[ExI] POST MORTAL chugging on

[Damien Broderick]

At 12:59 AM 6/11/2007 +0200, Jonathan Meyer <erathostenes at gmail.com> wrote:

>You overdo it a bit when Alex is already building such elaborate 
>toys with the means he is expected to find at the home of a lawyer.. 
>This is one of the parts that hit me as most unrealistic, even in a 
>SF-Story...

Hey, you ain't seen nuthin yet. :)

I think the reader has to consider POST MORTAL SYNDROME, to some 
fairly large degree, as a playful allegory of rapid discontinuous change.

We set this acceleration in the context of all the bothersome 
human-paced confusions of an ordinary life under stress and even 
threat from forces of law and criminal intent alike.

Alex represents something new, never seen before on the planet: a 
child whose brain is being amplified and rewired from day to day, in 
a growth spurt that combines jumps to a transhuman condition of 
clarity and ingenuity and... let's call it "imaginative intuition"... 
that's meant to convey not just human genius (Mozart, say) but 
something we can't quite conceive.

But Alex also remains human in his motivations, his love for his 
mother and Paul, his hunger for knowledge, his generosity toward a 
brute who has tried to murder him...

In other words, this novel is not meant as a strictly realistic 
portrayal of the effects of a genetic/neural booster, but as a sort 
of parable or cartoon of what lies ahead of us as we move toward the 
singularity.

Thanks for your comments, Jonathan!

Damien Broderick