Charles Stross: Accelerando (2005)
Filed under fiction | Tags: · artificial intelligence, biotechnology, posthuman, science fiction, technological singularity, technology
“The Singularity. It is the era of the posthuman. Artificial intelligences have surpassed the limits of human intellect. Biotechnological beings have rendered people all but extinct. Molecular nanotechnology runs rampant, replicating and reprogramming at will. Contact with extraterrestrial life grows more imminent with each new day.
Struggling to survive and thrive in this accelerated world are three generations of the Macx clan: Manfred, an entrepreneur dealing in intelligence amplification technology whose mind is divided between his physical environment and the Internet; his daughter, Amber, on the run from her domineering mother, seeking her fortune in the outer system as an indentured astronaut; and Sirhan, Amber’s son, who finds his destiny linked to the fate of all of humanity.
For something is systematically dismantling the nine planets of the solar system. Something beyond human comprehension. Something that has no use for biological life in any form…”
Publisher Ace Books, New York, July 2005 / Orbit Books, London, August 2005
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License
ISBN 0441012841 / 1841493902
390 pages
Anonymous: Hypersphere (2015)
Filed under fiction | Tags: · anonymous, memes, science fiction
“Hypersphere, written by Anonymous with the help of the 4chan board /lit/ (of The Legacy of Totalitarianism in a Tundra fame) is an epic tale spanning over 700 pages.
A postmodern collaborative writing effort containing royalty, Žižek erotica, poetry, repair instructions for future cars, a history of bottles in the Ottoman empire; actually, it contains everything since it takes place in the Hypersphere, and the Hypersphere is a big place; really big in fact.”
Published 23 December 2015
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
ISBN 9781329781
734 pages
via pht
Chris Kraus: I Love Dick (1997)
Filed under fiction | Tags: · biography, contemporary art, love, theory
“In I Love Dick, Chris Kraus, author of Aliens & Anorexia, Torpor, and Video Green, boldly tore away the veil that separates fiction from reality and privacy from self-expression. It’s no wonder that I Love Dick instantly elicited violent controversies and attracted a host of passionate admirers.
The story is gripping enough: in 1994 a married, failed independent filmmaker, turning forty, falls in love with a well-known theorist and endeavors to seduce him with the help of her husband. But when the theorist refuses to answer her letters, the husband and wife continue the correspondence for each other instead, imagining the fling the wife wishes to have with Dick. What follows is a breathless pursuit that takes the woman across America and away from her husband—and far beyond her original infatuation into a discovery of the transformative power of first person narrative.
I Love Dick is a manifesto for a new kind of feminist who isn’t afraid to burn through her own narcissism in order to assume responsibility for herself and for all the injustice in world—and it’s a book you won’t put down until the author’s final acts of self-revelation and transformation.”
Publisher Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 1997
Native Agents series
ISBN 1570270465, 9781570270468
275 pages
Review: Joan Hawkins (CTheory, 2001), Zofia Krawiec (Szum, 2016, PL).
Commentary: Tereza Stejskalová (Artalk, 2016, CZ), McKenzie Wark (Public Seminar, 2016).
Wikipedia