minor:
host: c-71-58-49-72.hsd1.pa.comcast.net
username: Escha Ton
revision: 1
summary: =Old Twentieth by Joe Haldeman= Depressing novel about the never ending 20th century. Could relate well to Kurzweil’s promise of immortality. . . .
Depressing novel about the never ending 20th century. Could relate well to Kurzweil’s promise of immortality.
Set in a future in which (rich) people live forever, after having wiped out 90% of the (poor) population using a genetically engineered virus. The narrator, Jake, is a virtuality engineer on a 1000 year space voyage to another star system. Virtual reality is used to simulate the 20th century so that people can relive the last great moment of human history.
As people start dying on the ship and on Earth, it is revealed that the VR environment has become self-aware. Things continue to worsen and incongruities in Jake’s reality begin to proliferate. Ultimately, Jake realizes that his own life is actually a simulation and that his body (and every body) is floating in zero gee, forever awaiting a cure to the side effects of the immortality drug that causes them to die suddenly.
The novel largely deals with questions of the debt of the 20th century and what to do with all the small minded, violent pre-singularity beings who will live forever if Kurzweil is right (see also Stross, Doctorow). The major difference here is that this book presents the immortal society as all nightmare.