self-organization, seemed like a rerun of Rucker's own The Hacker and the Ants (1994) from 13 yrs before in wch there were "ants" as the threat instead of "nants".
I'd 1st encountered the idea of technological insects in Stanislav Lem's great The Invincible (1967) when the idea struck me as highly original (but may not've been). Then there was Greg Bear's Blood Music (1985) in wch nanotechnology gets into humanity's bloodstream & dramatically changes human reality. THEN there was Greg Egan's Permutation City (1994) in wch people attain 'eternal life' by becoming code on an electronic chip. These 1st 3 bks all struck me as visionary. THEN, in June of 2000, Ghanesh & I interviewed writer Damien Broderick In Australia ( http://youtu.be/OhiGt9eJ9bw ) & he touched on his more hopeful imaginings for nanotechnology. THEN there came Michael Crichton's Prey (2002) wch featured nanotchenology as predator wch just struck me as derivative of Blood Music & not much more.
Finally, we get to Rucker's Postsingular (2007) wch is even later in the chronology &, therefore, not likely to provide much novelty. "By way of keeping people informed about the Nant Day progress, the celestial Martian nant-sphere put up a full map of Earth with the ported regions shaded in red. Although it might take months or years to chew the planet right down to the core, Earth's surface was going fast. Judging from the map, by evening most of it would be gone, Gaia's skin eaten away by micron-sized computer chips with wings." (p 32)
However, what makes Rucker's story a furtherance of the preceding is that the 2nd chapter runs thru the nanotechnology-threatens-life-as-we-know-it trope in short order: the drama happens & is curtailed & we move onto a different variation. As such, the 1st 2 chapters greatly condense the type of story that might've previously constituted an entire novel.
As such, as is so often the case w/ Rucker, I'm reminded of Philip K. Dick. I often say that Dick had so many ideas that his novels wd reach a spectacular (penultimate) climax halfway thru the bk: a climax that many writers wd be hard-pressed to come up w/ for their (ultimate) ending - & then Dick goes on to build to an even more fantastic actual ending. Rucker's 1st 2 chapters here somewhat compress that Dick strategy to a preface of sorts.
Moving on, the 1st chapter starts w/ some formative back-story in wch 2 boys make a rocket: "The rocket's sides were adorned with fanciful sheet metal fins and a narrow metal pipe that served as a launch lug." (p 14) I'm reminded of my own childhood when my neighbors made a mortar from a pipe That was used to launch CO2 canisters emptied of their gas & stuffed w/ match heads. The match heads wd be lit & the canister wd take off to wherever the pipe was pointed. &, uh, no, it wasn't safe. In Postsingular the boys time the launching of their rocket for when there's minimal likelihood of their hitting a passing jet:
""You can really see the jetliners on that blue map?" asked Carlos, his handsome face gilded by the setting sun.
""You bet. Good thing, too. We'll squirt our rocket when there's a gap in the traffic. Like a bum scuttling across a freeway."" - p 16
My friend Doug Retzler, who in the early to mid 1980s was making Sky Art, did a piece at a public arts festival in BalTimOre called the "Ad Hoc Fiasco" in wch he made a large painting of clouds on cheesecloth & had it held aloft by helium-filled weather balloons - floating above the festival & tethered to the ground to prevent the painting from floating away.
The tethering failed & the painting did venture upward. Given that it was something like 30 ft wide, Doug was seriously worried that it wd get in the path of a passing aircraft & foul its props or jets & cause a crash. He phoned the FAA & explained the situation to them & they assured him that the likelihood of that was very slim indeed. As far as I know we never found out where the cloud painting landed. Imagine the surprise of anyone who might've witnessed its coming back to ground: The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
The nants are defined: they're "a line of of bio-mimetic self-reproducing nanomachines" (p 20) & their risk is speculated on: "The nant swarms develop their own Wolfram-irreducible emergent hive-mind behaviors. We'll never really control the nants". (p 21)
But, of course, the nants are let loose or where wd the drama be?: "["]But Dibbs's advisers like it. We'll save energy, and the economy can run right around the clock. And, get this, Olliburton, the vice president's old company—they're planning to sell ads."" (p 24) Hopefully, this is transparent political satire to Americans alive at the time of the release of this novel but that might not be the case even 20 yrs from now. Dibbs is obviously Bush, Olliburton is clearly Haliburton & the vice-president is none other than Dick Cheney. &, yes, Cheney was the Chairman and CEO of Halliburton Company from 1995 to 2000 before becoming VP of the USA.
& for those of you who still don't get the satire here: "former Vice President Dick Cheney took a shot at Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). But Paul is not likely to be fazed by criticism from Cheney, for several years ago the Kentucky senator was pushing the conspiratorial notion that the former VP exploited the horrific 9/11 attacks to lead the nation into war in Iraq in order to benefit Halliburton, the enormous military contractor where Cheney had once been CEO." ( http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2... ) In other words, where Haliburton tromps, ethics are left-behind (even more than kuffar during the Rapture) & greed isn't even bothered to be leashed in its ravenous plunge forward to rend & tear - & so it is w/ Olliburton in Postsingular.
