Palfrey's life

Haven't updated in a while (*looks* ok, 6 days...), so here's me and my Easter weekend at the parentals. Had lunch with Ken (almost-lawyer old friend from London, who was in Brussels when I was there, but we didn't get to say hi then), went to the Apple store to see mac mini's - it's like a bright, air-conditioned view of hell - which wasn't very helpful, as the damn place is too noisy to listen to them, and various attempts to talk to staff result in finding out the quiet places in the store aren't really usable either. I'm still debating about mac-mini vs. Mini-itx, esp. as I've now found a site that looks like it'll do the right cables (which I've sent to the various mini-itx fansites in an attempt to get someone to test them - they appear interested) for an MS10000E. Caught up with Ben (the non-brother one still in Ealing) - apparently I should have got to him earlier and I would have got to go out with his workmates, which apparently include a cute and single SF fan. C'est la vie. Ripped the heck out of the remaining CDs of the familial music collection that I didn't have already, plus bought a Goldfrapp CD more-or-less on a whim. Visited mad grandparental, usual dren (Topes, briefly overhearing said grandparent saying something about "the Germans" and my deciding this is a good time to not listen and let my brother be the sacrificial lamb this time).

Nothing vastly interesting. Ditto for most of the immediate future - until April 8th I'm focused on getting stuff together so I can write this paper for Sensys 2005. Aside from the odd bits and pieces of side projects.... I've got two other separate things I want to post about, thoughts from the last day or so. Expect soonish.

I've read a couple of bits of new SF in recent days (Singularity Sky by Charles Stross and Newton's Wake by Ken McLeod, both of which I would heavily recommend), both of which deal with post-singularity society. The Singularity, that little postulated future event appears to have finally come of age. Both books are interesting because they cover it in somewhat similar ways (this could be attributed to the fact that AFAIK there's a little Scottish writing group involving both of those two and Iain M. Banks going on, and incidentally a significant block of Newton's Wake is in Scots English), postulating a hands-off "ascended the heck away" singularity, with the remants of baseline humanity left with "don't fuck with causality" as either a semi-physical law or something that gets stomped on from a *very* high height.

This is all interesting, because there's been a number of bits of speculation regarding the end of hard SF, in that most writers of hard SF are the sorts of people who are liable to agree with the probability of a singularity event in our relatively near-term future (depending on whose scales), and who also don't particularly like to ignore something like that, but were previously puzzled with how to do normal storyline ideas in a post-scarcity world, without "deus ex machina" vastly overwhelming things. I'm also interested, because the previous way around this was ideas like Ventor Vinge's concept of zones of thought (with posthuman minds only being possible in certain regions of space), which always struck me as a vast and ugly hack. This new wave, which has managed to allow the singularity (or indeed several singularities, which is another interesting point) to happen while managing to allow people to still be people, is good, and I'm enjoying it thoroughly.

I think what's liable to happen in this area of fiction is likely to mirror the rapid progress of technology that's postulated to head towards the Singularity, with rapidly evolving generations of different ideas coming into play. Reading old SF, with it's obsessions with nuclear power has always been amusing, and I'm wondering how long before information age SF will be similarily amusing.