(Alistair) After Ventus - which, alas, I read before I started booklogging, so I cannot give you a reference, here - I had pretty much decided to myself that whatever books Karl Schroeder wrote were probably worth reading, and so I would proceed on that assumption.

Lady of Mazes (in the same universe as Ventus, but with little overlap) does not disappoint me, in this respect.

On the one hand, considered solely as plot and character, the story of our three (primary and secondaries) protagonists caught up in the invasion of their home by an unseen, incomprehensible enemy and their attempt to save it, the book is merely excellent. But, rather, it is as a novel of ideas that it particularly shines.

Mr. Schroeder is unafraid to play with the big ideas: all-pervasive augmented reality - "inscape" - in various forms, including forms capable of such personalization as to effectively be self-reinforcing solipsism; posthuman entities; memetically-encoded intelligence. And some really fascinating ideas, in my opinion, about potential trans- and post-human political institutions that are themselves worth the cover price of the book (although I shall not give more details here, to avoid spoilering). As I would have said post-Ventus, I greatly admire his ability to build a coherent world and a believable future.

SPOILERS AT WEB SITE -- READ FIRST.

Exorbitantly recommended to transhumanists, SF readers, and the philosophically inclined.

( http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/ce... )

[Amy] I've been mulling over what I might say about this book ever since I was about halfway though it. See, it's a remarkably excellent book about very interesting people who live in a universe whose rules make me crazy. The author appears to hold some beliefs about the nature of technology and its effects on people that I find both implausible and offensive, but which I cannot really discuss without being spoileriffic.

I believe my review will be limited to this: This is the most astonishingly technophobic bunch of essentially-transhumans I have ever encountered.
[http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/ze...] ( )

I almost gave up reading Lady of Mazes at page 100. I think sticking through the entire book turned out to be a mistake though. The book uses a large number of terms to substitute for some pretty complex ideas, but the explanation for them is given piecemeal. Normally I prefer this method. I don’t like extensive, awkward descriptions of language or terms. However, in this case it works against the book, because I couldn’t understand what the hell they were when I wanted to know. At page 96, Schroeder had a character explaining the ones I hadn’t understood until then, and I decided I would finish the book. But then even more weirdness came into the story.

Add into the mix that this book is set largely in virtual reality, and it’s got huge strikes against it for my tastes. I ended up not liking the book, despite some interesting concepts.

(Full review at my blog) ( )

Schroeder is my new favorite sf author. This was MUCH better than Ventus, which was pretty good. Seldom have I seen a sf book that was so well plotted. All the mysteries are neatly explained by the end, in a very satisfying way. The only thing he could’ve improved was the wimpy title. I ran right out—er, logged right on to the library site—and reserved his new one, Sun of Suns. ( )

Hardcore science fiction. I love it. I most especially like the idea of the "algorithm book as an organization."

http://www.skyseastone.net/jvstin/unj... ( )

http://www.fascinationplace.org/2007/... ( )

Hoo-boy. That is kind of how you feel when you get deeper into this. It starts off reminiscent of John C. Wright's Golden Age, and force-multiplies itself by way of Greg Egan, Charles Stross' Accelerando and things like this. Set in the same place, with the same 3340 entity as Ventus.

If you stop occasionally as small pieces of your mind melt, don't be surprised.

An exploration of the nature of reality with respect to being human, when posthumans, AIs and others run around being able to almost do whatever they like.

It starts with a girl's perceptions changed because of an accident, and she uncovers layer after layer and motivation after motivation of all the different powers in her world and those around it.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2007/02... ( )

Hoo-boy, did I enjoy this book. I'll be buying a copy. It's not cyberpunk, but it's all about implanted cyberpresence and constantly mediated reality. It was practically homework, for my current course in HCI, and my Information Behaviour classes more generally. I wrote several huge paragraphs about it, which follow:

You guys, you guys, I read this cool science-fiction novel!

So I was feeling a little exhausted on Monday after staying up late and turning in lots of homework the night before, so I stayed offline the entire day and finished two library books. The second one turned out to be fascinatingly relevant to IB, so I figured I'd talk about the tech and ideas involved here.

ISBN: 0765312190,Lady of Mazes [no, I've only a slight idea about the title's meaning, sorry],
by Karl Schroeder

Disclaimer:
Hard-SF, so the macguffin is a technologically spawned philosophical idea, with perhaps a very slight resonance with space opera. (Despite being hard-SF, and perhaps arguably epic in spatial scope (though not in time, it all takes place within maybe a six-month period, excluding flashbacks), I didn't hate this book. It did not make me impatient, like many others. Probably because I loved the transhumanist, cyborg, jacked-in tech.)

Technology:
Everyone wears cybernetic/computer implants and is online all the time (except in the case of catastrophic hardware failure or minority extremism). Take some time to get used to that sentence, because that's actually not the cool or creative bit about this novel. What you should be getting used to there: immersive 3-D thought controlled interface indistinguishable from reality, rewinding all your conversations when necessary as if with TiVo (digital video recorder), while an 'agent' sim of yourself keeps up with the real-time component of the conversation. Having several conversations in several places using those agents. Stepping out of a conversation at a party and leaving a sim-agent behind to continue it for you. Asking your personalized customizable search agents to go find you things online and bring them back. Turning on and off your 'society' (buddy-list) if you are bored or want to be alone. Oh, and everyone has nanotech 'angel'shields so you can't accidentally hurt yourself much. Also none of this is cyberpunk, because the online things are portrayed as *normal*. Also of course, because the concept of offline doesn't really exist anymore, to contrast.
Excerpt:
Livia didn't want to talk to any of the real inhabitants of the estate right now, so she excluded them from her sensorium.
...
Conversations bubbled around her as she scowled at the mirror. Some dialogues were happening now in the manor, but most were the peers, laughing and chattering in diverse places back home. Some voices were real people's; some were imitations performed by AIs. They were filtered for relevance by Livia's agents so that she only got the gist of what was happening today...


The actually cool philosophical bit:
The protagonist comes from a world where separate countries / utopian-societies / philosophies co-exist. None of them can see each other (due to, if you like, cyber-filters), though for practical reasons their territories rarely overlap in space. They've got it set up, though, so that nobody can harmfully visit another society. Think of the Star Trek Prime Directive, here. Each one is a state of mind, so the way to visit from one to another is to shift perceptions, thoughts, and values. Once you've done that, you're "there". The girl from the city has to start consciously noticing all the trees, and hearing the animals in the forest, and eventually she's walking into the pseudo"Indian" village. Lots of people stay in their birth societies because they find that switch too difficult.

Later in the novel, she visits a more libertarian world, where they don't have these cyber-filters between societies. Indeed, they have no consensus society views of the world at all. Every single person *there* has their very own cyberview of the world and can swap to their friends' views at a moment's whim.

Excerpt:
Livia reached out with her senses and will, determined not to notice anything of Westerhaven: no buildings, no contrails. Her change of attitude and attention was noted by her neural implants and the mechology known as the *tech-locks*; where there had been impenetrable underbrush, a pathway appeared leading into the woods.


The big philosophical question:
Whether it's better to have that anarchic freedom to modify one's own environment, or whether it's better to keep some form on things to spur creativity. ( )

http://www.tuginternet.com/jja/journa... ( )