my mind on books

I caught myself looking longingly at the fiction after a spate of nonfiction, so I picked up a copy of Glasshouse by Charles Stross, which turned out to be an entertaining “thought-experiment” dealing with issues of mind and identity, wrapped in a good story.

In Stross’s future, memories can be erased, personalities edited, people regularly make back-up copies of themselves, and their minds can be placed in different bodies. Problems and issues such as these arise:

p 2 – “It’s tough, not being able to tell the difference between your own thoughts and a postsurgical identity prosthesis.”

p 15 – “Not wearing a face in public is a deliberate snub.”

The action soon moves to an experimental simulation of a ‘Dark Ages’ society (c. 1950-2040), which affords a look back at the present-day world from the future perspective.

At Stross’s website, www.accelerando.org, his earlier book Accelerando is available as a free ebook.

Author’s blog: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/