A Quicksilver Vision of the Future
- By dj
- 25 July, 2018
- Comments Off on A Quicksilver Vision of the Future
I’d like to express my thanks to Eric Klein and J. Daniel Batt at the Lifeboat Foundation for including my transhumanist tale ‘Sweet Quicksilver’ in the second edition of its mind-expanding Visions of the Future anthology of fiction and nonfiction. It’s weird (undeniably, in a good way) to see my name on the contents page alongside author-visionaries such as Greg Bear, David Brin, Ray Kurzweil and Ramez Naam.
The common theme of the anthology is the human future. While I don’t wish to give too much away about the story, we shouldn’t assume that there will be one. As Lord Martin Rees points out in his essay ‘Our Final Hour’ (included in the anthology), our odds of surviving our current technological inflection point, lasting perhaps a century, stand at around 50 percent. If there is a future in which ‘we’ survive, it might edge so far beyond our current goals and values as to become unrecognizable as human.
My story draws inspiration from a Grimms fairy tale. It ponders the consequences of dabbling in the invigorating ‘quicksilver’ of unfathomably-motivated sapient technology.