Rucker's parody of Bush imagines the worst: "President Dick Dibbs—now eligible for the third and fourth term thanks to a life-extending DNA modification that made him legally a different person—issued periodic statements to the effect that the nant-sphere computer was soon coming online." (p 26) Fortunately for the reader who wants at least the mild vicarious pleasure of seeing Bush come to a bad end as punishment for his crimes, Dibbs gets his come-uppance.
""And you're saying your string of symbols can stop the nants?" asked Nektar doubtfully. "Like a magic spell?"" (p 30) This idea of sequences of symbols as magic spells was also in Rucker's The Hacker and the Ants. Some refer to mathematics as 'the language of nature' & think that the more closely one describes natural processes in this language the more ability one will have to move from pure math to applied math: ie: to control the processes described. As such, the similarity to ceremonial magik, in wch esoteric incantations are inscribed & chanted are thought to channel specific occult forces, is obvious.
""I've written a nant-virus. You might call it a Trojan flea." He chuckled grimly. If I can just get this code into some of the nants, they'll spread it to all of the others—it's written in such a way that they'll think it's a nant-designed security patch."" - p 30
These days, computer viruses are anathema to just about everybody - but I remember when my friends & fellow neoists Boris Wanowitch & Barnoz were the editors of Cacanada's 1st Macintosh computer magazine, MacMag, in the early 1980s & they sent out a virus that caused a smiley-face (or some such) to appear on computer desktops that had a msg w/ it to the effect of "Have a Nice Day - from MacMag". Yeah, they got into alotof trouble for that since they infected the products of at least one major software designer but the intention was fairly benign.
One of the main characters is "Chu", an autistic child w/ an interest in computers. At one time he might've been called an "idiot savant". These days that's probably 'politically incorrect'.
"Ond gave his son more food, then paused, thinking. He laid his sheaf of papers down beside Chu, thirty pages covered with line after line of hexadecimal code blocks: 02A1B59F, 9812D007, 70FFDEF6, like that.
""Read the code, he told Chu. See if you can memorize it. These pages are yours now."" - p 32
I'm reminded of Crispin Hellion Glover's movie What is it? featuring a cast of actors w/ Down syndrome. If I remember correctly, when Glover introduced the movie at a screening of it that I witnessed he explained that people w/ Down syndrome are very gentle. I'm also reminded of a friend who was temporarily paralyzed. During this time she cd sense when people entered the rm by the increase of temperature from their bodies. The point being that there's always the possibility that a deficiency in one area may be partially compensated for by a strength in another.
& here I am still in the 2nd chapter, barely getting started - this prefatory bit is fast-moving: ""The Trojan fleas just hatched!" shouted Ond. "Yes I saw a glitch. The nants are running backwards. Reversible computation. Look up at the sky. the scrolls are spiraling inward now instead of out. I knew it would work." Ond was whooping and laughing as he talked. "Each of the nants preserves a memory of every single thing it's done. And my Trojan fleas are making them run it all backwards."" (p 36) The disaster happens 1st & the rest of the novel explores a slower approach that attempts to produce the good results w/o the bad.
& then there're always those referential touches that I'm so fond of: "Jill and Craigor's home was a long cabin atop a flat live-aboard scow called the Merz Boat." (p 37) People familiar w/ 20th century art history will most likely recognize the reference immediately. Rucker goes on to explain: "He'd renamed the boat in honor of one of his personal heroes, the Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters, who'd famously turned his house into an assemblage called the Merzbau. Merz was Schwitters's made-up word meaning, according to Craigor, "gnarly stuff that I can get for free."" (p 38) Well, being the persnickety nitpicker that I sometimes am, I quote from the bklt that comes w/ my 3rd LP, "Mechanically Repetitive / ReRecorded Records RECORD" regarding the etymology of the Japanese noise musician Merzbow's name:
""Extracted from the word Commerzbank, Merz came into view like a nova in an unknown sky in the shape of a picture nailed and stuck together, held in place with paste and crossed by wires. From his newspaper collages he transferred the trademark to his little periodical Merz, and finally to himself"
"- Hans Richter - page 150 of DADA - ART AND ANTI-ART (Oxford University Press - 1965 edition)
""Kurt Schwitters, of Hanover, living amongst the remnants of a military society of the lower middle class, in a town in which Hamann, the sexual murderer, lived and wrought nor far from the super-father Hindenburg - this Kurt Schwitters discovered the symbolic meaning of his movement in a syllable of the "KomMERZbank", on a neatly painted sign-board not far from his home, where he was leading a normal existence with his wife and child. Since that monumental event, which befell him one day as he was walking about town, he called his art "MERZ-art"."
"- Willy Verkauf - page 35 of DADA - MONOGRAPH OF A MOVEMENT (Academy Editions/St. Martin's Press - 1975
edition)
""He [Schwitters] went on to build a series of 'Merzbau', the first of which in Hanover was a huge architectural-sculptural column"
"- Robert Short - page 46 of DADA AND SURREALISM (Chartwell Books - 1980 edition)
"As you can probably understand now, "Merzbow" is phonetically the same as "Merzbau" from which it's derived. "Merz" is from "Kommerz" (or Commerce - as it would be in English) & "Bau" means something like "structure". A strict/literal translation into English from the original GERMAN (not Japanese) is something like "wares-structure" - not "erotic misery"! However, a too literal translation misses the point. Schwitters' intention was to render the military-industrial complex (represented by the CommerceBank) into a nonsensical fragment."
