New Story! And bonus stories by others!

[elfs]

In case you missed it, I’ve posted a new story in the Bastet series: Bath Night, which brings us to the most recent decade and a riff on something I read during the Iraq war.

If you’re a fan of the Singularity, here are two stories told from opposite sides of the fence: Gentle Seduction by Marc Stiegler is an early, and hopeful, depiction of the Singularity.  It starts as a riff on the seminal trans-Singularity movie Brainstorm, and moves on from there, reflecting on the character of a woman who we normally wouldn’t have thought of one of us– and it is her quality as someone not interested in the rapture of the nerds that makes her so pivotal to our success. The other is by Peter Watts, so expect nastiness, and Watts delivers: The Things is John Carpenter’s The Thing as told from the point of view of the monster. Watts manages to make us sympathetic to the creature, even when leading to an even more horrific conclusion than what Carpenter delivered.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.

Comments

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

For those of us not up to date on the Singularity (genre?), could you sum it up in a line or three?

From the gentle seduction and brainstorm links it looks like it's shorthand for the transhumanist "we have only the limits we impose on ourselves" kind of philosophy.

[kengr]

The basic idea of The Singularity is that as change accelerates, we will hit a singularity (in the mathematical sense, just like the singularity at the heart of a black hole). A place where the rules are no longer predictable by the previous models.

In human terms, if we reach the Singularity, what comes after *cannot* be comprehended by the folks from before it.

Here's a wiki article that may or may not be of any help.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

The Things was fantastic.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Totally.

[grum]

I enjoyed the new story. Think I have a typo catch though, towards the end are you missing a what?

"I'm sorry, Sergeant Wilson. And I'm very sorry, Joplin. It looks like you found (what) you needed."