Only read 30-50 pages.... just not my kind of book. I don't tend to like books written in this style- is it called humor? comedy? sarcasm? Just seemed flipant. ( )

Well, that was weird as hell. Fun too. ( )

review of
Rudy Rucker's Postsingular
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - January 26, 2015

For the complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/388646-upping-the-nante

At 1st this just seemed like reruns to me. The "nants", life-as-we-know-it-threatening nanotechnology intent on eating the Earth & its inhabitants & recreating them virtually in order to create a super-computer more in keeping w/ the nants's own self-organization, seemed like a rerun of Rucker's own The Hacker and the Ants (1994) from 13 yrs before in wch there were "ants" as the threat instead of "nants".

I'd 1st encountered the idea of technological insects in Stanislav Lem's great The Invincible (1967) when the idea struck me as highly original (but may not've been). Then there was Greg Bear's Blood Music (1985) in wch nanotechnology gets into humanity's bloodstream & dramatically changes human reality. THEN there was Greg Egan's Permutation City (1994) in wch people attain 'eternal life' by becoming code on an electronic chip. These 1st 3 bks all struck me as visionary. THEN, in June of 2000, Ghanesh & I interviewed writer Damien Broderick In Australia ( http://youtu.be/OhiGt9eJ9bw ) & he touched on his more hopeful imaginings for nanotechnology. THEN there came Michael Crichton's Prey (2002) wch featured nanotchenology as predator wch just struck me as derivative of Blood Music & not much more.

Finally, we get to Rucker's Postsingular (2007) wch is even later in the chronology &, therefore, not likely to provide much novelty. "By way of keeping people informed about the Nant Day progress, the celestial Martian nant-sphere put up a full map of Earth with the ported regions shaded in red. Although it might take months or years to chew the planet right down to the core, Earth's surface was going fast. Judging from the map, by evening most of it would be gone, Gaia's skin eaten away by micron-sized computer chips with wings." (p 32)

However, what makes Rucker's story a furtherance of the preceding is that the 2nd chapter runs thru the nanotechnology-threatens-life-as-we-know-it trope in short order: the drama happens & is curtailed & we move onto a different variation. As such, the 1st 2 chapters greatly condense the type of story that might've previously constituted an entire novel.

As such, as is so often the case w/ Rucker, I'm reminded of Philip K. Dick. I often say that Dick had so many ideas that his novels wd reach a spectacular (penultimate) climax halfway thru the bk: a climax that many writers wd be hard-pressed to come up w/ for their (ultimate) ending - & then Dick goes on to build to an even more fantastic actual ending. Rucker's 1st 2 chapters here somewhat compress that Dick strategy to a preface of sorts.

Moving on, the 1st chapter starts w/ some formative back-story in wch 2 boys make a rocket: "The rocket's sides were adorned with fanciful sheet metal fins and a narrow metal pipe that served as a launch lug." (p 14) I'm reminded of my own childhood when my neighbors made a mortar from a pipe That was used to launch CO2 canisters emptied of their gas & stuffed w/ match heads. The match heads wd be lit & the canister wd take off to wherever the pipe was pointed. &, uh, no, it wasn't safe. In Postsingular the boys time the launching of their rocket for when there's minimal likelihood of their hitting a passing jet:

""You can really see the jetliners on that blue map?" asked Carlos, his handsome face gilded by the setting sun.

""You bet. Good thing, too. We'll squirt our rocket when there's a gap in the traffic. Like a bum scuttling across a freeway."" - p 16

My friend Doug Retzler, who in the early to mid 1980s was making Sky Art, did a piece at a public arts festival in BalTimOre called the "Ad Hoc Fiasco" in wch he made a large painting of clouds on cheesecloth & had it held aloft by helium-filled weather balloons - floating above the festival & tethered to the ground to prevent the painting from floating away.