[..]
"["]He was referring to yet another column, whose title, Kathedrale des erotischen Elends (Cathedral of Erotic Misery), has often been applied" [..] "to the Merzbau as a whole.["]"
"- John Elderfield - page 147 of Kurt Schwitters (Thames and Hudson - 1987 edition)"
ANYWAY, the boat's name might even be more appropriate than Rucker realized insofar as there's commerce & a fair amt of erotic misery going on on it. As an aside, "Schwitters' Hannover and Norway constructions were destroyed respectively in an Allied bombing raid and a fire." ( http://www.artsprite.com/resume/javas... )
"Craigor was a kind of fisherman as well; that is, he earned money by trapping iridescent Pharaoh cuttlefish, an invasive species native to the Mergui Archipelago of Burma and now flourishing in the climate-heated waters of the San Francisco Bay. The chunky three-kilogram cuttlefish brought in a good price apiece from AmphiVision, Inc., a San Francisco company that used organic rhodopsin from cuttlefish chromatophores to dope the special video-displaying contact lenses known as web-eyes." - p 39
Rucker also makes reference to the use of cuttlefish-generated materials for growing bldgs or such-like in his TedX talk he presented in Brussels in 2011 here: http://youtu.be/ifddXYCPCYU .
"Pretty soon he noticed something interesting about the cuttlefish. Every so often, one of them would totally disappear.
"Chu wondered how this could be. One of the mushroom AIs obligingly did a quick search of all the science papers in the world and found that there's a theory that there's another world parallel to ours, less than a decillionth of a meter away, and that objects can quantum-tunnel back and forth between the worlds, thus seeming to disappear or, on the other hand emerge from nothing. the paper called the worlds "branes," like in "membranes."" - pp 65-66
Now one thing that I love about science fiction is that if something like that's mentioned it's quite possible that there's actually a theory somewhere along these lines - &, of course, that's the case here: "The central idea is that the visible, four-dimensional universe is restricted to a brane inside a higher-dimensional space, called the "bulk" (also known as "hyperspace"). If the additional dimensions are compact, then the observed universe contains the extra dimensions, and then no reference to the bulk is appropriate. In the bulk model, at least some of the extra dimensions are extensive (possibly infinite), and other branes may be moving through this bulk. Interactions with the bulk, and possibly with other branes, can influence our brane and thus introduce effects not seen in more standard cosmological models." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brane_co... ) Gotta love it.
"As for those luminous humanoid beings—the AIs now reported that these were so-called angels from a parallel sheet of reality that had recently been dubbed the Hibrane. the best current models indicated the higher-space distance to the Hibrane must be about a thirtieth of a vatometer, that is, 0.03 decillionts of a meter. Due to the Randall-de Sitter interbrane warp factor, Hibraners ar this remove would be scaled six times larger than regular humans and would move six times slower." - p 74
&, yes, even that has a basis in scientific research. EG: there's a paper in the Cornell University Library called "Embedding of two de-Sitter branes in a generalized Randall Sundrum scenario" by Rodrigo Aros & Milko Estrada (Submitted on 4 Dec 2012) that has the following abstract: "In this work it is studied a generalization of Randall Sundrum model. It is obtained new behaviors of {\it warp factor}, constraints in that the strong brane has tension of positive sign and, new relations between the coupling constants, and between the Higgs and Planck masses." ( http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.0811 ) One thing I like about Rucker's work is the way he explains fanciful mythology, angels, eg, by using contemporary General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (or ideas from other scientific arenas) - even if he is playing fast & loose w/ them.
One of these 'angels' "messaged that his name was Azaroth; he said he was working as an interbrane cuttlefisherman." (p 81) In C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia:
"Azaroth was a minor goddess of the Calormene Religion. The Calormene religion was a polytheistic one, worshipping many gods; Tash and Zardeenah were two others. In the legendary hierarchy of Calormene gods and goddesses, Azaroth was considered below Tash (the highest of Calormene gods) but above Zardeenah, the goddess of night and of unmarried maidens. Azaroth commanded more respect and fear than Zardeenah, though her exact position and responsibilities is not clearly known."
[..]
"C.S. Lewis never defined whether Azaroth was a god, or a goddess. In Paul F. Ford's book, entitled Companion to Narnia, Revised Edition: A Complete Guide to the Magical World of C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, Azaroth is assumed to be female, as here." - http://narnia.wikia.com/wiki/Azaroth
According to p 171 in Postsingular the character Azaroth was named by his father "after a Babylonian demon." (p 171) Presumably, that's the origin Rucker was working from. Still, it's interesting to me that Azaroth is also a character in bks by the Christian fantasy writer Lewis. That fits nicely w/ Rucker's casting of Azaroth as an "angel" (or "Hibraner").
