Re: My top 3 SF writers of all time

: "Gene Ward Smith" <genewardsmith@xxxxxxxxx>
: Mike in Harsh Mistress seems like science fiction to me, whereas "my
: laptop is alive" stories strike me as fantasy. I thought Turing Hopper
: leaned in that second direction; it gave me the same sense a
: fantasy-mystery crossbreed does. It counts as more convincing than cat
: detectives, or vampire detectives, but not by much.

Hm. T.H. requires quite a bit more resources than "my laptop is alive".
Indeed, probably more, in terms of the MIPS the author has in mind,
than Mike does. Mind you, T.H. lived for a while in a single, compactly
packaged cluster of processors, and that system was later used as a
PC (essentially, a very large and clumsy "laptop" for telecommuting).
But T.H. normally lives in a distributed network with lots more resources
than "a laptop". LOTS more.

Of course, in 20-20 hindsight (and could-have-been-anticipated-sight),
neither Mike or T.H. has anywhere near the hardware resources to make
their capabilities plausible. But they don't seem as unakin to me
as they do to you. T.H. "came alive" in a rather large corporate network
with plenty of computing resources, dedicated to simulating cognition; make "came alive" in a large colony's aggregate computer resources, dedicated
to... um... um... why did he come alive again?

Possibly, not mentioning any details makes Mike more plausible
(or harder to poke specific holes in). Maybe.


Wayne Throop throopw@xxxxxxxxx http://sheol.org/throopw
.

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