The Spike: How Our Lives Are Being Transformed By Rapidly Advancing Technologies

The rate at which technology is changing our world--not just on a global level like space travel and instant worldwide communications but on the level of what we choose to wear, where we live, and what we eat--is staggeringly fast and getting faster all the time. The rate of change has become so fast that a concept that started off sounding like science fiction has become a widely expected outcome in the near future - a singularity referred to as The Spike. At that point of singularity, the cumulative changes on all fronts will affect the existence of humanity as a species and cause a leap of evolution into a new state of being. On the other side of that divide, intelligence will be freed from the constraints of the flesh; machines will achieve a level of intelligence in excess of our own and boundless in its ultimate potential; engineering will take place at the level of molecular reconstruction, which will allow everything from food to building materials to be assembled as needed from microscopic components rather than grown or manufactured; we'll all become effectively immortal by either digitizing and uploading our minds into organic machines or by transforming our bodies into illness-free, undecaying exemplars of permanent health and vitality. The results of all these changes will be unimaginable social dislocation, a complete restructuring of human society and a great leap forward into a dazzlingly transcendent future that even SF writers have been too timid to imagine.

Science & Math

Broderick, Damien

History & Philosophy

Tor Books

The rate at which technology is changing our world--not just on a global level like space travel and instant worldwide communications but on the level of what we choose to wear, where we live, and what we eat--is staggeringly fast and getting faster all t

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Transrealist writing treats immediate perceptions in a fantastic way, according to science fiction writer and mathematician Rudy Rucker, who originated the term. In the expanded sense argued in this book, it also intensifies imaginative fiction by writing the fantastic from the standpoint of richly personalized experience. Transrealism is also related to slipstream writing, another category introduced into studies of speculative fiction to account for texts that seem to follow trajectories mapped by the huge body of science fiction accumulated in the last century, while retaining a central interest in traditional literary strategies.
This book examines a variety of work from the transrealist perspective, something that has not been done previously. It emphasizes the texts of Philip K. Dick and Rucker himself, while it additionally engages the texts of such slipstream writers as Kurt Vonnegut, J.G. Ballard, and John Barth. It places its argument against the antihumanist trend in science fiction and builds comparisons with more traditional varieties of science fiction works.

Transrealist Fiction: Writing in the Slipstream of Science (Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Praeger

A Comic Science Fiction Masterpiece! Science fiction that makes you grin, and then laugh out loud, is hard to find. With this very funny short novel, Damien Broderick joined the ranks of Robert Sheckley, Bob Shaw, John Sladek, Arthur Schopenhauer and Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). Sopwith Hammil is a popular but rather stupid TV presenter when a time machine lands in his living room. To save his life and the human race (they're turning the Sun off!), he must find a wife inside three hours. Meanwhile, 197 years later, in a world that makes 1984 look like Brave New World, beautiful Hsia Shan-Yun is fighting the future--and losing. Meanwhile, on Alpha Grommett, two married robots find their love-life has become depressingly mechanical. Meanwhile, the wacky astrologer O'Flaherty Gribble has discovered the long-lost secret of the Callisto Effect. Meanwhile, in a pact with the devil-- Ditmar Award Winner

Striped Holes

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction

Avon/Books

The White Abacus

Traveling to earth, where he is befriended by the computer-augmented Ratio, Telman Lord Cima, scion of a ruling family from a distant world, comforts Ratio, whose father has been killed, and accompanies him on his quest for the truth. Original.

Traveling to Earth, where he is befriended by the computer-augmented Ratio, Telmah Lord Cima, scion of a ruling family from a distant world, is aided and comforted by Ratio in his quest for the truth surrounding his father's death

Today, the humanities seem severed from the sciences. Writers, artists and the ordinary thinking citizen cannot readily understand the sciences that have reshaped modern life. Scientists in turn, find critical theory difficult and elusive. Drawing on recent semiotic and post-structural approaches to the text, Damien Broderick provides a critical introduction to recent efforts to contruct an interdisciplinary analysis of the "two cultures", literature and science. He finds literary theorists deficient in scientific rigour, and would like scientists to acquire the linguistic sophistication of humanists and their post-modern successors. Both literary theories and scientific practices, he concludes, are deeply implicated in social contexts.

The Architecture of Babel: Discourses of Literature and Science (Interpretations)

Melbourne Univ Pr

Maggie Roche is an out-of-work poet and single mother. Spied on by a cyborged rat, attacked, drugged into panic and rapture, seduced, drawn into conspiracy, she's flung four thousand years into her own future. In the alien world of the Ull- Upload Lifeform Lords who are human-machine hybrids of overwhelming power-she learns that she is history's first true time traveler, hunted by friend and foe to the end of time. The entire future of the cosmos will be reset by these terrifying events. The Judas Mandala introduced the terms "virtual reality" and "virtual matrix," anticipating Frank Tipler's influential Omega Point Theory, William Gibson's cyberpunk fiction, and The Matrix... A new Afterword describes the strange publishing history of this ground-breaking novel, and includes the full text of an omitted chapter. "Experience an epic sense of immensity: an inkling of humanit's perhaps limitless possibilities within the strangeness of our universe." -Australian Book Review

Judas Mandala

Pocket

Clarkesworld is a Hugo Award-winning science fiction and fantasy magazine. Each month we bring you a mix of fiction (new and classic works), articles, interviews and art. Our January 2015 issue, supersized for our 100th issue, contains:  Original Fiction by Aliette de Bodard ("Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight"), Tang Fei ("A Universal Elegy"), Naomi Kritzer ("Cat Pictures Please"), Kij Johnson ("The Apartment Dweller's Bestiary"), Zhang Ran ("Ether"), Catherynne M. Valente ("The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild"), and Jay Lake ("An Exile of the Heart"). Classic stories by Damien Broderick ("This Wind Blowing, and This Tide"), and Karl Schroeder ("Laika's Ghost"). Non-fiction by Jason Heller (Song for a City-Universe: Lucius Shepard's Abandoned Vermillion), an interview with Xia Jia, an Another Word column by Cat Rambo, and an editorial by Neil Clarke.

Clarkesworld Issue 100 (Clarkesworld Magazine)

Valente, Catherynne M.

De Bodard, Aliette

Schroeder, Karl

Kritzer, Naomi

Clarke, Neil

Johnson, Kij

Lake, Jay

Fei, Tang

Ran, Zhang

Clarkesworld Magazine

The Spike: Accelerating into the Unimaginable Future

Reed Publishing (

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Broderick, Damien. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Broderick, Damien

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Broderick, Damien. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Spike: How Our Lives Are Being Transformed By Rapidly Advancing Technologies

The Spike: How Our Lives Are Being Transformed By Rapidly Advancing Technologies

Transrealist Fiction: Writing in the Slipstream of Science (Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy)

Striped Holes

The White Abacus

The White Abacus

The Architecture of Babel: Discourses of Literature and Science (Interpretations)

Judas Mandala

Clarkesworld Issue 100 (Clarkesworld Magazine)

The Spike: Accelerating into the Unimaginable Future