The golden globe
From back cover Ace paperback September 1999: All the universe is a stage -- and Sparky Valentine is its itinerant thespian. He makes his way from planet to planet as part of a motley theater troupe, bringing Shakespeare -- a version of it anyway -- to the outer reaches of Earth's solar system. Sparky can transform himself from young to old, fat to thin, even male to female, by altering magnetic implants beneath his skin. Indispensable hardware for a career actor -- and an interstellar con man wanted for murder...
Stats for nerds
3recommend
5mentions
5people
2009–2025years
60% recommend40% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Steel Beach and Golden Globe are both great books.
- Nice to see a recommendation for one of John Varley's works (The Golden Globe). There is one sci-fi author who is underappreciated. His writing has touches of Heinlein. His Gaea Trilogy is really creative too.
- I cannot recommend 'The Long Way' by Bernard Moitessier & 'The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst' highly enough. Both books cover how 2 contestants in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race could have won but did not, for rather interesting/different reasons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunday_Times_Golden_Globe_Race
- John Varley in the science fiction novel The Golden Globe envisioned a future where there are two separate AIs: one that is solely designed to help people, that knows everything, and a separate AI designed for law enforcement that is constrained to a limited set of inputs. I don't know if that's practical, or palatable, but it was an interesting thought experiment, although he doesn't dig into it too deeply. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Globe
- I'm reminded of the novel The Golden Globe, by john varley. In that novel very powerful AI handle most day to day operations of society, and it is mentioned by one of them that - technologically speaking - they could create the single most despotic and privacy-eliminating regime in human history. A place where even an individual's thoughts and emotions are no longer secret, let alone snooping on every word they ever speak. The AI then says it could do this, but it will not, and has intentionally blinded itself to all such data streams. The central intelligence refuses to examine the incoming data as it believes doing so would violate its subjects human rights. In-novel this is why the AI doesn't just tell our protagonist where the big bad is, but I've found it an interesting possible trajectory for the future. Where every word we say is monitored, but it is strictly illegal to view said monitoring.
I wonder if that is the most realistic version of a future were we still have private lives.
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