Sometimes things 'ring a bell' but I can't quite place them: "Nektar's mother, Karen Lundquist, had given the family's savings to a TV evangelist" (pp 70-71) Is "Karen Lundquist" from another Rucker novel? Not as far as I cd tell from a superficial online search. From somebody else's novel. Cdn't find any online reference. Still, something bugs me about it.. - like someday I'll be rereading (unlikely) some SF & I'll encounter the name & then I won't remember that I read it here too.
Clearly, Rucker is a computer geek - but he's also a guy who recognizes the healthiness of getting away from computers too. Here's an excerpt from the computer geek side: ""The orphidnet is a locative planetary brain," he told Jil. "My possessions are embodied thoughts."" (p 82) - but at the same time, there's ahint of the non-computer geek too in the last sentence: ""My possessions are embodied thoughts."" resonates w/ the Hylozoic - a concept I learned about thru checking out the TedX YouTube talk.
Hylozoism is "in philosophy, any system that views all matter as alive, either in itself or by participation in the operation of a world soul or some similar principle. Hylozoism is logically distinct both from early forms of animism, which personify nature, and from panpsychism, which attributes some form of consciousness or sensation to all matter." ( http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t... )
"["]Maybe they can even make your air smart too."
""And that would be good?"
""Oh yes. Hylozoic."" - p 172
Rudy Rucker's Postsingular
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - January 26, 2015
For the complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
At 1st this just seemed like reruns to me. The "nants", life-as-we-know-it-threatening nanotechnology intent on eating the Earth & its inhabitants & recreating them virtually in order to create a super-computer more in keeping w/ the nants's own self-organization, seemed like a rerun of Rucker's own The Hacker and the Ants (1994) from 13 yrs before in wch there were "ants" as the threat instead of "nants".
I'd 1st encountered the idea of technological insects in Stanislav Lem's great The Invincible (1967) when the idea struck me as highly original (but may not've been). Then there was Greg Bear's Blood Music (1985) in wch nanotechnology gets into humanity's bloodstream & dramatically changes human reality. THEN there was Greg Egan's Permutation City (1994) in wch people attain 'eternal life' by becoming code on an electronic chip. These 1st 3 bks all struck me as visionary. THEN, in June of 2000, Ghanesh & I interviewed writer Damien Broderick In Australia ( http://youtu.be/OhiGt9eJ9bw ) & he touched on his more hopeful imaginings for nanotechnology. THEN there came Michael Crichton's Prey (2002) wch featured nanotchenology as predator wch just struck me as derivative of Blood Music & not much more.
Finally, we get to Rucker's Postsingular (2007) wch is even later in the chronology &, therefore, not likely to provide much novelty. "By way of keeping people informed about the Nant Day progress, the celestial Martian nant-sphere put up a full map of Earth with the ported regions shaded in red. Although it might take months or years to chew the planet right down to the core, Earth's surface was going fast. Judging from the map, by evening most of it would be gone, Gaia's skin eaten away by micron-sized computer chips with wings." (p 32)
However, what makes Rucker's story a furtherance of the preceding is that the 2nd chapter runs thru the nanotechnology-threatens-life-as-we-know-it trope in short order: the drama happens & is curtailed & we move onto a different variation. As such, the 1st 2 chapters greatly condense the type of story that might've previously constituted an entire novel.
As such, as is so often the case w/ Rucker, I'm reminded of Philip K. Dick. I often say that Dick had so many ideas that his novels wd reach a spectacular (penultimate) climax halfway thru the bk: a climax that many writers wd be hard-pressed to come up w/ for their (ultimate) ending - & then Dick goes on to build to an even more fantastic actual ending. Rucker's 1st 2 chapters here somewhat compress that Dick strategy to a preface of sorts.
Moving on, the 1st chapter starts w/ some formative back-story in wch 2 boys make a rocket: "The rocket's sides were adorned with fanciful sheet metal fins and a narrow metal pipe that served as a launch lug." (p 14) I'm reminded of my own childhood when my neighbors made a mortar from a pipe That was used to launch CO2 canisters emptied of their gas & stuffed w/ match heads. The match heads wd be lit & the canister wd take off to wherever the pipe was pointed. &, uh, no, it wasn't safe. In Postsingular the boys time the launching of their rocket for when there's minimal likelihood of their hitting a passing jet:
""You can really see the jetliners on that blue map?" asked Carlos, his handsome face gilded by the setting sun.
""You bet. Good thing, too. We'll squirt our rocket when there's a gap in the traffic. Like a bum scuttling across a freeway."" - p 16
My friend Doug Retzler, who in the early to mid 1980s was making Sky Art, did a piece at a public arts festival in BalTimOre called the "Ad Hoc Fiasco" in wch he made a large painting of clouds on cheesecloth & had it held aloft by helium-filled weather balloons - floating above the festival & tethered to the ground to prevent the painting from floating away.
