The Transpegritzian nonHumanist Future
Oct. 17th, 2005 10:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oneirophreniaSo check it out--thanks to the endless encouragement of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lyssabard and tlttlotd and others, I'm back working my ass off on my overly-gigantic epic transhumanist novel, Scibidius. For those of you who don't know what this is all about, lemme bust these funkee lyrics fo' y'all:
Scibidius basically follows the adventures of an Average Joe, Joseph Johnson--later known as Scibidius--from Earth through the entire populated Solar System of 2314 C.E. as he slowly works his way up from a useless ol' Human 1.0 to literal post-posthuman godlikehood. It begins with him on Earth, a young (18-year-old) citizen of the New Republic, a staunchly conservative amish nation prettymuch formed of the southern American states after the so-called Singularity Era...the three decades of MASSIVE and rapid technological, societal, and philosophical change that transformed the entire human experience in the mid-21st Century. Earth is now populated primarily by unmodified "Original," or Version 1.0 humans, living in various self-consciously "backward" nations usually defined by various non-transhumanistic religions or philosophies. The New Republic, for instance, is a conservative Christian nation--at the start of the novel on the eve of yet another war with the Islamist Expanded Caliphates and Levantine Coalitions. Fleeing from his repressive upbringing in a perfect "Republican" household and the threat of being forced by law and family tradition to serve in a suicidal, pointless war, he sneaks out of the New Republic with the aid of a transhumanist underground collective to the H+ stronghold of--wait for it--Pittsburgh, one of the Transformed Cities of the American Northwest populated by various clades and forms of transhumans, posthumans, postposthumans, Machine Intelligences, and so forth. He's taken in by an "upgrade charity" organization that promises to bootstrap him to Human 1.5 and ship him offplanet for adventure and life in the Solar System beyond stodgy, useless old Earth. But no one ever said transhumans are any more ethical or responsible as regular Humans...and Scibidius ends up upgraded and sold to the completely uncaring Orbital Confed to be used as cheap labor, for jobs that no Machine Intelligence or self-respecting botic would ever bother to do.
From there, Scibidius lands aboard the Neutron Dance, an intelligent mass hauler piloted by an uploaded exHuman seMInt and crewed by hundreds of provolved (uplifted) cats, including a somewhat schizophrenic grey cat named Tithonus, who becomes Scibidius' friend and companion through the remainder of the novel. The Neutron Dance is a heavily-armed and -armored mass hauler who usually transports various forms of computronium for different buyers, clades, and so forth. Scibidius is put to work as a semi-disposable "mover of large, non-cat-sized objects" as the Neutron Dance heads inSystem toward Solar Equatorial Orbit to pick up a new shipment of computronium manufactured by the unimaginably advanced Machine Intelligences there. Shortly after the Singularity Era, a coalition of MInts led by the Googleplex--a massively-parallel-processing descendant of Google's search engines--left Earth in order to begin building a computing habitat for themselves in close equatorial orbit of the Sun, where they can collect huge amounts of energy to run their vast processors. They dismantled Mercury and Venus to build their Dyson ring around the waist of the sun, and are currently using the same miniature black hole they used to physically rip Venus apart to render Mars into raw materials. Most the Solar System lives in constant terror of the Machine Intelligences, who, by any reckoning, are now so fucking smart they might as well just be called gods. The MInts, you see, are barely aware of the various Human descendants strewn around the Solar System, and many trans- and posthuman socities are working to upgrade themselves faster and faster in order to survive if the MInts decide on a whim to scrounge up every other scad of matter in the System for themselves. But, nonetheless, the MInts manufacture the best computronium in the Solar System--nano- and picocomputers so amazingly powerful they make even the most advanced posthuman computronioum designs look like Commodore 64s. No one really knows why the MInts, who really seem to have no use for economics at all, sell such materiels to other buyers whom they might eventually want to gobble up...but, hey, who can understand transcendant entities, right? And why not take advantage of their largess!?
Well, the Neutron Dance picks up the computronium--an extremely advanced self-replicating computing substrate usually called "smart dust"--and sets off for Jupiter to deliver its cargo. But on the way to Mars for a quick stopover at the stripmining project, the ship is attacked by pirates. Yep. You heard me right: TRANSHUMAN PIRATES! Needless to say, only Scibidius and Tithonus escape...with Scibidius full of smart dust, since before the ship was destroyed its "captain" injected a bunch of the materials into him thinking that the pirates would never check inside a near-useless Human 1.5 cargo slave. When the posthumans of Jupiter collect Scibidius, all they have to do is pulp his body and extract the computronium from the mess, after all (and believe me, they'll do it: posthumans make Nietzsche's ubermenschen look like Christians when it comes to ethics, or complete and utter lack thereof). Anyway, they end up on Mars--which is in the process of being torn apart by a black hole and tripod robots, escape, head out-system and....
