September Books 18) The Golden Transcendence
18) The Golden TranscendenceSorry, but I've got a hundred pages into it and I'm giving up. The unlikeable protagonist is locked in mental battle with his adversary using various nanotech and other superpowers, and I suddenly realised I didn't really care which of them won (indeed, as Ian Hislop said about the Mohamed al-Fayed vs Neil Hamilton libel
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If my memory serves me rightly, the ending bases itself on the idea that (a) the AI Minds can instantly understand every facet of something and come to the right idea*, providing that they aren't being lied to, and that Freedom is logically and absolutely better than Servitude, so that when, at the climax, Our Hero tells the mad AI ship that it has been enslaved and lied to, it instantly understands that it should, instead of serving its creators instead be Free. Because logic dictates that people should be Free. Or something.
Mere moments before this, one of the other main characters points out that this is nonsense - that what people want has nothing to do with logic, and that morals are all relative. But this is swept entirely under the carpet, when our hero turns out to be entirely right, and a new Golden Age is swept in.
I actually really enjoyed the writing for most of the trilogy - it was fun and interested and had some twists and turns I wasn't expecting. I just expect better thinking from a writer who claims that thinking and logic are vitally important.
But then again, he recently converted to catholicism, claiming that "If Vulcans had a church, they'd be Catholics."
*Mr Wright clearly not having heard of Godel.
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