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Post-Human (2000)

by David Simpson(Favorite Author)

3.55 of 5 Votes: 5

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

series

Post-Human

review 1: The first book was average but interesting. Unfortunately, the writing, plotting, dialog, characterization, and basic thinking-through of events here have taken an insane nosedive. Basically, as the author sees it, highly advanced technology will render both personality and functional psychology absolutely irrelevant. People have no reason to believe in a god now because they can fly. They have no desires for privacy because it's so convenient to have your lustful reactions to coworkers broadcast to everyone you know. The returning hero from the previous book once was a developed, even tragic figure. Here, he's been whitewashed, depersonalitied, and condemned to barely being relevant. He's not a scientist, so how could he be? I'm looking forward to continuing on with this ... moretrainwreck and seeing if the author's clever ideas ever find the wings (well, magnet bubble) to take off. May the Lord or perhaps the futuristic application of theoretical rationalism have mercy.
review 2: Like the first of this series, this book lacks the polish that is apparently difficult to come by without a big publisher. Still, his writing is actually surprisingly good. Although the ending was not perfect, this was a substantially better story than the first, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.The first book in this series was just good enough to make me read this one. This book was good enough to give me faith in independent writing and ensure that I will read more from the author (rest of the series and beyond) and other indies.It won't blow your mind, but I solidly recommend it.EDIT:Oh, one more thing. In the foreward from the author (I think at the beginning of the first book, I read as a combined set), he seems quite confident that he's been uniquely visionary in his modernization of sci-fi. I would not go quite that far. He applies more realism than many, and it is written more recently ... he makes references to Moore's law and, especially in the first, shows some really rapid acceleration of technology ... but at the end of the day there are only really four stand-out technologies, two of which have been thoroughly explored by other authors and one of which is certainly not *new*. I think it's almost impossible to really look 40 or 50 years ahead, precisely because of Moore's law ... it's easy to say "look, if we follow the trend we have been since the 80s, our most powerful supercomputer will have more computational power than the entire human race before 2040" - it's quite another to figure out what that MEANS, and to counter-balance it with the slow pace of infrastructure change. I guess what I'm saying is that the story got a lot a right, but I hardly think the author is a visionary or THAT much better at looking forward than anyone else. Don't buy into his statement that science fiction is outdated and only he as the answer. I can think of others that got it at least as "right" - take Peter F. Hamilton in the Void trilogy, for example, or even the much older Hyperion Cantos series by Dan Simmons. So, go in with reasonable expectations and have a good time. less

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