That's as far as I have it plotted so far. Eventually, Scibidius will end up going from planet to planet all the way to Pluto and beyond. Along the way, he and Tithonus will be pursued by machmen--humanoid hunter/killer droids--and half-insane posthumans, hook up with interplanetary goths in cathedral ships built of water-ice frozen hard as diamond, slowly become posthuman himself as the smart dust in his blood begins to interface with his implants, become an Outer System pirate legend himself, raid the System Archives on Pluto before hitching a ride on Charon, which has been reconstructed into an interstellar freighter, and follow the prodding of the smart dust in his brain as it demands to be taken to Quaoar or the 10th Planet, where it must fulfil the mission for which it was originally programmed: to contact the dark-matter entities that live between the stars and try to convince them not to wipe out Solar civilization as a nuisance.
This thing is going to be chock-full of references to classic sci-fi by Olaf Stapledon, Dan Simmons, Robert Silverberg, Gregory Benford, Isaac Asimov, Homer, Neil Gaiman, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Iain Banks (think Consider Phlebas meshed with Excession) Mary Shelley, the Canterbury Tales, Bram Stoker, H. P. Lovecraft (DUH), Caitlin R. Kiernan, John C. Wright, and Charles Stross. Not to mention hundreds upon hundreds of references to New Wave bands and songs, particularly Gary Numan, Nash the Slash, Sisters of Mercy, the Cure, Dear Enemy, NASA, S.P.O.C.K., and...you name it! Expect lots of contemporary social commentary, thinly-disguised portraits of people I know, lots of action, long philosophical interludes, and vicious transhumanist speculation. A lot of the background to the novel is naturally inspired by the work of Ray Kurzweil, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and other transhumanist authors...but it's nowhere near as optimistic as their work. The future isn't a bleak, cyberpunk dystopia--though some of it sure is--but neither is it a gleaming techno-utopia. The MInts are incomprehensible entities with goals so far beyond human or trans- or posthuman thinking as to be virtually impossible to understand. The posthumans are unbelievably arrogant techno-fascists (modeled after my own political leanings). Oldskool Humans are just as stupid and religion-haunted as always, but not completely ignoble....Basically, the future is just as complex and self-contradictory as the human world is today. Just because a techno-Singularity of a sort has occurred doesn't mean the world is suddenly all sweetness and light or machine-haunted darkness.
So...any suggestions, ideas, anything? Feel free to contribute to the pot! I expect this gigantic suminabitch to have a "Big Thanks" page at least twelve pages long, so get with it!
lyssabard and tlttlotd and others, I'm back working my ass off on my overly-gigantic epic transhumanist novel, Scibidius. For those of you who don't know what this is all about, lemme bust these funkee lyrics fo' y'all:Scibidius basically follows the adventures of an Average Joe, Joseph Johnson--later known as Scibidius--from Earth through the entire populated Solar System of 2314 C.E. as he slowly works his way up from a useless ol' Human 1.0 to literal post-posthuman godlikehood. It begins with him on Earth, a young (18-year-old) citizen of the New Republic, a staunchly conservative amish nation prettymuch formed of the southern American states after the so-called Singularity Era...the three decades of MASSIVE and rapid technological, societal, and philosophical change that transformed the entire human experience in the mid-21st Century. Earth is now populated primarily by unmodified "Original," or Version 1.0 humans, living in various self-consciously "backward" nations usually defined by various non-transhumanistic religions or philosophies. The New Republic, for instance, is a conservative Christian nation--at the start of the novel on the eve of yet another war with the Islamist Expanded Caliphates and Levantine Coalitions. Fleeing from his repressive upbringing in a perfect "Republican" household and the threat of being forced by law and family tradition to serve in a suicidal, pointless war, he sneaks out of the New Republic with the aid of a transhumanist underground collective to the H+ stronghold of--wait for it--Pittsburgh, one of the Transformed Cities of the American Northwest populated by various clades and forms of transhumans, posthumans, postposthumans, Machine Intelligences, and so forth. He's taken in by an "upgrade charity" organization that promises to bootstrap him to Human 1.5 and ship him offplanet for adventure and life in the Solar System beyond stodgy, useless old Earth. But no one ever said transhumans are any more ethical or responsible as regular Humans...and Scibidius ends up upgraded and sold to the completely uncaring Orbital Confed to be used as cheap labor, for jobs that no Machine Intelligence or self-respecting botic would ever bother to do.
