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Charles Stross Interview
An anonymous reader writes "I'm surprised nobody mentioned this yet: a very interesting interview with author Charles Stross, whose current cycle of singularity-based stories Accelerando (featuring character Manfred Macx) is as tightly-packed with cutting-edge speculations as Bruce Sterling's work. An excerpt from the first of those stories is currently available on the Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine website."
Here is what Vernor Vinge has to say about the singularity. Watch out, its a bit fatalistic.
s ing.html
http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-
It was in trying to imagine a world where this wouldn't happen that he created his "Zones of Thought" novels.
Wasn't it Vernor Vinge who coined the term Singularity in relation to exponential technologic growth which overwhelms our ability to predict and comprehend?
His writings are suffused with it. It is a key theme in A Fire Upon the Deep and Marooned in Realtime. It also weighs heavily in the background of A Deepness in the Sky. All IMO are brilliant pieces of SF.
Yeah, reducing entire philosophies to an incorrect one-phrase blurb does tend to produce ridiculousness.
Extropian graphs are like metaphors... they are a way of describing something, but they do not take priority over the real thing. Similarly, those graphs are just a demonstration of the larger point of the difficulty of predicting the near-future in an exponentially-progressing-technology era.
The graphs flow from the arguments, not vice versa.
As chance wants it, I came across Charlie's writing just a couple of weeks ago - and concur with all the positive comments. He also has a unreleased novel called Scratch Monkey on his website (right at the bottom), for which you need to request the "keys" before being able to access it.
Scratch Monkey is definitely worth reading.
PS: hi Charlie! This article is the equivalent of being on the cover of the Rolling Stone, yea?
yes, we have no bananas
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HTH, HAND.
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