Charlie Stross in Second Life
These days one just cannot keep up with all the interesting things that happen in Second Life. Today as soon as I went in I had the good luck to run into Sophrosyne Stenvaag who told me about their plans for Extropia Core in Second Life and that she was about to go to attend an interview with Charlie Stross (YES! The author of Accelerando - one of my 3 favorite SF writers with Rudy Rucker and of course Greg Egan). See a short videoclip of the interview on blip.tv. I talked to Charlie who promised to do a talk for transhumanists in Second Life. I will contact him to schedule the talk, in a format lecture + Q/A like we used for Kevin Warwick.
The interview with Stross took place at the amphitheater at Dr. Dobb’s Island (aptly named “Life 2.0"). About 70 avatars attended. There is a very good coverage at Information Week:
“Our guest for our next GridTalk is science-fiction writer Charles Stross, whose most recent novel Halting State, is set in the near future—just 11 years from now, when virtual worlds, massively multiplayer games, advanced mobile computing, and augmented reality are a part of daily life. Stross will discuss the world he created for Halting State, and how networked technologies are likely to evolve and affect our daily life and business over the course of the next decade. You can join the discussion in Second Life or on the Web, or listen afterwards as a downloadable audio file or a podcast. Scroll to the end of this post for more details how to participate.
It’s really hard to predict the future on the scale Stross does. Imagine yourself in 1996. Back then, would you have predicted the ubiquity of smartphones, user-generated content on the Internet (blogs weren’t even invented yet), Facebook, MySpace, the massive American entertainment industry grinding to a complete halt over a dispute over Internet video, and post-9/11 geopolitics? Could you have imagined, in your bones, what it would be like to live in that world?
That’s what Stross accomplishes with Halting State. In Stross’s year 2018, most people wear transparent eyeglasses that are hooked up to computers and networks that overlay electronic images and information over their view of the real world around them. These electronic glasses display electronic street signs and directions. Police see overlays of the criminal activity at every building they see. A fencing enthusiast gets to practice her swordplay in a visual representation of a gothic castle. Multiplayer games like World of Warcraft and virtual worlds like Second Life are part of day-to-day life. And the characters in Halting State take it all for granted. Halting State is a well-realized and intelligent treatise about near-future effects of networked technology. It’s also an extremely entertaining, thrilling, and funny crime caper novel”.
Posted by G.P. on 11/13 at 05:29 PM