Telosians’ Crossroads, Internet, Sci-fi and Jonathan Apple
——Book Review for Left Behind
Written by Bunker
The brains of Telosians record all the stimuli from their senses: every tingling along their hairy spine, every sound wave striking their membranous body, every image perceived by their simple-compound-refractive light-field eyes, every molecular gustatory and olfactory sensation captured by their waving stalk-feet, every ebb and flow in the magnetic field of their irregular, potato-shaped planet.
When they wish, they can recall every experience with absolute fidelity. They can freeze a scene and zoom in to focus on any detail; they can parse and reparse each conversation to extract every nuance. A joyful memory may be relived countless times, each replay introduciont new discoveries. A painful memory may be replayed countless times as well, each time creating a fresh outrage. Eidetic reminiscence is a fact of existence.
Infinity pressing down upon the finite is clearly untenable.
The Telosian organ of cognition is housed inside a segmented body that buds and grows at one end while withering and shedding at the other. Every year, a fresh segment is added at the head to record the future; every year, an old segment is discarded from the tail, consigning the past to oblivion.
Thus, while the Telosians do not forget, they also do not remember. They are said to never die, but it is arguable whether they ever live.
I am at the crossroads which such Telosians are facing.
At the end of the book, Ken Liu concluded that the time, place and motive where we read a book as well as the way we read it decides how we resonance with it. Now I’m in favor of this opinion, since back when the story The Paper Menagerie first won the Hugo Prize, immediately did I rush to read it, only to get lost in its plot and settings, wondering “can this be counted as a science fiction?”, judging that it was nothing, yet when several years have past and I encountered the same story on the train heading home, tears suddenly began to drop uncontrollably.
Thus, instead of making futile description and analysis on the love and relations frequently emerged in thie book I shall conclude that every character is full of love. Such love overrides all those gulf, fighting, indifference and caprice in this book in a very persuasive way. Therefore, it’s convicing that this is a quite brilliant collection, as long as the book is open in the right hand, in the right place.
Only after reading the whole book have I begun to understand that the reason why I dislike some part of Mass Effect 2 may not be a disgust for such concentration on sentiment and love in science fiction, but merely a bad story, plus an incorrect time.
Moving the topic back on science fiction, as is pointed out in the introduction, most stories in this collection are depicting a separation of “humanity”(a fuzzy term defined by humans) during the process of fusion between humans and machines, until one day, it seems that human is not what a human really should feel like. Putting all these pieces with the same theme together, the discussion over artificial intelligence and Internet industry has become the most realistic and comprehensive science fictions I have ever read. I can still remember the sense of favor when a modern near future world close tied to Google and Twitter stroke me hard when enjoying The Book of Life, and these “Ken Liu stories” presents a even stronger modernity based on his insight into CS ecology.
Some time ago, I compared reality to an absurd science fiction on an online forum.
In the world of such fiction, the internet failed to maintain its origin environment. Instead, barriers are set piece by piece. Countries and enterprises began to draw their own boundaries, establishing new forms of separated entity. Data stopped to flow freely, instead, they are transformed into wealth purchased and sold between these entities, while citizens may lost themselves in such ocean of information, selling their digital identity to different entities without even notice. What is worse is that the strictly distributed network that we are familiar with is actually a perfect shelter for crimes such as drug and pornography. If such fiction exist, I believe that given enough time, it will become such classic that can even match 1984, Brave new World and We.
People have begun to worry about such crisis. They talk about it everywhere, even when they are having lunch with their friends and families. So does Ken Liu’s stories, but what he was trying to convey is a more dramatic future, an even extreme world, with more conflict and more taste. The questions he throwed to readers are far beyond my answer that when I reflected on those debate, the first sound echoed in my head was the Jonathan apple presented in Carthaginian Rose, as if I really took a hard bite, soaked within that wonderful sore.
As for those stories that drove apart from the main theme——
I always had a ridiculous thought: after landing on a wasted planet, space travelers discovered a computer. Someone in the team happened to kick off the battery, without knowing a civilization that uploaded themselves thousand of years ago, that was smoking and having party was gone with it. That is why story Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer left me with an incomparable joy, moved by Sophia’s obsession of space exploration within the virtual reality.
Indeed, there are some “normal” science fiction. Stories such as The Last Seed and Monkeys are both amusing and thought-provoking. Placed at the end of this book, they provide a sense of peace after those tides arousen by previous works.
In a word, this is a book that goes beyond my expectation.