The tethering failed & the painting did venture upward. Given that it was something like 30 ft wide, Doug was seriously worried that it wd get in the path of a passing aircraft & foul its props or jets & cause a crash. He phoned the FAA & explained the situation to them & they assured him that the likelihood of that was very slim indeed. As far as I know we never found out where the cloud painting landed. Imagine the surprise of anyone who might've witnessed its coming back to ground: The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
The nants are defined: they're "a line of of bio-mimetic self-reproducing nanomachines" (p 20) & their risk is speculated on: "The nant swarms develop their own Wolfram-irreducible emergent hive-mind behaviors. We'll never really control the nants". (p 21)
But, of course, the nants are let loose or where wd the drama be?: "["]But Dibbs's advisers like it. We'll save energy, and the economy can run right around the clock. And, get this, Olliburton, the vice president's old company—they're planning to sell ads."" (p 24) Hopefully, this is transparent political satire to Americans alive at the time of the release of this novel but that might not be the case even 20 yrs from now. Dibbs is obviously Bush, Olliburton is clearly Haliburton & the vice-president is none other than Dick Cheney. &, yes, Cheney was the Chairman and CEO of Halliburton Company from 1995 to 2000 before becoming VP of the USA.
& for those of you who still don't get the satire here: "former Vice President Dick Cheney took a shot at Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). But Paul is not likely to be fazed by criticism from Cheney, for several years ago the Kentucky senator was pushing the conspiratorial notion that the former VP exploited the horrific 9/11 attacks to lead the nation into war in Iraq in order to benefit Halliburton, the enormous military contractor where Cheney had once been CEO." ( http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2... ) In other words, where Haliburton tromps, ethics are left-behind (even more than kuffar during the Rapture) & greed isn't even bothered to be leashed in its ravenous plunge forward to rend & tear - & so it is w/ Olliburton in Postsingular.
Rucker's parody of Bush imagines the worst: "President Dick Dibbs—now eligible for the third and fourth term thanks to a life-extending DNA modification that made him legally a different person—issued periodic statements to the effect that the nant-sphere computer was soon coming online." (p 26) Fortunately for the reader who wants at least the mild vicarious pleasure of seeing Bush come to a bad end as punishment for his crimes, Dibbs gets his come-uppance.
""And you're saying your string of symbols can stop the nants?" asked Nektar doubtfully. "Like a magic spell?"" (p 30) This idea of sequences of symbols as magic spells was also in Rucker's The Hacker and the Ants. Some refer to mathematics as 'the language of nature' & think that the more closely one describes natural processes in this language the more ability one will have to move from pure math to applied math: ie: to control the processes described. As such, the similarity to ceremonial magik, in wch esoteric incantations are inscribed & chanted are thought to channel specific occult forces, is obvious.
""I've written a nant-virus. You might call it a Trojan flea." He chuckled grimly. If I can just get this code into some of the nants, they'll spread it to all of the others—it's written in such a way that they'll think it's a nant-designed security patch."" - p 30
These days, computer viruses are anathema to just about everybody - but I remember when my friends & fellow neoists Boris Wanowitch & Barnoz were the editors of Cacanada's 1st Macintosh computer magazine, MacMag, in the early 1980s & they sent out a virus that caused a smiley-face (or some such) to appear on computer desktops that had a msg w/ it to the effect of "Have a Nice Day - from MacMag". Yeah, they got into alotof trouble for that since they infected the products of at least one major software designer but the intention was fairly benign.
One of the main characters is "Chu", an autistic child w/ an interest in computers. At one time he might've been called an "idiot savant". These days that's probably 'politically incorrect'.
"Ond gave his son more food, then paused, thinking. He laid his sheaf of papers down beside Chu, thirty pages covered with line after line of hexadecimal code blocks: 02A1B59F, 9812D007, 70FFDEF6, like that.
""Read the code, he told Chu. See if you can memorize it. These pages are yours now."" - p 32
I'm reminded of Crispin Hellion Glover's movie What is it? featuring a cast of actors w/ Down syndrome. If I remember correctly, when Glover introduced the movie at a screening of it that I witnessed he explained that people w/ Down syndrome are very gentle. I'm also reminded of a friend who was temporarily paralyzed. During this time she cd sense when people entered the rm by the increase of temperature from their bodies. The point being that there's always the possibility that a deficiency in one area may be partially compensated for by a strength in another.
& here I am still in the 2nd chapter, barely getting started - this prefatory bit is fast-moving: ""The Trojan fleas just hatched!" shouted Ond. "Yes I saw a glitch. The nants are running backwards. Reversible computation. Look up at the sky. the scrolls are spiraling inward now instead of out. I knew it would work." Ond was whooping and laughing as he talked. "Each of the nants preserves a memory of every single thing it's done. And my Trojan fleas are making them run it all backwards."" (p 36) The disaster happens 1st & the rest of the novel explores a slower approach that attempts to produce the good results w/o the bad.
