Posthuman Blues

Arthur C. Clarke is famous for his maxim "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Let's take this further. A pervasive, "arbitrarily advanced civilization" (term coined by Kip Thorne) could alter the universe so radically that we would perceive its workings as physical law. Quantum mechanics seems contradictory and weird to us. Maybe it's because we've reached the threshold of our universe's resolution. Stare too closely at a television screen and you can see the individual pixels; the image dissolves into a stew of glowing points.

Maybe I was being too harsh about wannabe authors in the last post. Philip K. Dick and William Gibson's novels are peopled by oddballs and addicts of various sorts. And what of J.G. Ballard's roster of psychotics?

Still, the "Infinite Jest" thing is played. I'm tired of it. And I'm tired of science fiction being marginalized by stodgy academics.

"I'll give you television, I'll give you eyes of blue, I'll give you a man who wants to rule the world."

-- David Bowie