This problem has prompted the development of a culture of "Bridgers" who modify their own minds to form a chain of intermediates between exuberant strains. Unlike pre-Introdus (21st century) society, the vast profusion of qualitatively different types of fleshers has made any sort of global civilisation impossible. There even exists a subculture (the dream apes) whose ancestors bred out the capacity for speech and some of the higher brain functions, apparently in order to attain a primal innocence and rapport with nature. These include enhancements such as disease resistance, life extension, intelligence amplification, and the ability to allow selected transhumans to thrive in new environments, such as the sea. fleshers, biological societies consisting of statics, the original, naturally-evolving race of Homo sapiens, and a wide variety of exuberant derivatives, whose genes have been modified beyond the static baseline.Certain assumptions, common to Greg Egan literature, are made to enable the plot, such as the digital mutability of reality (that there is no difference between any real thing and a sufficiently similar mathematical replica of that thing).įor the story, Egan adopts Keri Hulme's gender-neutral pronouns 've', 'vis', 'ver' for most of the characters in the novel, who opt to have a neutral gender.īy 2975 CE (Universal Time), the year in which the novel begins, humanity has speciated into three distinct groupings: Kozuch Theory treats elementary particles as semi-point-like wormholes, whose properties can be explained entirely in terms of their geometries in six dimensions. Egan deftly invents several new theories of physics, beginning with Kozuch Theory, the dominant physics paradigm for nearly nine hundred years before the beginning of the novel. The novel began life as a short story entitled "Wang's Carpets" which originally appeared in New Legends, a collection of short stories edited by Greg Bear (Legend, London, 1995), and was later adapted, and included, as a chapter in the novel.Ī glossary is included, which explains many of the complicated terms in the novel. This novel is set in a posthuman future, in which transhumanism long ago (during the mid 21st century) became the default philosophy embraced by the vast majority of human cultures.
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