& then there're always those referential touches that I'm so fond of: "Jill and Craigor's home was a long cabin atop a flat live-aboard scow called the Merz Boat." (p 37) People familiar w/ 20th century art history will most likely recognize the reference immediately. Rucker goes on to explain: "He'd renamed the boat in honor of one of his personal heroes, the Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters, who'd famously turned his house into an assemblage called the Merzbau. Merz was Schwitters's made-up word meaning, according to Craigor, "gnarly stuff that I can get for free."" (p 38) Well, being the persnickety nitpicker that I sometimes am, I quote from the bklt that comes w/ my 3rd LP, "Mechanically Repetitive / ReRecorded Records RECORD" regarding the etymology of the Japanese noise musician Merzbow's name:
""Extracted from the word Commerzbank, Merz came into view like a nova in an unknown sky in the shape of a picture nailed and stuck together, held in place with paste and crossed by wires. From his newspaper collages he transferred the trademark to his little periodical Merz, and finally to himself"
"- Hans Richter - page 150 of DADA - ART AND ANTI-ART (Oxford University Press - 1965 edition)
""Kurt Schwitters, of Hanover, living amongst the remnants of a military society of the lower middle class, in a town in which Hamann, the sexual murderer, lived and wrought nor far from the super-father Hindenburg - this Kurt Schwitters discovered the symbolic meaning of his movement in a syllable of the "KomMERZbank", on a neatly painted sign-board not far from his home, where he was leading a normal existence with his wife and child. Since that monumental event, which befell him one day as he was walking about town, he called his art "MERZ-art"."
"- Willy Verkauf - page 35 of DADA - MONOGRAPH OF A MOVEMENT (Academy Editions/St. Martin's Press - 1975
edition)
""He [Schwitters] went on to build a series of 'Merzbau', the first of which in Hanover was a huge architectural-sculptural column"
"- Robert Short - page 46 of DADA AND SURREALISM (Chartwell Books - 1980 edition)
"As you can probably understand now, "Merzbow" is phonetically the same as "Merzbau" from which it's derived. "Merz" is from "Kommerz" (or Commerce - as it would be in English) & "Bau" means something like "structure". A strict/literal translation into English from the original GERMAN (not Japanese) is something like "wares-structure" - not "erotic misery"! However, a too literal translation misses the point. Schwitters' intention was to render the military-industrial complex (represented by the CommerceBank) into a nonsensical fragment."
[..]
"["]He was referring to yet another column, whose title, Kathedrale des erotischen Elends (Cathedral of Erotic Misery), has often been applied" [..] "to the Merzbau as a whole.["]"
"- John Elderfield - page 147 of Kurt Schwitters (Thames and Hudson - 1987 edition)"
ANYWAY, the boat's name might even be more appropriate than Rucker realized insofar as there's commerce & a fair amt of erotic misery going on on it. As an aside, "Schwitters' Hannover and Norway constructions were destroyed respectively in an Allied bombing raid and a fire." ( http://www.artsprite.com/resume/javas... )
"Craigor was a kind of fisherman as well; that is, he earned money by trapping iridescent Pharaoh cuttlefish, an invasive species native to the Mergui Archipelago of Burma and now flourishing in the climate-heated waters of the San Francisco Bay. The chunky three-kilogram cuttlefish brought in a good price apiece from AmphiVision, Inc., a San Francisco company that used organic rhodopsin from cuttlefish chromatophores to dope the special video-displaying contact lenses known as web-eyes." - p 39
Rucker also makes reference to the use of cuttlefish-generated materials for growing bldgs or such-like in his TedX talk he presented in Brussels in 2011 here: http://youtu.be/ifddXYCPCYU .
"Pretty soon he noticed something interesting about the cuttlefish. Every so often, one of them would totally disappear.
"Chu wondered how this could be. One of the mushroom AIs obligingly did a quick search of all the science papers in the world and found that there's a theory that there's another world parallel to ours, less than a decillionth of a meter away, and that objects can quantum-tunnel back and forth between the worlds, thus seeming to disappear or, on the other hand emerge from nothing. the paper called the worlds "branes," like in "membranes."" - pp 65-66
Now one thing that I love about science fiction is that if something like that's mentioned it's quite possible that there's actually a theory somewhere along these lines - &, of course, that's the case here: "The central idea is that the visible, four-dimensional universe is restricted to a brane inside a higher-dimensional space, called the "bulk" (also known as "hyperspace"). If the additional dimensions are compact, then the observed universe contains the extra dimensions, and then no reference to the bulk is appropriate. In the bulk model, at least some of the extra dimensions are extensive (possibly infinite), and other branes may be moving through this bulk. Interactions with the bulk, and possibly with other branes, can influence our brane and thus introduce effects not seen in more standard cosmological models." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brane_co... ) Gotta love it.
"As for those luminous humanoid beings—the AIs now reported that these were so-called angels from a parallel sheet of reality that had recently been dubbed the Hibrane. the best current models indicated the higher-space distance to the Hibrane must be about a thirtieth of a vatometer, that is, 0.03 decillionts of a meter. Due to the Randall-de Sitter interbrane warp factor, Hibraners ar this remove would be scaled six times larger than regular humans and would move six times slower." - p 74
&, yes, even that has a basis in scientific research. EG: there's a paper in the Cornell University Library called "Embedding of two de-Sitter branes in a generalized Randall Sundrum scenario" by Rodrigo Aros & Milko Estrada (Submitted on 4 Dec 2012) that has the following abstract: "In this work it is studied a generalization of Randall Sundrum model. It is obtained new behaviors of {\it warp factor}, constraints in that the strong brane has tension of positive sign and, new relations between the coupling constants, and between the Higgs and Planck masses." ( http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.0811 ) One thing I like about Rucker's work is the way he explains fanciful mythology, angels, eg, by using contemporary General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (or ideas from other scientific arenas) - even if he is playing fast & loose w/ them.
