What literature (should) shapes our SL?

What literature (should) shapes our SL as touchstones?

Obviously:

Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash
William Gibson
Bruce Stering


Others:

Vurt by Jeff Noon
Works by Ian M. Banks
Melissa Scott
Frank Herbert (his work on artificial environmental sociological fiction)
Philip K. Dick
Michael Moorcock
Walter Jon Williams

Of course there are lots more...that's where you come in..lol

yes, i'm feeling geeky tonight...

half Alice In Wonderland and half Lord Of The Flies.

Vernor Vinge: (True Names, The Ungoverned ...)
John Shirley (Eclipse trilogy ...)
Tad Williams (Otherland)
Greg Bear (Eon, Eternity ...)

Actually, even though a lot of residents like to see SL as a kind of budding Metaverse ... I see a lot of similarities with Otherland too. Vinge on the other hand describes in an unsurpassed form how it is possible, to feel so much 'here' within the constraints of current technology. He also describes best (IMHO) how a kind of capitalistic anarchy based on contracts between groups and individuals might actually work in a technological world.

And Bear desribes a very believable model for a hybrid society in which people live part of their lives in RL, another part in the virtual world, switch between the worlds daily or in some larger phases in their lives, even have offspring that is born in a virtual world etc.

Analogies and inspiration for SL can't only be found with the sword wielding street warriors of the cyberpunk era ...

i second otherland. when i met sl i thought... here's the embryo of what i've read about and my chance to watch it grow 8D

grow dammit!

actually i've been surprised that nobody else has mentioned otherland until just now....

l.

My best guess about Second Life is it's somewhere between The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Animal Farm, and Penny Arcade.

In other words, for the most part Second Life is an absurd hodgepodge of the ideas rendered. Fortunately there are (some) exceptions to this rule.

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On a more serious note though, it's difficult to predict where things are going, but "metaverse" signs are strong, and in a general sense, the outcomes have been positive. I just hope this gravy train lasts.

The Ugly Duckling

... because one can experience such personal growth and transformation in here.

I have to mention Charles Stross' upcoming novel Accelerando and the short stories that preceded it, and his novels Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise, though the SL-relevant parts of Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise are overshadowed at times by in-depth explanations of relativistic spaceflight.

But read Accelerando! It's going to be great.

Also interesting, This article discusses the Singularity, and Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow's takes on it.

Catherine, that book sounds great after reading the article... it's so surreal it borders on Hitchhiker's Guide, and yet I see it's all built around a few technology advancements - nanotech, downloading your brain into computers, and high speed space travel.

I think that's the key to sci-fi ... imagining the technology, and then figuring out how people would deal with it. Sci-fi masters have both the imagination to think up the useful inventions (or nefarious) and then the intelligence to think about how humans would adapt.

I believe humankind has already gone through major singularities:
- fire - that let us thrive in new environments and command nature
- language - allowing quick communication
- currency - allowing investment, banking, etc
- explosives - ending feudalism because walls no longer stop armies
- modern medicine - from anticeptics onward
- refrigeration
- high speed electrical communication (the computer & the internet)

Future ones - perhaps V.R.? teleporters? genetic engineering? Instant communication (paired particles that are linked across space/time)?

A superb book As was Pollen and Nymphomation. Automted Alice wasn't much kop and I recently read Falling Out Of Cars which was a big dissapointment as well. But the first three books are pure class.

I suppose with the half dog half human people in those books, there's a similarity between that and the proliferation of furries in SL

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish

Bob the Builder: Bob's Amazing Pop-up Book

How to Win Friends and Influence People

The Continuing Drama of Those Left Behind

The Soap Opera Encyclopedia

Who stole my cheese?

and yes it's a real book

With all this FIC talk wouldn't The Sneetches be a better Dr. Seuss pick?

Who has the FIC star upon thars?

That's a lot of the fun of the Accelerando stories -- the fact that it's both fantastic and ordinary at the same time. Even in the face of what for all intents and purposes is the end of the human era, the story doesn't become difficult to believe. I really enjoyed them, seeing the world progressing in slices, five, ten, twenty years apart, and seeing huge changes having occurred each time, yet everything still remaining plausible.

I don't know if we'll ever get the electronics side of things right for VR to be anywhere near tolerable before neuroscience has caught up enough to just render the entire HMD industry moot entirely. The same with teleportation and faster-than-light spaceflight. It may turn out that we can teleport objects from place to place, but that when we finally figure out the technology, we simply won't NEED to.

I'm completely serious when I say that SL, or something very much like it is the future of humanity. I believe that in a hundred years or so, the MAJORITY of humans will exist solely as software. With exponentially greater computing power and nanotechnology, I see very little reason why we wouldn't choose to do so, particularly when being uploaded means very little difference in your day-to-day experience, save for having no physical needs and never dying.

Alex,

<<Michael Moorcock>>

And of course, we have a great deal in common with those characters who populate the 'Dancers at the End of Time' series.

In my first ever virtual world, my avatar was called Iron Orchid.

Greg Egan's Permutation City

Taken from that excerpt:


My comment:
There are still people who are mystified by email. There are still people who believe that computers are evil. There are people who still believe that the only functional use of a computer is solitare!

Near Future? I think not.

your forgetting:

Anne Rice: all or any of her works.

The Story of O.


so sayeth:

Marilyn

Philip Jose Farmer - The Maker of Universes

Maybe not an impeccable writer (the traduction I have sucks) but greatly creative.

George Eliot's Middlemarch

I mean it's got relationships, commerce, drama, status, greed, generosity, love...

OMG I hate that book. Corporate crapola. Our whole company/corporation fell in love with it and every ass-kisser had a copy prominently displayed on thier desk. I read it and was envious of how the author could waste so many people's time and get so rich with so little work.

Just like all the other corporate psuedo-literature: brainwashing and mind numbing for the masses.

And Otherland is indeed more of an example of SL-possibilites than any other book I've read, Snowcrash included. The Amber series by Roger Zelazny could kind of tie-in as well.

Edit: I think the title was "Who Moved My Cheese".

Reading any of those splendid Jack Chick religious tracts should be preparation enough for our new surrealist-apocalypse lifestyle.

Yes, I quite agree all the Otherland books were very pertinent to our experience. In particular I felt the portrayal boy who was dying of a chronic condition and had an outlet via VR gaming to interact and develop normalized relationships with other people was a very interesting concept.

Hiro, that list you posted looks like the Civilization Game Advance tree ; hehe Have you played it?

Selador,

Yes, sometimes i do feel here like the people with the magic godlike rings in Dancers At the End of Time.


Maybe we should write an SL version of the book "Who Returned my Pixel?"

I suppose different books are peritnent depending on which sub-culture (s) you're in...

Goths, Furries, Gamers, Shoppers, Clubbers, Glams, Builders, BDSM, Forum People (hehe), WWIIores, etc.


How can any of the concepts mentioned in these books enhance or change our experience in SL for better or for worse?

Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations

Excellent choice. Add John Locke's Second and Third Letter and Two Treatises of Government for some folks. I don't care how much cyberpunk you read, people still organize in the same ways.

Needful Things and Insomnia by King for laughs.