Vernor Vinge's 1981 sf short novel True Names was reprinted in 2001 as part of True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier. That collection of articles, edited by James Frenkel, includes a variety of pieces by computer scientists and technopundits. What's most amazing to me is how little these clearly-smart people manage add to the original Vinge tale and the accompanying Marvin Minsky 1983 "Afterword" essay. Maybe Vinge and Minsky told the story about as well as it can be told – the "story" being a description of mind via the metaphor of computation and vice versa. Attempts to put a political/social/technological spin on it are both unnecessary and irrelevant.

(one exception to the above: Richard M. Stallman's nightmare parable "The Right to Read"; cf. VernorVinge (17 Sep 2001), Boston Public Library (20 Jun 2002), TrueNames (16 Oct 2003), CountermeasureAndGodshatter (30 Oct 2004), ...)

TopicLiterature - TopicScience - 2005-02-16

(correlates: BlindLake, PostCaptain, SimplyGoodHearted, ...)