One of these 'angels' "messaged that his name was Azaroth; he said he was working as an interbrane cuttlefisherman." (p 81) In C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia:
"Azaroth was a minor goddess of the Calormene Religion. The Calormene religion was a polytheistic one, worshipping many gods; Tash and Zardeenah were two others. In the legendary hierarchy of Calormene gods and goddesses, Azaroth was considered below Tash (the highest of Calormene gods) but above Zardeenah, the goddess of night and of unmarried maidens. Azaroth commanded more respect and fear than Zardeenah, though her exact position and responsibilities is not clearly known."
[..]
"C.S. Lewis never defined whether Azaroth was a god, or a goddess. In Paul F. Ford's book, entitled Companion to Narnia, Revised Edition: A Complete Guide to the Magical World of C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, Azaroth is assumed to be female, as here." - http://narnia.wikia.com/wiki/Azaroth
According to p 171 in Postsingular the character Azaroth was named by his father "after a Babylonian demon." (p 171) Presumably, that's the origin Rucker was working from. Still, it's interesting to me that Azaroth is also a character in bks by the Christian fantasy writer Lewis. That fits nicely w/ Rucker's casting of Azaroth as an "angel" (or "Hibraner").
Sometimes things 'ring a bell' but I can't quite place them: "Nektar's mother, Karen Lundquist, had given the family's savings to a TV evangelist" (pp 70-71) Is "Karen Lundquist" from another Rucker novel? Not as far as I cd tell from a superficial online search. From somebody else's novel. Cdn't find any online reference. Still, something bugs me about it.. - like someday I'll be rereading (unlikely) some SF & I'll encounter the name & then I won't remember that I read it here too.
Clearly, Rucker is a computer geek - but he's also a guy who recognizes the healthiness of getting away from computers too. Here's an excerpt from the computer geek side: ""The orphidnet is a locative planetary brain," he told Jil. "My possessions are embodied thoughts."" (p 82) - but at the same time, there's ahint of the non-computer geek too in the last sentence: ""My possessions are embodied thoughts."" resonates w/ the Hylozoic - a concept I learned about thru checking out the TedX YouTube talk.
Hylozoism is "in philosophy, any system that views all matter as alive, either in itself or by participation in the operation of a world soul or some similar principle. Hylozoism is logically distinct both from early forms of animism, which personify nature, and from panpsychism, which attributes some form of consciousness or sensation to all matter." ( http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t... )
"["]Maybe they can even make your air smart too."
""And that would be good?"
""Oh yes. Hylozoic."" - p 172
January 14, 2018
As I was reading Postsingular, a thought about the structure of writing pervaded throughout: perhaps detailed exposition will be done away with after the singularity event.
That’s certainly what I felt whilst reading the disconnected and rushed prose inundating me throughout Rucker’s Postsingular. It’s as if the author wrote the novel thinking that readers are editors, that all they need are a cast of characters, a bevy of locations, and an array of things, and words bridging all those together into a coherent story is the responsibility of the supposedly telepathic audience.
I might be exaggerating, yet hard sci-fi has this reputation of failing to provide many key elements in quality storytelling: deep characterizations, reasonable motivations, taut explanations, and strong pacing. Numerous hard sci-fi tales are mere thought experiment exercises, painfully made into a semblance of narrative. Many will claim that I’m looking in the wrong genre for such qualities, but the existence of hard sci-fi novels containing some or all those qualities do exist, thus debunking the inability of talented authors to incorporate them.
Postsingular is no different from many falling into the aforementioned mere thought experiments. Where it gets even worse is the sheer lack of words bridging actions, thoughts, and descriptions throughout the story. Many elements are introduced abruptly, only partially explained, and then skyrocketed into the thick of the plot. Did the editor of Postsingular have a limited character count with the associated printing press?
As with many hard sci-fi tales falling into the trap of disconnected incoherency, Postsingular reveals a plethora of intriguing ideas concerning the fate of humanity, the ubiquity of technology, and how intertwining reactions of both work to adjust the human condition. Nevertheless, expounding on them in the narrative we got from Rucker was a bad idea; the ideas would’ve been better suited to non-fiction such as Superintelligence by Bostrom, or at least a series of podcasts. The narrative aspects in Postsingular – the characters, unfolding plot, world-building, techno-babble – were weak sauce. The book feels trimmed to fit under 100K words, but the material and the initial setup of the narrative aspects screams for much, much more space to explain it all. If that’s due to the publisher, shame on them for undercutting Rucker and amputating his style. If it’s not, Rucker’s style is little more than attention-addled scribblings worthy of sophist, yuppie blog posts.
