Hylozoic Novel
(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)
My new SF novel Hylozoic starts shipping today. Hylozoic continues the story of my previous novel Postsingular, although it's self-contained enough that you can read it on its own.
What I was after in these two books was to tackle the notion that our world is going to (or already has) changed in a very extreme way, due to the presence of increasingly powerful computers---this notion is what people often term "the Singularity," a usage introduced by SF writer Vernor Vinge in a classic 1993 talk.
A few SF writers were worried that we wouldn't be able to write about the future after a technological singularity, but Charles Stross's 1995 novel, Accelerando, blew the doors off this fear. Charlie just up and does it, brings on the singularity before our eyes.
Emboldened, I wrote my own version of a world after the singularity, that is, Postsingular. In my take, computation migrates out of man-made devices and into natural processes. Everyone has something like a web browser in their heads, telepathy becomes real, and even teleportation becomes possible. And then a universal memory upgrade takes hold...and everything wakes up.
And that's where Hylozoic starts.
The story is (kind of) represented in a triptych of three paintings that I did while I was working on it. In the left panel, we see our heroine Thuy Nguyen noticing that there some nasty little beings in the subdimensions. In the central panel, a flying alien manta ray is about to rescue Thuy and her boyfriend Jayjay Jiminez---the background patterns indicate that the air itself is alive. In the right panel, Thuy and Jayjay fly up to a higher level of reality in order to fix things up.
[The Hylozoic Triptych. Click on the image to see a larger version.]
If you want to know a little more about the book, you can access my Hylozoic Writing Notes, online as a book-length PDF document containing the working notes for the book. I have numerous images in the document, and internal and external links as well. (If the file fails to open for you, this could mean that someone else is currently opening it, and the server is overloaded---try again another time and mabye save the file to your local drive so you can peruse it at leisure.)
And finally, here's a picture from the Hylozoic Writing Notes, of a plot diagram that I made on the sand at Big Sur. You can see an evil alien Peng bird on the left, the Magic Harp in the middle, and a Hrull flying manta ray on the right. The letters indicate the chapters' point of view, which alternates among Jayjay, Thuy, and Chu.
the latest
latest episodes
Just general question in light of your wonderful guestblogger posts...
WHAT DRUGS ARE YOU ON AND HOW IN THE NAME OF ALL THINGS HOLY DO I GET SOME?
Hi Rudy,
Interesting stuff, I've had a quick scan through some of your notes, and might get myself copies of both books at some point in the not too distant future (when cash flow isn't such a problem).
Not too sure about your assertion that Accelerando was the first book to deal with a post-singularity world, though - There are a few authors I can think of, but the most relevant one that springs to mind is Iain M. Banks and his Culture novels (starting with Consider Phlebas, way back in '87), which all deal with a people ("The Culture") who've clearly reached and surpassed the singularity: Artificial 'Minds', far beyond the comprehension of the humans who paved the way for them, are God-like (and thankfully mostly benevolent) beings which have reached a kind of zenith beyond the human singularity (perhaps there's an AI singularity they're yet to achieve!?), but exist in harmony (democratically even, to some extent) with the relatively puny - though fully upgraded - humans and drones.
I don't know if you're unaware of Banks, or if there's a reason you think his Culture novels don't count as post-singularity, but if you're not acquainted with him, I can highly recommend you seek out and enjoy his epic space-operas!
(NB: Iain M. Banks should not be confused with Iain Banks - they're the same author, but the former is his pen-name for Sci-Fi, while he uses the latter for 'ordinary' novels)
Interesting indeed. I've been following, rather casually, the whole idea of the singularity/postsingularity and what I have personally concluded is that there is a point at which extremely high levels of intelligence are not compatible with consciousness. That is, consciousness is predicated on illusion, or even delusion, if you prefer. Something hundreds, thousands or millions of times more intelligent than a human would lose this sense of illusion, and therefore could not be, nor would necessarily want to be conscious. This is something that I haven't seen addressed by the adepts of the singularity/postsingularity. But I would assert that once you know, it's the end of the show.
