10:24 pm - Book Meme
I've been book tagged by Ken MacLeod.
1: Total number of books I own: unclear, but certainly in excess of 2000, possibly in excess of 4000. (I just moved two-thirds of the mass market SF paperbacks into a new bookcase in the living room and there're just over 700 books in it -- it has less than half the shelf yardage of my study, which is full, there are boxes on the mezannine, and there's another book case and a half in the living room.)
2: The last book I bought: "The far side of the stars" by David Drake. (You had to ask. You had to ask. Oh, the ignominy!) If I include the other stuff on the same shopping trip -- this afternoon -- I'd have to add in "River of Gods" by Ian McDonald (in a lightweight paperback edition that won't break my wrists when I read it), replacement copies of "Lord of Light" and "This Immortal" by Roger Zelazny, and ... that's it.
3: The last book I read: if that means "the last book I finished", it would be "Evolution's Darling" by Scott Westerfield. Very interesting -- a first novel, I suspect, with first novel flaws but also an amazing promise for the future of hard SF, by an author who's rapidly carving out a name for himself as one of the stars of the new space opera. ("Evolution's Darling" isn't space opera; it has more in common with the new cognitive SF, like Justina Robson's "Natural History". But I need to digest it for a bit longer before I issue a pronunciamento.)
If this question means "the last book I read from (finished or otherwise)" the answer would of course be, I'm ploughing through "The System of the World" by Neal Stephenson.
And if we look at the last work of non-fiction ... well, it would probably be a toss-up between "Forensics for Dummies" and "The Mediaeval Underworld" by Andrew McCall and "Ignition: a history of liquid rocket fuels" by John D. Clark. But I dip into non-fiction works rather than reading them cover to cover, so all of these are reads in progress.
4: Five books that mean a lot to me:
- 1984 - George Orwell. (Do I need to explain this one?)
- Schismatrix - Bruce Sterling. (Take cyberpunk, the 1980's, and all the SF of that period. If I had to throw it all on a bonfire except for one book, it would be this one. Not because of its brilliantly insightful characterisation or literary style, but because if SF is a literature of ideas, then this one single-handedly reinvented space opera and redefined a subgenre I work in in ways that are still having repercussions twenty years later. Forget Neuromancer, this was the most important book to come out of the cyberpunk movement.)
- Programming Perl (1st edition) - Larry Wall and Randall Schwartz. (This book fucked with my head when I read it, then gave me a whole new career and a whole new attitude to software design and the best way to approach large projects. It has had an incalculable effect on my life. It's also bloody well-written, amusing and educational, and inspirational in a way that the canonical book of a programming language just isn't supposed to be.)
- The Emperor's New Mind - Roger Penrose. (This book is just so wrong it's amazing -- and infuriating! Yet it's also a tour de force, a work of genius, and deeply educational. Reading it and figuring out why it was wrong -- which was made somewhat easier by also having read too much of Frank Tipler and John Barrow's "The Anthropic Cosmological Principle", which was wrong but orthogonally so to Penrose's work -- forced me to grapple with my own preconceptions about the area of AI.)
- Mind Children - Hans Moravec. (A slim volume that slipped out in the mid eighties, it was outrageously provocative and prefigured most of the ideas in singularity SF by a decade or more. Moravec isn't a fiction writer; if he was, Vernor Vinge (and I) wouldn't be able to strip-mine his ideas so blatantly.)
5:Tag five people and have them do it on their blogs
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Randall Schwartz: Absolutely brilliant writer, in ways that tech writers are not supposed to be. I still have my "learning perl" book on my desk whenever I need to figure out how to do something that I knew how to do 10 years ago.
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David Drake: No ignominy there. His is some of the best writing in the sub genre he works in. His "Hammer's Slammers" fiction is horribly underrated. I hope the hardcover omnibus editions of this I'm publishing go a ways towards correcting this oversight. Drop me an email with your address, and I'll be sure to send you a comp copy of volume one when it comes out. :)
"Swarm" is also the earliest story I'm aware of featuring the concept of the Singularity. (Though posting this here is probably as good as asking to be informed of an earlier example...)
Not a story, exactly, but Teilhard de Chardin was writing about the Omega Point in the 1930s, which strikes me as a passable match for the Vingean Singularity if you squint a little.
Greg Bear mentions Teilhard de Chardin near the end of the novel version of Blood Music, which is pretty clearly a Singularity: the development of a noosphere. Still an evocative term, IMO.
Bruce Sterling actually thought of the end state for humanity in the Schismatrix universe as "Clarkean transcendence", as in Childhood's End. (Of course, there's a school of thought about CE that thinks humanity gets eaten at the end.)
I think you can trace the Clarke-Teilhard strain back to variants of theosophy, but I haven't checked very deeply.
I also suspect it's liable to be a useful mine for convincing-but-inaccurate physical laws, for purposes of writing sf. The physics that Phipps proposes are not quite subject to speed-of-light limitations, and there are likely to be useful loopholes there to play with if one is so inclined, though I haven't looked at them.
Hans Moravec's Fiction; proteomics/lipidomics
He wrote a novel; I don't know if he got it published. We'd discussed it at Complexity and AI cons and the like, years ago. One plot thread that I recall involve sentients Orthogonal to us. They can easily do something to the entire cosmos at a given spacial frequency, but it is utterly beyond their technology to do anything localized to one place in xyzt coordinates.
I did robotics for JPL while still an undergrad at Caltech, circa 1972, and then in grad school, 1973-1977, where my Master's Degree Thesis was in parallel AI software.
I disagree with standard theories of uploading human minds to silicon or other substrate. In a nutshell, I've been arguing since the late 1960s that the human mind and memory have roughly 90% of their information stored and processed by proteins and lipids (primarily in glial cells), and most of the minor 10% by DNA and RNA (with much of the RNA to protein effort in glial cells). The electrochemical neural network, which most people incorrectly identify as the brain, is merely the LAN or internet that quickly connects distant parts of the brain. The glial cells in your brain outnumber the cells with axons and dendrites by roughly 10 to 1. Or, as they say, of the 10^10 cells in your brain, 10^11 are glial.
Having done the pioneering research into nanotechnology, artifical life, and the proteomics of nonlinear enzyme wave computing, I am now working on a breakthrough paper for mathematical lipidomics.
Re: Hans Moravec's Fiction; proteomics/lipidomics
Anyway, no, he doesn't seem to have published a novel. It's possible it's buried in that (terrifyingly huge; where do these people get the time?) list of things he's written and I missed it, but if it got as far as print form the Library of Congress doesn't know about it, which is usually a good indication.
Pity; it'd be interesting to read...
Re: Hans Moravec's Fiction; proteomics/lipidomics
-- Professor Jonathan Vos Post