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Ask HN: Which scifi authors to interview about immortality?

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Re: Ask HN: Which scifi authors to interview about immortality?

#11
John C Wright

Wrote the Golden Ocumene trilogy which explores a post-post-singularity society where not only is immortality taken for granted, post-humans can swap between species and lifestyles, IRL or virtually, pretty much at will. Essentially the book itself explores the will to push boundaries in a world where everything conceivable is plentiful and readily available, and as a result, most of humanity and culture has grown stagnant, because how can you get better than perfect?

Re: Ask HN: Which scifi authors to interview about immortality?

#13
John Varley - His "Eight Worlds" future history has combined the concepts of backing up and restoring human consciousness with cloning a new body to house that consciousness in stories going back to the 70's.

Perhaps he would be most famous for his short story "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" which was dramatized on PBS. This production was later to be soundly mocked during the original run of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Re: Ask HN: Which scifi authors to interview about immortality?

#14
post #9

Try Charlie Stross (@cstross), if he's not interested in being interviewed himself I'm sure he'll still give you an interesting reccomendation set.

The ending of A Colder War hints at the rather bad possibilities of virtual immortality...

And he doesn't actually think the singularity or mind uploading will happen:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/06/reality-...

Re: Ask HN: Which scifi authors to interview about immortality?

#18
Going to second Eliezer Yudkowsky. He wrote the most popular Harry Potter fanfic in the world, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (I know it's funny, but it's probably been read more than most of the other scifi in this thread). The whole theme was about the philosophy of the rejection of death as the natural order.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_o...

http://yudkowsky.net/

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