Thank you for the kind words and the image. I tried and failed to locate the image while writing this story. I’m glad readers can see it now. I tried embedding your image under a spoiler tag but the spoiler tag only blocks text. Images go right through it. The link will have to do.
I didn’t know Stross based his early work on published science. The earliest of his stories I read was Saturn’s Children which seemed to be an allusion to Asimov’s robot stories and Heinlein’s Friday.
I mean… like… “the Lobsters” in Accelerando (who ultimately end up being highly similar to humans compared to the very weird “Vile Offspring”, and altruistically are able to help us a bit with escaping, after humans are essentially deported from Earth and so on) were, I’m pretty sure, based on a hypothetical extension of work vaguely like this? (There’s a specific study where someone did the crude but serviceable first cell of a Moravec Upload, but on a Lobster, that I wanted to link to but can’t instantly find anymore.)
I can’t remember all the allusions, but parts of that novel were very dense with these kinds of things :-)
My understanding is that Stross held (still holds (dunno: haven’t checked in a while)) singularitarians in mild contempt, and just harvested a bunch of “our memes” and threw them back at us in a book aiming to insultingly pander to us. If that’s what happened, I’m fine with it! Such high quality pandering is ok by me <3
I think over time he came up with larger audiences to insultingly pander to, where I could see the pandering more easily, but not notice as many collected allusions to interesting research? C’est la vie.
Thank you for the kind words and the image. I tried and failed to locate the image while writing this story. I’m glad readers can see it now. I tried embedding your image under a spoiler tag but the spoiler tag only blocks text. Images go right through it. The link will have to do.
I didn’t know Stross based his early work on published science. The earliest of his stories I read was Saturn’s Children which seemed to be an allusion to Asimov’s robot stories and Heinlein’s Friday.
I mean… like… “the Lobsters” in Accelerando (who ultimately end up being highly similar to humans compared to the very weird “Vile Offspring”, and altruistically are able to help us a bit with escaping, after humans are essentially deported from Earth and so on) were, I’m pretty sure, based on a hypothetical extension of work vaguely like this? (There’s a specific study where someone did the crude but serviceable first cell of a Moravec Upload, but on a Lobster, that I wanted to link to but can’t instantly find anymore.)
I can’t remember all the allusions, but parts of that novel were very dense with these kinds of things :-)
My understanding is that Stross held (still holds (dunno: haven’t checked in a while)) singularitarians in mild contempt, and just harvested a bunch of “our memes” and threw them back at us in a book aiming to insultingly pander to us. If that’s what happened, I’m fine with it! Such high quality pandering is ok by me <3
I think over time he came up with larger audiences to insultingly pander to, where I could see the pandering more easily, but not notice as many collected allusions to interesting research? C’est la vie.