...you'd pretty much have to stop there, lol.
Thanks for digging up that year-old thread, Ryan.
What a difference a year makes! As I announced in a singular post in Corey's thread A Fair(y) Use Tale, Postsingular is now a novel, available online under a Creative Commons license. Here's something I posted in an IIZaadz thread a while ago that tells more about the novel:
I've just started reading the latest novel by Rudy Rucker, one of my favorite authors of all time. Postsingular
presents a particularly gonzo look at the technological singularity
scenario. As I mentioned elsewhere recently it is licenced under Creative Commons and is available for free download! I love this license:
~~~
Electronic License
The
electronic version of the text is distributed under the terms of a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0
shows a full description of the license, and a summary of the license
appears within each of the downloadable files. Roughly speaking, you
have the right to copy the files in a non-commercial fashion,
attributing them to Rudy Rucker, but you don't have the right to remix,
alter, transform, build upon the files or convert them into other media
unless you've gotten permission from me. This said, it's generally okay
to port one of the files to a different text format or reader platform
as long as you don't add or remove anything.
~~~
The author offers numerous different formats for download on this page, which also has the following information on the book:
Book Summary
Postsingular and its sequels represent Rucker's return to the cyberpunk style of his classic Ware tetralogy. But this is 21st Century cyberpunk; Rucker calls it psipunk.
Postsingular
takes on the question of what will happen after the Singularity—what
will happen after computers become as smart as humans and
nanotechnology takes on the power of magic?
A mad
scientist decides it might be a good idea to create a giant virtual
reality simulation that is running a copy of Earth and of most of the
people in it. Fine, but in order to create this simulation, the mad
scientist plans to grind our planet into a zillion supercomputing
nanomachines called nants.
Ultrageek Ond Lutter
and his autistic son Chu find a way to block the nants—but then Ond
can’t resist infesting Earth with a congenial breed of
quantum-computing nanomachines called orphids.
The
orphids coat the planet, one or two per square millimeter, and now
everyone is on-line all the time, and everything is visible in the orphidnet. Artificial life forms emerge in the orphidnet, these are helpful agents called beezies, and they pyramid together into a superhuman planetary mind called the Big Pig.
People can mentally access the Big Pig and feel like geniuses—with the
catch that when they come down they can’t really remember what they
saw. Those addicted to this new kind of high are called pigheads.
The
lovers Jayjay and Thuy begin as pigheads, but Thuy manages to kick the
habit to work on a vast orphidnet-based narrative called a metanovel.
Jayjay continues his sessions with the Big Pig in hopes of learning
more about science—and this puts a damper on their love affair. But the
mad scientist is still machinating to bring back the nants and destroy
Earth, and Thuy and Jayjay reunite to save the world.
It
helps that Jayjay has figured out how to do teleportation via the
orphidnet. And that Thuy has made friends with a giant, ethereal man
from a parallel world called the Hibrane. Jayjay helps Thuy teleport to
the Hibrane for help. The Hibraners do have a fix for Earth’s problems,
but it’s going to be a bigger change than anyone ever imagined. Earth
is on the verge of a postdigital age, more postsingular than anyone
ever imagined.
Nature will come alive.
Blurbs
“Rudy
Rucker should be declared a National Treasure of American Science
Fiction. Someone simultaneously channeling Kurt Gödel and Lenny Bruce
might start to approximate full-on Ruckerian warp-space, but without
the sweet, human, splendidly goofy Rudy-ness at the core of the
singularity.”
— William Gibson, author of Pattern Recognition
“Rudy Rucker is the most consistently brilliant imagination working in SF today”
— Charles Stross, author of Accelerando
“Rudy
Rucker never fails to leave me breathless… Reading one of his stories
is like a reset button on reality: when it's over, the whole universe
looks slightly different…and much stranger.”
–Spider Robinson, author of Night of Power
(Blurbs for Rudy Rucker's Other Books)
Reviews
Alt-cultural
folk strive to save Earth from digitized doom in this novel from the
prince of gonzo SF. A computer mogul's threat to replace messy reality
with clean virtuality and by a memory-hungry artificial intelligence
called the Big Pig propels nanotechnologist Ond Lutter, his autistic
son, Chu, and their allies on an interdimensional quest for a golden
harp, the Lost Chord, strung with hypertubes that can unroll the eighth
dimension and unleash limitless computing power. … Rucker favors the
flower power of San Francisco over the number crunching of Silicon
Valley. His novel vibrates with the warm rhythms of dream and
imagination, not the cold logic of programming … Playing with the math
of quantum computing, encryption and virtual reality, Rucker places his
faith in people who find true reality “gnarly” enough to love.
— Publisher's Weekly (C) Reed Business Information.
Always
willing and able to embrace sf's trendiest themes, Rucker here takes on
the volatile field of nanotechnology and the presumed inevitable
“singularity” of human and computer unification. In a series of
interrelated vignettes, he describes the calamity that befalls nanotech
inventor Ond Lutter and his would-be benefactors when Ond unleashes a
variety of self-replicating nanobots. In one episode, trillions of
microscopic bots, dubbed nants, chew up Mars to create a colossal Dyson
Sphere orbiting the sun. When the nants move on to Earth to transform
every living being into a virtual-reality doppelganger, Ond saves the
day with a nant-busting virus. The real fun begins, however, when Ond
“improves” on the nants with apparently benign nanobots, called
orphids, that blanket every surface and provide plugged-in users
three-dimensional access to every conceivable scrap of knowledge and
experience. … His devoted fans and dazzled newcomers to him will revel
in his willingness to push technological extrapolation to its soaring
limits.
— Carl Hays, Booklist
When it comes to unique voices in science fiction, few can claim to have quite as distinctive a style as Rudy Rucker. Postsingular
is packed full of the larger-than-life weirdness that has become his
trademark; classic genre tropes and clichés rub shoulders with
mathematical theorems and wild technological speculation, delivered in
prose that captures the the languid vibe and hippie undercurrents of
California. … Rucker's quick-draw style acts as a sleight-of-hand that
allows him to slip some of sf's biggest tropes and ideas beneath the
reader's radar, as well as touching some very human character aspects
that are often skipped over (or, worse still, rendered tiresome) by the
pens of others. Postsingular has all the bells and whistles that only a computing professor could provide, but never at the expense of the story.
—Paul Raven, Interzone
Rudy Rucker's new novel Postsingular
is pure Rucker: a dope-addled exploration of the way-out fringes of
string theory and the quantum universe that distorts the possible into
the most improbable contortions.
—Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing
This
book is densely written…yet also captivatingly plotted for sheer
narrative verve and laced with plenty of humor and suspense. Walking a
tightrope between information overload and thriller action, the book
captures the heady zip, zest and buzz of the post-singular milieu, a
world where miracles are commonplace but structured logically to
provide real challenges, risks and triumphs.
—Paul DiFilippo, SciFi.com
Rucker
writes with a hyperactive level of inventiveness that seems to owe bits
in equal measure to Lewis Carroll, William Burroughs, and Ray Kurzweil.
Rucker can be enormous fun to read, and there are some stunningly bold
ideas here.
—Gary K. Wolfe, Locus
~~~
postspiral out,
arthur