Welcome! These forums will be deactivated by the end of this year. The conversation continues in a new morph over on Discord! Please join us there for a more active conversation and the occasional opportunity to ask developers questions directly! Go to the PS+ Discord Server.

Pink Noise

5 posts / 0 new
Last post
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
Pink Noise
Another book recommendation for Eclipse Phase: Pink Noise by Leonid Korogodski. This is a gold mine for EP concepts and descriptions. The protagonist is an infomorph psychosurgeon, and the descriptions of him dancing his way around the damaged brain of a young girl provide great imagery of what might be involved. Plenty of other interesting ideas, from the mythology of the Martian blueberries, the roleplaying game themed technocratic caste societies that emerged from the singularity (not a bad description of how a hypercorp might work from the perspective of indentures), ZuluZionist Mars colonists, shapechanging warships, plasma going wild, the witchunts before the Fall, the wish virus and the Fairy... In a way it almost feels like it is located in the same universe as Hannu Rajaniemi's "The Quantum Thief", but a few centuries earlier. It also has lengthy endnotes where the author explains some of the science and linguistics he bases the story on. I don't buy all his interpretations of it, but it is interesting anyway. It is rare to find a poetic novel that also teaches you a bit about plasma physics and African mythology.
Extropian
fellowhoodlum fellowhoodlum's picture
Re: Pink Noise
How "readable" is this author? While I enjoyed The Quantum Thief very much, I found his writing style a little... taxing. I can understand why people have trouble getting into it.
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
Re: Pink Noise
fellowhoodlum wrote:
How "readable" is this author? While I enjoyed The Quantum Thief very much, I found his writing style a little... taxing. I can understand why people have trouble getting into it.
Not quite as taxing as Rajaniemi, but Korogodski is still not easy reading. He is both a bit poetic and happy to bring in new concepts. You can read a sample at http://www.pinknoise.net/pdf/PinkNoise-Sample.pdf I think this shows how to do psychosurgery with style:
Quote:
He was at home in a human brain — this small, enclosed world of living, fragile circuits. Nathi’s electronic mind washed over it like a cleansing fluid, slipped through synapses on the magnetic wings of nanobots, the microscopic nodes of his private network. With his nanotori, he could switch the brain’s internal circuitry at will — but carefully, with the lightest touch, and always following the music. Some described it as a symphony. But Nathi heard in it ingoma ebusuku, “song of the night,” the old tiptoe music of his Zulu ancestors — perhaps because it called for no instruments, just voice. He was tiptoeing across the brain, leading a procession up and down an undulating path, out of the land of sorrows. Switch. He is with an isicathamiya band, singing on stage in an all-night musical contest: Sigadla ngengoma! — We are attacking with song. Switch. Now a kwaito singer of the post-apartheid era, dancing to a soul-catching electronic beat. And, hundreds of years later, in a transport spaceship, waiting with the Zulu Zionist white-robes for their historic arms. Deep voices, resonant. Polyphony developing like the converging horns of buffalo. The drums and handclaps of a qhuqhumbela. Something has changed. A coherent wave in the theta range has snuck into the texture of the melody to couple with the faster gamma oscillations. Calcium spikes that have been threatening to overwhelm the girl’s unsteady motor system have organized themselves into a pattern, binding the girl’s senses to its will. The dysrhythmia’s “edge effect?” But it could also be a long-term memory from the hippocampus entering the dream. So Nathi doesn’t stop it. Staying in the dream the girl does not control, he watches with her eyes, and listens with her ears, smells it, feels it with her skin.
(the technical musical and neuroscience terms *are* explained at the end of the book, but there is plenty of poetry in strange terminology itself)
Extropian
fellowhoodlum fellowhoodlum's picture
Re: Pink Noise
Okay I read it. It was... interesting the way it was told in a fairy tale-like manner. I admit I am enjoying the appendices a bit more than the actual story. Neat use of Indian and Zulu mythologies in posthuman culture. About the part in the appendices where the author says that dark matter theory is "wrong" how well accepted is this plasma galaxy theory? It hasn't shown up much in popular media yet...
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
Re: Pink Noise
The plasma theory is total fringe. It is not crazy crackpottery, but rather one of those ideas outside the mainstream that refuses to give up despite weak or nonexistent evidence for it. Still, it is *fun*. The story is in many ways too short, but that might be to its benefit. The grand epic this feels like it is the start of would likely be a hopeless read, but as the first two chapters of the imaginary tome the story works.
Extropian