Comments on: BOOK REVIEW: Fast Forward 2, edited by Lou Anders

By: Paul Raven

Paul Raven — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 16:23:17 +0000

Thanks for the input, Jeff! I didn’t use Egan as a touchstone because I thought the others were more likely to resonate with the average reader here, but you’re quite right. I’m hugely fond of Diaspora; Schild’s Ladder was good, too, but didn’t grab me quite the same way for some reason.

By: Jeff Fourmyle

Jeff Fourmyle — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 03:27:56 +0000

While it’s fun to read the Rosenbaum-Doctorow novella while you’re waiting for Amazon to deliver your hardcopy-only version of all the other stories, “True Names” has far more in common with Greg Egan’s “Schild’s Ladder” than it does with Vinge’s story. Both Rosenbaum-Doctorow and Egan involve far-future environments when personalities put on and take off bodies as easily as we put on hats or overcoats, and are concerned with the reaction of protagonists and societies to subatomic plagues that are at first thought to be eating at the foundations of reality, but turn out to be hosts of even more diverse forms of experiencers rather than plagues. In passing, Rosenbaum-Doctorow toy with the limits of simulations of environments recursively hosting multitudes of environments without approaching the real foundational issues in computer science of decidability and unsolvability, while Egan pushes much more forcefully into the the foundations of physics and quantum gravity. If you’re looking for SF that tries to take ideas to their limits, Egan will get you further.

By: OldMiser

OldMiser — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 04:35:59 +0000

The Doctorow-Rosenbaum novella “True Names” has just been released as a Creative Commons download. Details at http://www.boingboing.net/2008/12/02/fast-forward-2-origi.html

By: JustinP

JustinP — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:45:56 +0000

Wow. Massive review. And i’m totally going to try and lay my hands on this (and its predecessor) in the post-Christmas loot trawl.

By: Paul Raven

Paul Raven — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:31:00 +0000

No problem, Dave – I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.