Lady of Mazes
One of the new stars of hard SF returns to the same distant future in which "Ventus" is set, but employs a broader canvas to tell the story of Teven Coronal, a ringworld with a huge multiplicity of human civilizations.
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2007–2025years
92% recommend8% neutral
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What Hacker News says
- One of my favorite sci-fi authors wrote Lady of Mazes, which in part explores what a "finished" tech tree looks like, and how societies might explicitly reject parts of it as part of their values. It explores multiple societies physically overlaid but invisible to each other because their technological values are incompatible. (The titular lady possesses a rare ability to step through to different societies.)
- Others have suggested Ra for those that find this concept compelling. Let me also recommend basically all of Karl Schroeder's work, which touches on machine intelligence in lots of ways. The steampunk Virga series has AIs which act on behalf of nature, Lady of Mazes has "votes" which are physical embodiments of political movements, and Ventus has sentient terraforming robots who no longer think as humans do.
- There's a lot of cool scifi mentioned at the start of this but it's missing Karl Schroeder's "Lady of Mazes" (2005) which takes on this concept directly. In it the perceptual layers people computationally put in front of their senses have lead to complete severing of filter bubbles from each other into discrete political entities that perceive and live in entirely different "worlds". I don't want to spoil it with more since it's well worth a read.
- This is one of the themes brilliantly explored (in my opinion), in the (largely hard) scifi book "Lady of Mazes" by Karl Schroeder.
- OP here. Bingo! Karl Schroeder is fairly obscure unfortunately... I love Ventus and Lady of Mazes. I picked this handle mainly because it's unique everywhere I've tried to sign up.
- He mentions early in the talk about how some people working in VR/AR make a comparison that they're building the tech from 'Snowcrash' which he calls out as wrong model for thinking about VR.
A while later he describes a companies responses to building features after a player virtually groping another player in a virtual archery space.
The model for AR/VR that seems most plausible to me is what's described in the book 'Lady of Mazes'[1] - really recommend people check that out if they find this talk interesting.
[1]: http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/lady-of-mazes...
