/lit/ - Literature

>>20420704
Luminous - Greg Egan (1998)

Chaff (1993)
The newest front of the drug war is a drug that alters the user's neurological function to where arbitrary stimulus can create any effect on sensory experience. A DEA agent who believes that consciousness is irrelevant and instinctual drives control everything is tasked with retrieving a biochemist, a traitor, from a massive bioengineered rain forest in the Amazon Lowlands.
Enjoyable

Mitochondrial Eve (1995)
A man in love with a woman reluctantly visited the local establishment of The Children of Eve, a genealogy obsessed ancestor worship cult of Mitochondrial Eve. Eventually he's tasked with scientifically proving that all humans descended from a single woman. I was rather amused by the politics of the story.
Enjoyable

Luminous (1995)
I'd describe this as a metaphysical mathematics conspiracy thriller. I have no doubt though that I would've enjoyed it more if I had more of a background in mathematics, but even so I enjoyed anyway, mostly in an abstract way. The infodump is the narrative - there's no meaningful difference between the two. The basic idea of the story is that all mathematical theorems must be tested by a physical system to be proven true or false. Mathematical Platonism is ridiculed. By doing so they realize that truth is locally defined and there are competing systems of mathematical logic that are in conflict. Then it gets weirder.
Enjoyable

Mister Volition (1995)
An impoverished man robs a wealthy man of a neural prosthetic, which he discovers is called PANDEMONIUM. Despite the ominous name and his need to sell it for money to pay for rent, he decides to use it for himself. It lives up to its name. Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus are explicitly mentioned and the narrative is based on their ideas, though the idea being explored is inspired by Minsky and Dennett.
Ok

Cocoon (1994)
A corporation develops a cocoon for fetuses with the stated purpose that harmful actions by the mother or environmental hazards don't affect their development. Their R&D laboratory is bombed and an investigator, seemingly all government services have been privatized, is hired to find the culprit. The primary idea here is the convergence of sexual politics and corporate greed.
Enjoyable

Transition Dreams (1993)
It's unclear how much, if any, of this is unreliable narration. Usually I'm at least indifferent to that, but in this case I didn't like it. If everything is accepted as presented in the story then this is about the dreams a consciousness has while being transferred from a biological body to an artificial body. Strangely, nothing interested me about it.
Meh