A masterwork that talks deeply to us of our own world through the prism of one imagined. In contrast to the empty characters and superficial gimmicks of so much sci-fi, the worlds of Urras and Annarres are rich in philosophical and political detail. Furthermore, in Shevek we have a rounded and fully imagined character, and one through whom we can satisfactorily explore the otherness of her creation. Note: all quotes are from [Gollancz 2002] but original was published in 1974.
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… but the principle of organic economy was too essential to the functioning of the society not to affect ethics and aesthetics profoundly. Excess if excrement,
Odo wrote in the Analogy. Excrement retained in the body is poison.
[84]
Second Life is a massively-multiplayer world developed by Linden Labs. Unlike many other MMGs there is no particular aim, rather the intent is to live in the world and add to it. Thus importantly it is the game’s participants that create and develop the universe they inhabit (its creators explicitly invoke the Metaverse of Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash as a model).
MMG (massively multiplayer games) solve the central problem that current computer technology faces in creating interesting games: namely no decent AI. Without AI all the interesting parts of a ‘world’ have to lovingly crafted by hand. Thus while we can draw some lots of pretty stuff we are a) we are severely limited in the size and variety of the world’s artifacts and geography b) /very/ limited in the other entities that we can interact with.
Extracts from The Lessons from Lucasfilm’s Habitat, Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer. A fascinating work which, unusually for computer scientists, is full of lapidary phrases and well-written prose.
There were two sorts of implementation challenges that Habitat posed. Thefirst was the problem of creating a working piece of technology — developingthe animation engine, the object-oriented virtual memory, the message-passingpseudo operating system, and squeezing them all into the ludicrous Commodore 64(the backend system also posed interesting technical problems, but itsconstraints were not as vicious). The second challenge was the creation andmanagement of the Habitat world itself. It is the experiences from the latterexercise that we think will be most relevant to future cyberspace designers.
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, [Harvill 1996]. An extraordinary work, short, but all the closer to perfection for that. The withering of nobility, the decline of the House of Salina despite its bitter compromise with a new age, the ache of nostalgia and dissatisfaction of the Prince all intertwine, and together with the endless details of place and person, of phrase and mood combine to entirely captivate us as we move spellbound through this world conjured from the regrets and tumults of a half-forgotten past.
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Love. Of course, love. Flames for a year, ashes for thirty. He knew what love was … Anyway, Tancredi would always find women falling for him like ripe pears. [p.49, The Prince musing on Tancredi's match with Angelica]
About
Dr. Rufus Pollock is co-Founder and Director of the Open Knowledge Foundation, a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, and an Associate of the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge.
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