[ExI] reconsidering the Orion's Arm timeline...

Keith Henson hkhenson at rogers.com
Wed Jan 7 06:05:18 UTC 2009


On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 10:29 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/1/7 Keith Henson <hkhenson at rogers.com>:
>
>> This is my attempt on humans being seduced into cyberspace in a short story.
>>
>> http://www.terasemjournals.org/GN0202/henson.html
>
> Is "seduced" a good word? Sometimes I talk to people the possibility
> of a human future in cyberspace and they are horrified. I counter that
> no-one will be forced but instead they will undergo the change
> voluntarily, because once they understand it or experience it they
> will see its advantages. Comes the reply: "So people won't be forced,
> they'll be seduced! That's just as bad!"

Yeah.  :-(

Do you see any way that people can avoid what happens in the story?

This short story is actually the second chapter in unfinished novel
set beyond the singularity.  It's a world with a few people left in
it, but most are gone.  This chapter was to explain what happened to
the missing people.  It's partly centered around the difficulty of
keeping the remaining population from going *poof.*

Charles Stross in :_Halting State_ put it this way:

"Someday we're all going to get brain implants and experience this
directly. Someday everyone is going to live their lives out in places
like this, vacant bodies tended by machines of loving grace while
their minds go on before us into strange spaces where the meat cannot
follow. You can see it coming, slamming towards you out of the future,
like the empty white static that is all anyone has ever heard from
beyond the stars: a Final Solution to the human condition, an answer
to the Fermi paradox, lights on at home and all the windows tightly
shuttered. Because it's a thing of beauty, the ability to spin the
cloth of reality, and you're a sucker for it: Isn't story-telling what
being human is all about?"

Keith



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