Reviews for Two novels

The average rating for Two novels based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-05-24 00:00:00 Lorraine Corvino Experimental SHAMS review SHAMS stands for Steve Hotopp Assisted Manuscription System™. SHAMS is hereby in testing stage. Steve, any system needs testing. Lets see the results. SHAMS Review of True Names I'm so nostalgic and nervous over this one. Vinge's True Names is chock full of fantasy representations of cyberspace, MMORPG precursor imagery, shady games in anonymity that combine for an impressive and thought-provoking reading experience. The main character, Mr. Slippery, is a successful writer of participatory literature in the real world and a warlock in the virtual world, very skilled in manipulation of real-world data through the interfaces of the cyberspace. He is not that skilled in keeping a low profile in the real world, though. I won't divulge much of the plot, but I will say that the technological singularity is treated in a unique way for its time. The provocation, since Turing, has been to create an intelligence able to respond in real time like a human, to be completely not distinguishable from one. But if we get there, to the sentience of a different type of intelligence, what will be next for humanity is essentially unpredictable. The bigger point, it seems to me, is that there are elements we can predict before we get there: cyber-technology eventually precludes pseudonymity and anonymity, as it precludes any control over it by any governamental, NSAish and the like, agencies. The book was a non-standard science-fiction fare when it was published. Vinge wrote a powerful narrative to illustrate the concept of virtual reality and what will be known afterwards as cyberspace. It was an effective marriage between fantastical science fiction and the ethical questions of technology advances. All in all it was a convincing perspective about a disputable thesis, one you have to try on your own to know where you stand. I was enchanted by the classic cyberpunk feel, and knocked-down by the thought-provoking vision of the ultimate demise of a virtual experience as virtual, when the virtuality takes over reality. 5.9 stars rounded to 5. (The actual review may come later.) I think this is a successful experiment... One question, though: is this my review or Steve's? For all original content authored by me, the following license is applied: This work by Alfaniel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-09-01 00:00:00 N.a. Stansbury Good shorts in here. I have to give it five stars because the title story, True Names, was so fascinating to a computer geek like me. Thank you, Vernor, for introducing me to the Technological Singularity.