That’s certainly what I felt whilst reading the disconnected and rushed prose inundating me throughout Rucker’s Postsingular. It’s as if the author wrote the novel thinking that readers are editors, that all they need are a cast of characters, a bevy of locations, and an array of things, and words bridging all those together into a coherent story is the responsibility of the supposedly telepathic audience.
I might be exaggerating, yet hard sci-fi has this reputation of failing to provide many key elements in quality storytelling: deep characterizations, reasonable motivations, taut explanations, and strong pacing. Numerous hard sci-fi tales are mere thought experiment exercises, painfully made into a semblance of narrative. Many will claim that I’m looking in the wrong genre for such qualities, but the existence of hard sci-fi novels containing some or all those qualities do exist, thus debunking the inability of talented authors to incorporate them.
Postsingular is no different from many falling into the aforementioned mere thought experiments. Where it gets even worse is the sheer lack of words bridging actions, thoughts, and descriptions throughout the story. Many elements are introduced abruptly, only partially explained, and then skyrocketed into the thick of the plot. Did the editor of Postsingular have a limited character count with the associated printing press?
As with many hard sci-fi tales falling into the trap of disconnected incoherency, Postsingular reveals a plethora of intriguing ideas concerning the fate of humanity, the ubiquity of technology, and how intertwining reactions of both work to adjust the human condition. Nevertheless, expounding on them in the narrative we got from Rucker was a bad idea; the ideas would’ve been better suited to non-fiction such as Superintelligence by Bostrom, or at least a series of podcasts. The narrative aspects in Postsingular – the characters, unfolding plot, world-building, techno-babble – were weak sauce. The book feels trimmed to fit under 100K words, but the material and the initial setup of the narrative aspects screams for much, much more space to explain it all. If that’s due to the publisher, shame on them for undercutting Rucker and amputating his style. If it’s not, Rucker’s style is little more than attention-addled scribblings worthy of sophist, yuppie blog posts.
November 20, 2018
This was... interesting?
A lot of interesting things happened, with possible... interesting and exciting implications. However, the most interesting characters were still as flat as a nanoparticle, while the others weren't deeper than a single Planck length.
The thing read dreamlike, while all the characters showed a profound emotional detachment from reality. This book feels like a dream you half remembered, which is interesting given the storyline, but usually not what I'm looking for in a book.
A fun enough read, but if this were a series I'd stop here.
A lot of interesting things happened, with possible... interesting and exciting implications. However, the most interesting characters were still as flat as a nanoparticle, while the others weren't deeper than a single Planck length.
The thing read dreamlike, while all the characters showed a profound emotional detachment from reality. This book feels like a dream you half remembered, which is interesting given the storyline, but usually not what I'm looking for in a book.
A fun enough read, but if this were a series I'd stop here.
July 26, 2019
Rudy Rucker is a genius. I first read his Ware Tetralogy, which was the craziest sci-fi series I'd ever experienced. Parts of those stories still haunt and amuse me. This story checked all the same boxes, but didn't unravel the wtf yarn quite as far... which was just fine with me.
This story was full of creative sci-fi concepts from the start, had interesting yet cliche-type characters, and was full of action and inter-relational drama.
I recommend this book to anyone that enjoys cyberpunk or stories about the singularity.
This story was full of creative sci-fi concepts from the start, had interesting yet cliche-type characters, and was full of action and inter-relational drama.
I recommend this book to anyone that enjoys cyberpunk or stories about the singularity.
May 15, 2025
Strange but Refreshing
It won’t be for everyone. I bounced between loving it and wishing it was more of the parts I loved. The author has a great voice and easily bounces between surfer speech and highly technical scientific embellishments. It was fun but I could do without the absurd leaning into fantasy aspects. They are pitched as science but effectively the kind of nonsense I’m not into, even if it was entertaining
Regardless, I enjoyed the story and am strongly looking forward to seeing more of what this artist has on offer
It won’t be for everyone. I bounced between loving it and wishing it was more of the parts I loved. The author has a great voice and easily bounces between surfer speech and highly technical scientific embellishments. It was fun but I could do without the absurd leaning into fantasy aspects. They are pitched as science but effectively the kind of nonsense I’m not into, even if it was entertaining
Regardless, I enjoyed the story and am strongly looking forward to seeing more of what this artist has on offer
February 14, 2018
The first couple of pages sucked me right into the story. I wanted to know more about the two best friends and what they were up to.
Instead, their story stops, and we meet a bunch of new characters some ten, twenty, ... years into the future. In fact, there were so many new characters that there just didn't seem to be enough time to get to know any of them properly. And so, I didn't care about their stories.
The idea for the book though, is interesting : Gaia vs. technology.
Instead, their story stops, and we meet a bunch of new characters some ten, twenty, ... years into the future. In fact, there were so many new characters that there just didn't seem to be enough time to get to know any of them properly. And so, I didn't care about their stories.
The idea for the book though, is interesting : Gaia vs. technology.
July 8, 2017
Imaginative but disjointed. Had a hard time getting through it. Helps if you have read Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near." Based on the idea of a coming time when collective machine intelligence will surpass that of humans..
May 26, 2017
2 and a half stars but I gave it 3 because I like his style.
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