The Peace War /and/ Across Realtime
My friend wrote a review of this book, and I thought I’d write some comments.
I own this book and occasionally re-read it myself. I found the world as it existed during the Peace War to be an interesting exposition on how sciences would adapt to the loss of electricity. First with some scientists advancing technology that required less and less energy to achieve similar results (energy star cameras and communication devices that cannot be detected by the Peace Authority), and advanced biotechnology including human genome manipulation via virual cures.
Across Realtime was even more interesting in that the book was linked by the woman who started the revolution against the Peace Authority (and was the first person to ever be bobbled, proving that they provided a one-way time travel method instead of killing everyone inside them as the Peace Authority original claimed).
The book posits that scientific discovery operates on a modified Moore’s Law (Moore’s Law is that computing power doubles every X months). There are several really interesting ideas that dovetail with each other. One is how an extremely rapid rate of invention would affect manufacturing (there’s a reference in there somewhere about how technology would be obsolete by the time it reached the market, requiring that things be more and more customized and smaller and smaller manufacturing runs be made).
Likewise, the book posits that extreme scientific advancement would result in a singularity. A scientific event through which all of humanity was either destroyed or transformed. And we get to see a sample of technology held by the survivors of this singularity (those who were bobbled when it took place were left behind), and those who bobbled up closer to the singularity had technology that was smaller, more advanced and more innovative than those who bobbled before them.
The suggestion of technology advancement, and the increasing rate of that advancement was characterized by comparing technology that was in some cases only a few years apart versus technology that was decades apart, showing that in the few years immediately preceding the singularity the rate of technological advancement had increased.
There were some odd references to a think-tank (literally where humans would join their mind together for some purpose) and if I recall correctly, one of the purposes to which that brain power was put was to syphon energy directly off the sun (not by converting light to energy, but by syphoning the matter of the star in to some kind of generator or battery.)
However, what really sold the book for me is that the technology was treated as more of the background and the characters drove the story. (It’s a murder mystery, while The Peace War is more action/adventure.)
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