Mad Professor
Page 28
Some timid souls have suggested that writers and futurologists must stand mute before the Singularity, that there’s no way for us to imagine the years beyond such a cataclysmic change. But, hey, imagining the unimaginable is what thought experiments are for! And Stross shows us how; he blows right past the Singularity and deep into some very bizarre and fun-to-read-about futures.
In his Accelerando the solar system has become concentric Dyson spheres of computing devices with only our Earth remaining like “a picturesque historic building stranded in an industrial park.” And some minds in the shells want to smash Earth, simply to enhance their RAM and their flop by a few percent.
This struck me as being no different, really, from people wanting to fill a wetland to make a mall, to clear-cut a rainforest to make a destination golf resort, or even to kill a whale to whittle its teeth into religious icons of a whale god. I was outraged. But also very intrigued by the idea.
And so I began writing my novel Postsingular (Tor Books, projected for 2007). The novel opens with an attack of world-eating nanomachines called nants. The nants are rolled back, at least temporarily, and then one of the characters introduces a more benevolent kind of nanomachines called orphids, as described in “Visions of the Metanovel.”
I’m very intrigued by the question of what kind of art we might make given vastly improved abilities. By way of researching the question, I studied Jorge Luis Borges’s visionary writings, particularly his tale, “A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain,” which indeed describes an imaginary novel called April March. (The Quain piece appears in, for instance, Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, Viking Penguin, 1998.) Also of use to me in this context was Stanislaw Lem’s book, A Perfect Vacuum (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), in which he reviews a series of nonexistent books.
Although Postsingular features a kiqqie metanovelist named Thuy Nguyen, I didn’t include the full text of “Visions of the Metanovel” in my novel. My sense is that people reading a novel don’t want to negotiate a bulky sequence of intellectual games. But I felt that the games might seem amusing if presented as a single short piece. So here, to close this anthology, are my descriptions of imaginary metanovels, a final offering from the mad professor.