From there, Scibidius lands aboard the Neutron Dance, an intelligent mass hauler piloted by an uploaded exHuman seMInt and crewed by hundreds of provolved (uplifted) cats, including a somewhat schizophrenic grey cat named Tithonus, who becomes Scibidius' friend and companion through the remainder of the novel. The Neutron Dance is a heavily-armed and -armored mass hauler who usually transports various forms of computronium for different buyers, clades, and so forth. Scibidius is put to work as a semi-disposable "mover of large, non-cat-sized objects" as the Neutron Dance heads inSystem toward Solar Equatorial Orbit to pick up a new shipment of computronium manufactured by the unimaginably advanced Machine Intelligences there. Shortly after the Singularity Era, a coalition of MInts led by the Googleplex--a massively-parallel-processing descendant of Google's search engines--left Earth in order to begin building a computing habitat for themselves in close equatorial orbit of the Sun, where they can collect huge amounts of energy to run their vast processors. They dismantled Mercury and Venus to build their Dyson ring around the waist of the sun, and are currently using the same miniature black hole they used to physically rip Venus apart to render Mars into raw materials. Most the Solar System lives in constant terror of the Machine Intelligences, who, by any reckoning, are now so fucking smart they might as well just be called gods. The MInts, you see, are barely aware of the various Human descendants strewn around the Solar System, and many trans- and posthuman socities are working to upgrade themselves faster and faster in order to survive if the MInts decide on a whim to scrounge up every other scad of matter in the System for themselves. But, nonetheless, the MInts manufacture the best computronium in the Solar System--nano- and picocomputers so amazingly powerful they make even the most advanced posthuman computronioum designs look like Commodore 64s. No one really knows why the MInts, who really seem to have no use for economics at all, sell such materiels to other buyers whom they might eventually want to gobble up...but, hey, who can understand transcendant entities, right? And why not take advantage of their largess!?
Well, the Neutron Dance picks up the computronium--an extremely advanced self-replicating computing substrate usually called "smart dust"--and sets off for Jupiter to deliver its cargo. But on the way to Mars for a quick stopover at the stripmining project, the ship is attacked by pirates. Yep. You heard me right: TRANSHUMAN PIRATES! Needless to say, only Scibidius and Tithonus escape...with Scibidius full of smart dust, since before the ship was destroyed its "captain" injected a bunch of the materials into him thinking that the pirates would never check inside a near-useless Human 1.5 cargo slave. When the posthumans of Jupiter collect Scibidius, all they have to do is pulp his body and extract the computronium from the mess, after all (and believe me, they'll do it: posthumans make Nietzsche's ubermenschen look like Christians when it comes to ethics, or complete and utter lack thereof). Anyway, they end up on Mars--which is in the process of being torn apart by a black hole and tripod robots, escape, head out-system and....
That's as far as I have it plotted so far. Eventually, Scibidius will end up going from planet to planet all the way to Pluto and beyond. Along the way, he and Tithonus will be pursued by machmen--humanoid hunter/killer droids--and half-insane posthumans, hook up with interplanetary goths in cathedral ships built of water-ice frozen hard as diamond, slowly become posthuman himself as the smart dust in his blood begins to interface with his implants, become an Outer System pirate legend himself, raid the System Archives on Pluto before hitching a ride on Charon, which has been reconstructed into an interstellar freighter, and follow the prodding of the smart dust in his brain as it demands to be taken to Quaoar or the 10th Planet, where it must fulfil the mission for which it was originally programmed: to contact the dark-matter entities that live between the stars and try to convince them not to wipe out Solar civilization as a nuisance.
This thing is going to be chock-full of references to classic sci-fi by Olaf Stapledon, Dan Simmons, Robert Silverberg, Gregory Benford, Isaac Asimov, Homer, Neil Gaiman, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Iain Banks (think Consider Phlebas meshed with Excession) Mary Shelley, the Canterbury Tales, Bram Stoker, H. P. Lovecraft (DUH), Caitlin R. Kiernan, John C. Wright, and Charles Stross. Not to mention hundreds upon hundreds of references to New Wave bands and songs, particularly Gary Numan, Nash the Slash, Sisters of Mercy, the Cure, Dear Enemy, NASA, S.P.O.C.K., and...you name it! Expect lots of contemporary social commentary, thinly-disguised portraits of people I know, lots of action, long philosophical interludes, and vicious transhumanist speculation. A lot of the background to the novel is naturally inspired by the work of Ray Kurzweil, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and other transhumanist authors...but it's nowhere near as optimistic as their work. The future isn't a bleak, cyberpunk dystopia--though some of it sure is--but neither is it a gleaming techno-utopia. The MInts are incomprehensible entities with goals so far beyond human or trans- or posthuman thinking as to be virtually impossible to understand. The posthumans are unbelievably arrogant techno-fascists (modeled after my own political leanings). Oldskool Humans are just as stupid and religion-haunted as always, but not completely ignoble....Basically, the future is just as complex and self-contradictory as the human world is today. Just because a techno-Singularity of a sort has occurred doesn't mean the world is suddenly all sweetness and light or machine-haunted darkness.
So...any suggestions, ideas, anything? Feel free to contribute to the pot! I expect this gigantic suminabitch to have a "Big Thanks" page at least twelve pages long, so get with it!
