I'm a big fan if Peter Watts (well, considering I've only read
two of his books - but
Maelstrom is on the way) and today I read in his
blog the cover blurb for this latest and it sounds fantastic!
A Different Kind of Singularity.
The eve of the 22nd century. A world where the dearly-departed send postcards back from Heaven, and Jainist evangelicals make scientific breakthroughs by speaking in tongues; where genetically-engineered vampires solve problems intractable to baseline Humans, and soldiers come with zombie switches that shut off their own self-awareness during combat. A world under blatant surveillance by an alien presence that refuses to show itself.
Daniel Brooks is a living fossil: an old man in a world of immortals, a field biologist in a world where all biology has long since turned computational, an unwitting catspaw used by terrorists to kill thousands. Taking refuge in the Oregon desert, he turns his back on a humanity that shatters into strange new subspecies with every heartbeat. But he isn't hiding from anything; he awakens one night to find himself at the center of a storm that's about to turn all of history inside-out.
Now he's trapped in a ship bound for the center of the solar system. To his left is a grief-stricken soldier with a zombie switch in his head, obsessed by whispered messages from a dead son half a lightyear away. To his right is an autistic hacker who hasn't quite discovered that Dan Brooks is the man she's sworn to kill on sight. A vampire and its entourage of zombie bodyguards lurk in the shadows behind. And dead ahead, a handful of rapture-stricken monks takes them all to a meeting with something they will only call "The Angels of the Asteroids".
But whatever they encounter, there in the blinding maelstrom above the sun's north pole, is the furthest thing from anyone's vision of divinity. By the end of their pilgrimage the whole world is coming apart at the seams— and Dan Brooks, the fossil man, is face-to-face with the biggest evolutionary breakpoint since the origin of thought itself.
The Singularity's here. It's too late to go back. And all those starry-eyed optimists, the extropians, the transhumanists, the rapture-nerds and technophiles who sang the praises of technology=magic — somehow, none of them realized there'd be no room for humanity in a post-human age …
They're planning on making a movie out of one of the best SciFi novels from the 1990's.
Dune is probably the greatest SciFi novel ever written. It's also one of the worst movies ever made and a mediocre TV series.
Science Fiction God Arthur C. Clarke died yesterday. Every mention of his death includes a reference to the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey which to my mind is more Kubrick's achievement. What Clarke did do was write some terrific and influential novels, Childhoods End being so influential in fact that most people have never heard of it, but everyone knows the image of gigantic spaceships hovering over the worlds cities.
