Review and Thoughts: Revelation Space

It is rare that a book, or anything for that matter drives me to the point of staying up three or four hours past the point when I was going to go to sleep in order to finish it. It is even rarer for that same book to do so for more than three nights. And it is downright unheard of that said book would then force me out of bed and back to the warm glow of my laptop to write about it.

This being said, Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space is one of these rare, gripping books. Not only is it well written, it is a compelling and somehow realistic vision of a future that may not be so far off.

My penchant for Sci-Fi Opera aside, the book asks some very pointed questions about the nature of humanity, what makes us individuals and, surprisingly, the fate of a soul after death. In the best traditions of philosophical fiction, the book provides no real answers, but merely a collection of 'facts' that the denizens of the world have to deal with.

My favorite example of philosophical fiction is still the Anime classic, Ghost in the Shell. The single most influential piece of artwork to come out of Japan, with the possible exception of Akira, shares a lot with my latest mind-snaring obsession.

In both universes, cyberization, (or Chimerics as Reynolds titles them) has become extensive, and human personalities can be scribed to massive computer simulations, the most advanced of which confer a sort of digital immortality, if at the cost of one's real body. The line between the digital reality and the visceral reality that we know is clearly marked, but the lines drawn between program and human are becoming distressingly blurred.

Ghost in the Shell was years ahead of its time when it addressed these concerns back in 1989 when it pioneered the genre of cyberpunk along with the 1984 novel Neuromancer by William Gibson. Yet both of these genre defining works are rich with some of the moral and ethical problems arising in 2008. Reynolds writes his version of the future from the much more recent year 2000, but updates surprisingly little of the digital setting. While his future is decidedly more space flavored, the same tenants of virtual vs. real are still there.

Of course, it will be year before one of us is forced to make the decision to back up a parent (or ourselves) to a machine, but the line between the digital and real is becoming ragged even now. Even as I write this, entire relationships are unfolding in cyberspace, between people who have not met and probably never will. Communication boils down to texting and instant messaging, and phone calls, once considered inadequate for real personal communication, are becoming the new kind of formal lunch.

It's easy to draw that invisible line and say that, sure things are moving a little fast today, but cyborgs and AI are generations away. What's to worry about? And I'm not saying that we need to worry about it now, or even at all. But the world is changing in drastic and sudden ways. We have a responsibility to society and ourselves to monitor the changes we experience and figure out if we're using the technology, or it's using us.

From my perspective, I'm as much a victim of the future as anyone else. I mean, I'm up at 4:30 blogging about a book. Does that seem right to you?

Muah!
Lyrinoir