Book 94: "Newton's Wake" by Ken MacLeod
Friday, December 4th, 2009 12:12![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwake'Where is here, anyway?'
'We call the planet Eurydice. The star — we don't have a name for it. We know it is in the Sagittarius Arm.’
'No shit!' Carlyle grinned with unfeigned delight. 'We didn't know the skein stretched this far.'
'Skein?'
She waved her hands. 'That wormhole, it's linked to lots of others in a sort of messy tangle.'
He stared at her' his teeth playing on his lower lip.
'And you and your colleagues came here through the wormhole?'
'Of course.' She wrapped her arms around herself while the thermal elements in the undersuit warmed up. 'You didn't know this was a gate?'
Armand shook his head. 'We've always kept clear of the alien structure' for reasons which should be obvious, but apparently are not.' He pointed a finger; the sweep of his hand indicated the horizon, and the hilltop henges. 'We took the circle of megaliths to be a boundary indicator, left by the indigenes. Today is the first time in a century that anyone has set foot within it. We keep it under continuous surveillance, of course, which is why your intrusion was detected. That and the signal burst. It went off like a goddamn nuclear EMP, but that's the least of the damage.' He glared at her. 'Something for which you will pay, whoever you are. What did you say you were?'
'The Carlyles,' she reiterated, proudly and firmly.
'And who're they, when they're at home?'
She was unfamiliar with the idiom. 'We're at home everywhere,' she said. 'People have a name for the wormhole skein. They call it Carlyle's Drift.'
This is an enjoyable space opera, but overall I found it a bit confusing. There is a lot going on and things like the political differences between the Returners and Reformers were never explained clearly enough. The implications of backing yourself up on a regular basis so that you could be resurrected if you died were touched upon, but never resolved. Now as she sat in the monorail shuttle facing the Armands and holding her knees together to stop their trembling, she felt the same horror. James Winter and Alan Calder were not uploads or downloads, or even resurrectees. They had prosthetic personalities. They had false memories. Without reliable human memory there could be no identity, no continuity, no humanity. The idea affected her like motion sickness. Although Lucinda was panicked when she discovered that Winter and Calder had been resurrected from the little that remained of their brains after they died in a car crash with their missing memories reconstructed from information about them that was held on computer, she soon convinced herself that there wasn't any problem after all. Even though when the resurrected Lucinda read a letter her dying self had written to her, she could tell that the original Lucinda was different, having been changed by the experiences she underwent after her last back-up.
The conclusion appears to be that 'memories maketh the man'. If you see yourself as a person then you are one, whether you are alive for the first time or have been resurrected from a back-up, whether you are a back-up of a real person living in a virtual reality, or a construct of a human being living in that same virtual reality. But in my opinion, although Lucinda #2 may think she is the same person as Lucinda #1, seeing them both as one continuous Lucinda, Lucinda #1 is dead and gone, to an afterlife, reincarnation or nothingness. There is no continuity of Lucinda-consciousness for her.
Don't you find it annoying when the person who wrote the back cover blurb has obviously not read the book. "Lucinda Carlyle, head of an ambitious clan of galactic entrepreneurs, had carved out a profitable niche for herself and her kin by taking control of the Skein, a chain of interplanetary star-gates left behind by the posthumans. But on a world called Eurydice, a remote planet at the farthest rim of the galaxy, Lucinda stumbled upon a forgotten relic of the past that could threaten her way of life." If they had read even the first chapter, they would have known that Lucinda is not the head of the Carlyles; she is a youngster of 24 and the mission to Eurydice is her first as team leader of a squad of combat archaeologists.
'We call the planet Eurydice. The star — we don't have a name for it. We know it is in the Sagittarius Arm.’
'No shit!' Carlyle grinned with unfeigned delight. 'We didn't know the skein stretched this far.'
'Skein?'
She waved her hands. 'That wormhole, it's linked to lots of others in a sort of messy tangle.'
He stared at her' his teeth playing on his lower lip.
'And you and your colleagues came here through the wormhole?'
'Of course.' She wrapped her arms around herself while the thermal elements in the undersuit warmed up. 'You didn't know this was a gate?'
Armand shook his head. 'We've always kept clear of the alien structure' for reasons which should be obvious, but apparently are not.' He pointed a finger; the sweep of his hand indicated the horizon, and the hilltop henges. 'We took the circle of megaliths to be a boundary indicator, left by the indigenes. Today is the first time in a century that anyone has set foot within it. We keep it under continuous surveillance, of course, which is why your intrusion was detected. That and the signal burst. It went off like a goddamn nuclear EMP, but that's the least of the damage.' He glared at her. 'Something for which you will pay, whoever you are. What did you say you were?'
'The Carlyles,' she reiterated, proudly and firmly.
'And who're they, when they're at home?'
She was unfamiliar with the idiom. 'We're at home everywhere,' she said. 'People have a name for the wormhole skein. They call it Carlyle's Drift.'
This is an enjoyable space opera, but overall I found it a bit confusing. There is a lot going on and things like the political differences between the Returners and Reformers were never explained clearly enough. The implications of backing yourself up on a regular basis so that you could be resurrected if you died were touched upon, but never resolved. Now as she sat in the monorail shuttle facing the Armands and holding her knees together to stop their trembling, she felt the same horror. James Winter and Alan Calder were not uploads or downloads, or even resurrectees. They had prosthetic personalities. They had false memories. Without reliable human memory there could be no identity, no continuity, no humanity. The idea affected her like motion sickness. Although Lucinda was panicked when she discovered that Winter and Calder had been resurrected from the little that remained of their brains after they died in a car crash with their missing memories reconstructed from information about them that was held on computer, she soon convinced herself that there wasn't any problem after all. Even though when the resurrected Lucinda read a letter her dying self had written to her, she could tell that the original Lucinda was different, having been changed by the experiences she underwent after her last back-up.
The conclusion appears to be that 'memories maketh the man'. If you see yourself as a person then you are one, whether you are alive for the first time or have been resurrected from a back-up, whether you are a back-up of a real person living in a virtual reality, or a construct of a human being living in that same virtual reality. But in my opinion, although Lucinda #2 may think she is the same person as Lucinda #1, seeing them both as one continuous Lucinda, Lucinda #1 is dead and gone, to an afterlife, reincarnation or nothingness. There is no continuity of Lucinda-consciousness for her.
Don't you find it annoying when the person who wrote the back cover blurb has obviously not read the book. "Lucinda Carlyle, head of an ambitious clan of galactic entrepreneurs, had carved out a profitable niche for herself and her kin by taking control of the Skein, a chain of interplanetary star-gates left behind by the posthumans. But on a world called Eurydice, a remote planet at the farthest rim of the galaxy, Lucinda stumbled upon a forgotten relic of the past that could threaten her way of life." If they had read even the first chapter, they would have known that Lucinda is not the head of the Carlyles; she is a youngster of 24 and the mission to Eurydice is her first as team leader of a squad of combat archaeologists.
