reginazabo Italy

In italiano: http://reginazabo.noblogs.org/post/2007/11/13/postsingu…

I must confess it: in front of cyberpunk literature I'm virtually helpless. At every nanotech trick, singularity episode and arising metaverse I rejoice as though this were the first SF book I've ever read, or better, as if I wasn't reading at all in the first place. I get deep inside the novel, I let it carry me away, I lose track of time and space.

So when I found out that Rudy Rucker's latest novel was free to download (http://www.rudyrucker.com/postsingular/), I didn't think twice: I downloaded, printed it and spent the last few days following the events of an earth permeated with nanotech, threatened of being swallowed up by nants, uncontrollable, self-reproducing nanomachines capable of munching through a planet in a matter of days and of transferring human life to a perfect virtual world, so perfect that non-compliant people and political views are banished, or better vanished.

The idea of orphidnet, a postsingular hyperconnected world is not new to cyberpunk, but as the reader participates in the emergence of a metaverse made up of nanomachines colonizing and networking every object in the planet, making any hardware useless and any being visible, she becomes more and more uncomfortable before a concrete world where the notion of individuality blurs, everybody takes part in a total reality show and every thought, every experience, can be recorded and enclosed in a metanovel or stored by anyone else.

The fantasy drift of the parallel world -- the world of angels or elves, in fact a parallel reality with telepathic communication and without any need for machines -- is a bit on the hippy side, but it is well constructed and absolutely justified in the _science_ fiction framework of this novel. As with many other books, one should skip the last few pages, with a trite love-overcomes-everything ending: otherwise I'd still be clapping at this dystopic vision of totalizing nanotechnology that has held my breath until the last page but one.