Charlie just up and does it, brings on the singularity before our eyes.
... and ushered in a resurgence of speculative fiction. Science fantasy. Wish-fulfillment with robots.
Anyone can engage in baseless speculation. That wasn't the thought behind calling it "the singularity." The term was used by Vinge to analogously refer to an event horizon: after our future society's technology passes the singularity period, we can't reasonably predict what will happen.
We can guess, sure. Maybe the air WILL come alive. Maybe Mecha-Christ will rise from the ocean to destroy Tokyo and Needles, CA - I hate that town. Post-Singularity, there's no way to *reasonably* predict what will happen, so there's no way to cull the *unreasonable* predictions. All roots to hard science fiction are cut off, and we enter the realm of whimsy.
Oh, and religion. People like to criticize singularitards for their hokey new age beliefs, but have a look at http://www.kurzweilai.net/mindx/frame.html and tell me that faith does not play a major role.
Um...Accelerando's from 2005, not 1995.
"or already has"
As an ex-physicist this is the closest I can get to believing in the notion of technological singularity: Parts of the world already live on the other side of it.
Consider the job I and many others hold now in the financial world: I take large amounts of numbers that describe how money is moving and put these numbers into an electric machine that can do a lot of math REALLY quickly, and based on that information my company makes money.
When I go home I sometimes go to another electric information machine, but in this case the "information" is what other people are writing around the world (and THAT information is being turned into pulses of light that you can't actually see but that travels over tiny hairs of glass that have been placed around the world).
This would be imcomprehensible to people living, say, 150 years ago.
Thank you, Beelzebuddy, you just managed to articulate everything that has been bugging me about the singularity/postsingularity-talks that have been going on around here lately.
I mean, I enyoy a ripping yarn as much as the next guy, but why do so many people feel the need to wrap their yarn around a core of shallow spirituality and bad science?
Also, it´s allready been done. And done better. At least way, way back when Asimov wrote about sentient machines he made some effort of actually trying to discuss what "sentient" would mean, instead of just re-defining the word to mean something much less and then sticking it like post-it onto everything in sight.
Hi Rudy... ready postsingular, (got it from feedbooks for my ereader), and loved it. I'm more than willing to shell out the $$$ for Hylozoic, but do you know if it will be coming out in electronic format anytime soon?
Come on, Rudy, PLEASE tell us about the drugs! I won't last 50 years to experience it for real.
You know, you might sell more books if people could read your name on the cover in that photo.
"I'm looking for that new book by Ru Rucke."
"Who?"
"Ru Rucke."
"Never heard of 'im."
:-)
Magic Harp, you say?
These paintings made me wonder, is there a specific art of the Singularity? A specific movement focused on the theme of Singularity and perhaps constituting a New Futurism movement? There has long been Apocalyptic art and, more recently, an Afterculture movement focused on the representation of a Post-Collapse culture -often with a little too much mimicry of primary cultures, IMO, based on a premise that these cultures would become the source of a reconstructed civilization. I've seen many examples -particularly through Boing Boing- of art that seems in some way or another inspired by individual concepts relating to notions of transhumanism and future disruptive technologies. And we have long seen art based on/in digital technology or based on visualization of advanced mathematics. But I haven't yet noticed things coming together in any kind of illustration/representation of the future. That seems to remain abandoned by the artist culture in favor of Retrofuturist nostalgia or irony.
How might the emergent technologies which we anticipate as key to Singularity, like nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, find their application in future art? Contemporary mathematics-derived/influenced art seems to offer some hints. Given that the line between art and science/engineering is thin and blurry, would it not be possible that art, rather than the pursuit of 'products' through applied technology, could catalyze Singularity and what might this mean for possible outcomes?
Of course, we could say the same thing about pornography which, in recent years, has demonstrated its propensity for being a first adopter of media technology the rest of the media industry is reluctant to take chances on. I like to say that when we see a technology being sexualized in some way it's usually an indication that it may be here for a while.