Futures for SF writers that aren’t the Singularity

RSS

Futures for SF writers that aren’t the Singularity

01 Jul

Rudy Rucker's tired of the Singularity (Vernor Vinge's conceit of a future in which people cease to have recognizably human motivations after they marry their minds with ever-accelerating computers). So he's come up with some other veins for SF writers to mine. Here's a couple (click through for the whole lot):

The Afterworld
I've always thought there should be more SF that speculates about what happens to people after they die. This can shade into fantasy, of course, but giving it an SF slant would be interesting. Certainly it's nice to speculate that there's some kind of underworld...rather than nothing.
Quantum Computational Viruses
The current trend is to view any bit of matter as carrying out a so-called quantum computation. These computations can be as rich and complex as anything in our brains or in our PCs. One angle, which I explored a bit in Postsingular and Hylozoic, is that ordinary objects could "wake up." Another angle worth pursuing is that something like a computer virus might infect matter, perhaps changing the laws of physics to make our world more congenial to some other kinds of beings...
An Infinite Flat Earth
What if Earth were an endless flat plane, and you could walk (or fly your electric glider) forever in a straight line and never come back to where you started? The cockroach zone! The kingdom of the two-headed men! One night there'll be a rumble and, wow, our little planet will have unrolled, ready for you to start out on the ultimate On the Road adventure.