The tethering failed & the painting did venture upward. Given that it was something like 30 ft wide, Doug was seriously worried that it wd get in the path of a passing aircraft & foul its props or jets & cause a crash. He phoned the FAA & explained the situation to them & they assured him that the likelihood of that was very slim indeed. As far as I know we never found out where the cloud painting landed. Imagine the surprise of anyone who might've witnessed its coming back to ground: The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

The nants are defined: they're "a line of of bio-mimetic self-reproducing nanomachines" (p 20) & their risk is speculated on: "The nant swarms develop their own Wolfram-irreducible emergent hive-mind behaviors. We'll never really control the nants". (p 21)

But, of course, the nants are let loose or where wd the drama be?: "["]But Dibbs's advisers like it. We'll save energy, and the economy can run right around the clock. And, get this, Olliburton, the vice president's old company—they're planning to sell ads."" (p 24) Hopefully, this is transparent political satire to Americans alive at the time of the release of this novel but that might not be the case even 20 yrs from now. Dibbs is obviously Bush, Olliburton is clearly Haliburton & the vice-president is none other than Dick Cheney. &, yes, Cheney was the Chairman and CEO of Halliburton Company from 1995 to 2000 before becoming VP of the USA.

& for those of you who still don't get the satire here: "former Vice President Dick Cheney took a shot at Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). But Paul is not likely to be fazed by criticism from Cheney, for several years ago the Kentucky senator was pushing the conspiratorial notion that the former VP exploited the horrific 9/11 attacks to lead the nation into war in Iraq in order to benefit Halliburton, the enormous military contractor where Cheney had once been CEO." ( http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/04/rand-paul-dick-cheney-exploited-911-... ) In other words, where Haliburton tromps, ethics are left-behind (even more than kuffar during the Rapture) & greed isn't even bothered to be leashed in its ravenous plunge forward to rend & tear - & so it is w/ Olliburton in Postsingular.

Rucker's parody of Bush imagines the worst: "President Dick Dibbs—now eligible for the third and fourth term thanks to a life-extending DNA modification that made him legally a different person—issued periodic statements to the effect that the nant-sphere computer was soon coming online." (p 26) Fortunately for the reader who wants at least the mild vicarious pleasure of seeing Bush come to a bad end as punishment for his crimes, Dibbs gets his come-uppance.

""And you're saying your string of symbols can stop the nants?" asked Nektar doubtfully. "Like a magic spell?"" (p 30) This idea of sequences of symbols as magic spells was also in Rucker's The Hacker and the Ants. Some refer to mathematics as 'the language of nature' & think that the more closely one describes natural processes in this language the more ability one will have to move from pure math to applied math: ie: to control the processes described. As such, the similarity to ceremonial magik, in wch esoteric incantations are inscribed & chanted are thought to channel specific occult forces, is obvious.

""I've written a nant-virus. You might call it a Trojan flea." He chuckled grimly. If I can just get this code into some of the nants, they'll spread it to all of the others—it's written in such a way that they'll think it's a nant-designed security patch."" - p 30

These days, computer viruses are anathema to just about everybody - but I remember when my friends & fellow neoists Boris Wanowitch & Barnoz were the editors of Cacanada's 1st Macintosh computer magazine, MacMag, in the early 1980s & they sent out a virus that caused a smiley-face (or some such) to appear on computer desktops that had a msg w/ it to the effect of "Have a Nice Day - from MacMag". Yeah, they got into alotof trouble for that since they infected the products of at least one major software designer but the intention was fairly benign.

One of the main characters is "Chu", an autistic child w/ an interest in computers. At one time he might've been called an "idiot savant". These days that's probably 'politically incorrect'.

"Ond gave his son more food, then paused, thinking. He laid his sheaf of papers down beside Chu, thirty pages covered with line after line of hexadecimal code blocks: 02A1B59F, 9812D007, 70FFDEF6, like that.

""Read the code, he told Chu. See if you can memorize it. These pages are yours now."" - p 32

I'm reminded of Crispin Hellion Glover's movie What is it? featuring a cast of actors w/ Down syndrome. If I remember correctly, when Glover introduced the movie at a screening of it that I witnessed he explained that people w/ Down syndrome are very gentle. I'm also reminded of a friend who was temporarily paralyzed. During this time she cd sense when people entered the rm by the increase of temperature from their bodies. The point being that there's always the possibility that a deficiency in one area may be partially compensated for by a strength in another.

& here I am still in the 2nd chapter, barely getting started - this prefatory bit is fast-moving: ""The Trojan fleas just hatched!" shouted Ond. ( )

intersting sci-fi ( )

A delicious and gnarly read. If you always wanted to know what upbeat, positive and yet very trippy sci-fi reads like, this is a good start into Rudy Rucker's work. ( )