The New York Times, its finger squarely on the pulse of SF as always, has a very nice profile of Vernor Vinge. That last bit isn’t sarcastic– it’s a good piece. The earlier snark is just because the focus is on a book that’s a couple of years old already.
Of course, any Vinge piece will necessarily dwell on the “Singularity,” which Jo Walton doesn’t like. I’m not a huge fan of the idea myself, so it’s nice to see that Jo’s comments inspired Rudy Rucker to suggest some new and different ideas for SF stories.
Rucker’s list, like his fiction, tends toward the “trippy,” as the kids say, so not all of his suggestions are to my tastes. It’s good to see the attempt, though.
Really? None of the three Vinge books I’ve read are really about the singularity… Ok, well, Fire on the Deep has a singularity element to it. I guess I don’t really count rainbow’s end as singularity…
The New York Times generally does a good job with the genres of Science Fiction, and with Mystery. I enjoyed the Vinge interview, though I am skeptical of The Singularity.
Vinge explained provocatively, at a panel we gave at a Westercon, that the Singularity is an observer-dependent phenomenon. To old fashioned Homo sapiens sapiens, increasingly weird stuff happens exponentially, and the world quickly becomes unrecognizable or incomprehensible.
But to AIs, and post-Homo sapiens transhumans whose computational capabilities are also increasing exponentially with time, there may be a very gentle transition indeed.
The Times didn’t mention it, but Vinge was one of the 3 novelists that hackers traditionally had to read: William Gibson (who had the “feel” of hacker culture, from interrogating informants such as myself, plus tremendous style, even though he knew nothing about computers as such; Bruce Sterling (because of Hacker Crackdown); and Vernor Vinge.
“Doing harm to SF?” Wow, there’s a sweeping, unjustified generalization– ironic in a piece whose position is that the whole notion of a technological singularity is a sweeping, unjustified generalization.
Aside from that, though, a general consensus that the consequences of drastically cheap and nearly ubiquitous computation and communication is an Issue To Be Addressed (or at least handwaved at) in a serious, semi-believeable work is no more “doing harm to SF” than similar consensus questions from the 50s and 60s.
Like, “How do you think we’ll get to 2000 without the Americans and the Soviets blowing each other up?” or “What justifies your Soviet-less world of 2050?”
“Doing harm to SF.”
Sheesh.
Ms. Walton is attacking a straw man version of the concept, and I’d bet money she made no effort to research it and has never read the article Vinge wrote about it.
Captain Button: you’d lose.
Kate Nepveu @5: Then why did she show no evidence of having done so?
Why on earth are you asking me? The Tor blog’s got comments enabled, go ask Jo.
Kate Nepveu @7:Why on earth are you asking me?
Why am I asking you? Because you are the person who claims to know the answer.
If you don’t don’t know for a fact that she did do the research, what is your basis for claiming I’d lose a hypothetical bet that she didn’t?
Oops. Delete the second “don’t” above.
This conversation is over. Move along.
Hope that the conversation is still open for those of us who are, you know, nice and have a clue. Becuase it is a good conversation.
One must, I think, distinguish between 3 things:
(1) Futurism prediction of a sudden transcendental increase in computational capability and/or control of physical universe and/or nature of consciousness;
(2) Science Fiction exploration of this on identifiable characters, in a story;
(3) A cult/political movement of transhumanists, singularity-hypers, geek nirvana proselytizers, philosophy professors and computer science males suddenly getting sexual access to dazzled acolytes.
On these, I am (as a professional Futurist who’s gotten nicely paid for same by mass-market magazines suxch as the late Omni, major network TV such as the NBC-TV Today Show, and keynote address gigs to corporate and legislative bodies) and dude with much grad school experience and degrees in brain theory and AI and robotics and what later was deemed nanotechnology:
(1) Skeptically interested in the Futurism prediction;
(2) Delighted by some superb Science Fiction, and able to skim past the copy-cats;
(3) Concerned by defamatory attacks on people whom I respect, plagiarism, and the possibly criminal exploitation of the young and gullible.
I suspect that there is a market niche for a book, not warning of the Singularity (o noes! AI/Nano is eating my brainz) nor worshipping the age of spiritual automata, but evincing healthy skepticism. Sort of a New Atheism piggybacking on the Rapture of the Nerds.