“‘There are only two industries. This has always been true,’ said Madame Ping, enfolding a lovely porcelain teacup in her withered fingers, the two-inch fingernails interleaving neatly like the pinions of a raptor folding its wings after a long hard day of cruising the thermals. ‘There is the industry of things, and the industry of […]
Since well before the 2008 financial crisis, the practice of economic austerity has beleaguered American and European politics. Praised by the right as a panacea of renewed financial responsibility, and decried by the left as a mechanism for dismantling the West’s already struggling middle classes, austerity signifies a critical juncture where battered economies face radically […]
“Finkle-McGraw began to develop an opinion that was to shape his political views in later years, namely, that while people were not genetically different, they were culturally as different as they could possibly be, and that some cultures were simply better than others. This was not a subjective value judgment, merely an observation that some […]
I picked up Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep as part of my due diligence for understanding key moments in the history of science fiction. As the first writer to popularize the idea of a technological singularity in fiction as well as nonfiction, Vinge has proved himself one of scifi’s most intelligent and prescient […]
“The ‘Blight,’ that was the other common name for the Perversion, and closer to Old One’s view. For all the Perversion’s transcendence, its life style was more similar to a disease than anything else. Maybe that had helped to fool Old One. But now Pham could see: the Blight lived in pieces, across extraordinary reaches […]
“In Ravna’s opinion, sex in zero-gee was not the experience some people bragged it up to be; but really sleeping with someone…that was much nicer in free fall. An embrace could be light and enduring and effortless.” ––A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge, loc. 5424 “When people say, ‘It can’t go on […]
“Memories? They towered over everything else. Yet he could not understand them. He could not understand the details. He could not even understand the emotions, except as inane simplifications––joy, laughter, wonder, fear and icy-steel determination. Now, he was lost in those memories, wandering like an idiot in a cathedral. Not understanding, cowering before icons.” ––A […]
Max More and Natasha Vita-More’s The Transhumanist Reader is probably the single best source for readers interested in a crash course in transhumanist philosophy. It presents more than forty essays addressing myriad aspects of transhumanist theory, with a good mixture of classic (i.e. pre-21st-century) papers and contemporary ones. It is a dense text containing a […]
There are plenty of reasons why I should hate (or at least vehemently dislike) Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, but I was surprised by this novel’s ability to ingratiate itself to me despite propounding a set of perspectives and values that seem anathema to mine. I am neither a military enthusiast nor a scholar of […]
“Young, Rodger W., Private, 148th Infantry, 37th Infantry Division (the Ohio Buckeyes); born Tiffin, Ohio, 28 April 1918; died 31 July 1943, on the island of New Georgia, Solomons, South Pacific, while single-handedly attacking and destroying an enemy machine-gun pillbox. His platoon had been pinned down by intense fire from this pillbox; Private Young was […]