Posthuman Blues

I've almost finished Charles Stross' "Singularity Sky," a novel that owes a great deal of its ideological source code to Ken MacLeod, particularly his "Engines of Light" trilogy. Stross envisions a post-Singularity future governed by a complex emergent intelligence known as the "Eschaton." The Eschaton is quietly omniscient, and its overarching concern is making sure that humans (who've learned to travel back in time and thus violate causality) don't "edit" it out of existence. So while humans are free to go about their usual puny affairs, the Eschaton makes sure that any civilization that attempts to modify the past gets exterminated in a hurry and that anyone of like mind gets the message.

The idea of a god-like superintelligence aloofly setting rules for humankind isn't a new one in science fiction. In MacLeod's trilogy the "gods" are sentient comets (!) who recruit surface-bound races to do their inscrutable bidding. As in "Singularity Sky," humans are free to do whatever they like -- up to an including developing an advanced interstellar society -- so long as it doesn't infringe on the dreaded "Powers Above."

John Norman -- an author with none of MacLeod or Stross' skill -- anticipated this premise in his Edgar Rice Burroughs-like "Gor" books. In Norman's world, insectile alien "Priest-Kings" engineer an intentionally low-tech civilization on an Earth-like planet, weeding out any attempts to develop sophisticated technology by divine decree and the occasional use of force; consequently Gor is permanently mired in the Middle Ages. Jack Vance used a similar mechanism in his "Dying Earth" books, in which magic and technology are indistinguishable.

But while Vance and Norman's motives are mostly escapist, MacLeod and Stross actually wrestle with the implications of god-like alien intelligences and what it might be like to live in a Cosmos subject to their caprices. Indeed, Stross' Eschaton seems less political metaphor than a sincere technological extrapolation; we may in fact be heading toward a future in which some kind of existential restraining order is needed to keep us from annihilating ourselves in some hedonistic orgy.

Which, given the real possibility of time travel, poses an interesting question: Could something like Stross' Eschaton be in place now? Could we be under quarantine, deftly misdirected so that we don't impose on someone else's turf or else stray from some alien ideal?

I suggest the UFO phenomenon, with its documented psychosocial effects, might be an automatic process emplaced by some long-ago intelligence, a "program" designed to help sculpt -- and possibly even catalyze -- our technical and conscious evolution in ways that promise to remain unclear until we face the phenomenon squarely.