keeping an eye on Earth (image source) |
Change
Now that I've completed "Hierion Writers Club" (15,000 words) some of that backstory is now in place. There is still a remaining opportunity to provide details about of how Mary used the Writers Block to support social and technological change on Earth, but the basics have now been provided, at least in outline.
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Wendy the probot |
by George Dyson |
I included just a glimpse of Samuel Butler in part 2 of "Hierion Writers Club" because I depict Mary's grandmother, Elizabeth (born Elizabeth Dixon), as being involved in the design and construction of Nanoville. R. Nyrtia is using the nanorealm as an experimental environment, exploring how to transform a group of humans into a super-organism with a unified group mind.
Samuel wrote "Darwin among the Machines", and it is fun to imagine that he could be brought into Elizabeth's life in order to help her imagine a future in which humans, programmed genetically with the equivalent of the three laws of robotics, might form a group mind. I like to think that Elizaabeth and Samuel worked to build a form of technology-assisted telepathy into the structure of everything in Nanoville.
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The character Charlotte Burke in "Hierion Writers Club" is loosely based on Charlotte Turner. I needed Charlotte in my story because of the way Isaac Asimov wrote about Gaia and Blissenobiarella (Bliss, for short) in his Foundation Saga.
Here is a typical bit of dialogue from Bliss, a young woman and an integral component of the group mind Gaia: "You must understand, Trevize, that we are not interested in you as a person... you are only important as a conduit to the truth..." As impersonal as Bliss sounds, she takes the elderly archeologist Pelorat as her lover and Asimov enjoyed telling readers just how much the planet Gaia (and its 1,000,000,000 human residents) all enjoyed sharing in the experience of their love making.
Asterothropes, path to Galaxia |
In my imagination, the main problem facing R. Nyrtia is how to modify the human gene pool so as to bring into existence a galaxy full of telepathic people, and do so without violating the laws of robotics. Perhaps the greatest challenge for the positronic robots is how to avoid altering the essence of what it means to be human while bringing Galaxia into being. The "probots" went down a similar path previously when they created the telepathic Asterothropes. The Asterothropes provided a useful source of gene patterns, but they were not human beings; they were a different species of primate and not covered by the laws of robotics.
the character Pols is loosely based on Mari |
Mari Wolf
Mari Wolf is probably most widely known for having used the term "droid" in her 1952 story "Robots of the World! Arise!" (see If, July 1952). For "Hierion Writers Club", I wanted to illustrate how Grean's arrival in Eternity would derail the plans of the probots. It was fun to imagine that in the Foundation Reality, Mari had been used by the probots to help introduce Earthlings to the idea of robots with super-human cognitive abilities.
Next: part 1 of "The Galaxiad" |
The Edge of Galaxia
I've now written a new 7,000 word story called "The Galaxiad" about the development of Galaxia, in the time just before Grean arrives on Earth to begin her take-over of Eternity.
Related Reading: 2021 "The Alastor Network"
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