JRSS00-20 Justina Robson - Silver Screen.nfo
General Information
===================
Title: Silver Screen
Author: Justina Robson
Read By: Anna Parker-Naples
Copyright: 1999
Audiobook Copyright: 2014
Genre: Sci-Fi
Publisher: Audible
Abridged: No
Original Media Information
==========================
Media: Digital
Length each: Chapterized - lossless
Source: Audible Enhanced
File Information
================
Number of MP3s: 20
Total Duration: 14:04:55
Total MP3 Size: 387.02
Parity Archive: No
Ripped By: 3j
Ripped With: SoundTaxi
Encoded With: LAME
Encoded At: CBR 64 kbit/s 22050 Hz Mono
ID3 Tags: Set, v1.1, v2.3
Book Description
================
Publisher's Summary
Silver Screen presents an enjoyably different, subversive slant on the
science fiction themes of AI and cyberspace. Insecure and overweight
hot-housed from an early age to perform in genius-level jobs. But Anjuli
worries that her eidetic memory and her friendship with genuine smart
boy Roy Croft has been her ticket to success, rather than any real intelligence
to upload his mind into cyberspace, seeking that SF dream of bodiless
research has led to him harnessing himself to dubious biomechanoid technologies-
, which pull the user into mental symbiosis, creating hybrid consciousness
-- a new "I", continuous with the old, but different. "Where does life
end and the machine begin?"
of global communications AI, 901, is locked into an increasingly bitter
war with the Machine-Greens, who preach AI liberation. As the case for
expert witness Anjuli is targeted by assassins and entangled in the
hunt for an algorithm which is the key to machine consciousness, and
which may even be the master-code of life itself.
This story explores many interfaces between humans and their technologies,
between the promises of science and the explanations of faith. It is
written in a first-person style that mingles elements of detective story
and confessional. Alongside its SF content, the book delves into the
complexities of friendship, loyalty, love, and betrayal from an intimate
human perspective.
What the Critics Say
"Silver Screen and Mappa Mundi showed intelligence, grace and a lively
but humane imagination. Robson's considerable sense of humour lay in
ambush, backed up by a postfeminist tendency to look the problem straight
in the eye. Combined with a clean, powerful narrative drive and a cosmological
sensibility, this clarity of vision now demonstrates itself as her major
asset, making her one of the very best of the new British hard SF writers.
But it proves her identity too, moving her on, like the Forged themselves,
into a space of her own choosing." (Guardian)
"A cerebral and absorbing novel that explores the nature of consciousness
and artificial intelligence... Robson's prose is lean and dynamic, and
the speculative concepts are cutting edge and ultra cool. A startlingly
innovative take on the tried-and-true theme of artificial intelligence."
(Kirkus (Starred Review))
"... a fascinating peek into the development of one of SF's brightest
new stars." (Publishers Weekly)
I picked this title up because of the interesting essay/review below.
I found the essay interesting enough I thought I'd include it here
even though it will make this nfo just a tad long..:
The first of these older titles I ended up tackling, in fact, turned
out to be a real doozy, one of the best SF novels I've now read in years
and years -- Justina Robson's instant classic Silver Screen, which originally
came out in the UK exactly ten years ago and garnered a bunch of British
award nominations, then was finally published in the US by Pyr in 2005
and promptly rang up a bunch of American award nominations. In fact,
I think it's becoming clearer by the day that this novel is destined
to eventually be known as one of the pillars in a brand-new "age" of
science-fiction, one that started right around September 11th and is
now officially old enough to be acknowledged as the legitimate movement
it is. Because for those who don't know, most SF fans consider the genre
to have now gone through four major stages of history, since first coming
together as a recognized story style in the early 20th century, labeled
"ages" becuase SF fans are nerds like that: first the so-called "Golden
Age" of the 1930s and '40s; then the "Silver Age" of the '50s and early
'60s; then the "New Age" of the late '60s and '70s; and then the "Dark
Age" of the '80s and '90s, when existential angst and shiny black leather
coats ruled all.
So if we are to give this newest movement in SF its own name as well,
perhaps most appropriate would be the "Accelerated Age," a term already
coined by author Charles Stross in his groundbreaking early-2000s Accelerando,
a highly influential volume on all the other writers who make up this
school of thought. And the reason I would call it this is because of
one of the most common themes among all these disparate books, the idea
of a coming age where biology and mechanics go through a profound merging,
where the organic and the manmade truly combine and unite for the first
time in human history, ushering in a "shortcut in human evolution" that
Ray Kurzweil (brainy nonfiction godfather of the movement) calls the
coming of "The Singularity," and which Stross refers to in his novels
as the titular "Accelerated Age." And starting in the late 1990s and
then really exploding in the early 2000s, you saw a whole series of
writers in the genre add just a little more and a little more to this
Accelerated-Age mythos, and create one by one all the tropes that have
now become well-known hallmarks of this movement: there is Stross's
buddy Cory Doctorow, for example (who for those who don't know, I've
interviewed in the past for the CCLaP Podcast); and then there's Doctorow's
buddy John Scalzi; and then there's Scalzi's buddy Vernor Vinge; and
then there's Vinge's buddy Jeff VanderMeer, and his whole little circle
of "New Weird" people like China Mieville and Warren Ellis and Robert
Freeman Wexler and all the rest.
In fact, like the great Silver Age writers of the cool Modernist '50s
and '60s (people like Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke),
one of the things these Accelerated Age authors are known for are for
being acquaintances and friends, for publishing each other's work at
their blogs and going drinking together at conventions. Nepotism? Not
at all -- that only applies when it's editors and journalists and publicists
who share this kind of inappropriate buddy-buddy relationship. When
it's simply authors being this way to other authors, that's called creating
a community, and is the main reason that "ages" or "movements" or whatever
you want to call them occur within the arts in the first place. Which
is ironic, of course, in that one of the major shared themes among Accelerated
Age fiction is the idea of humans who are fairly disgusted with their
fellow humans, who have generally given up on the entire idea of the
human race ever being a decent, redeemable species, which is why they're
spending all their time instead trying to sear together silicon and
flesh to jump-start the next stage of evolution, the fabled "uber-person"
or "ur-person" or "homo-superior" or "accelerated person" or any of
another dozen terms these various writers have come up with for it in
their related projects*. And in this, then, you can see it not only
as this circle of SF-writing friends exploring such topics in the early
2000s, but also so-called "body horror" filmmakers like David Cronenberg,
revered indie-lit figures like Michel Houllebecq, and more.
And this finally gets us to Robson; because her Silver Screen is a complex
look at a near-future world that has seen the invention of legitimate
artificial intelligence (i.e. sentient machines), yet another touchstone
in the overall Accelerated-Age look at the coming merging of the mechanical
and biological. And it's not just computers aware of their own existence
that make up the artificially intelligent in Robson's world; there are
in fact a dozen different kinds of AIs seen in Silver Screen, from brilliant
rogue godlike spirits whose conscious "minds" reside in a trillion little
empty spaces on the internet, to semi-intelligent bee-like "smart armor"
drones that mesh with their surgically-altered human wearers to create
unstoppable hive-mind armies. And this was in 1999, mind you, right
at the beginning of this so-called Accelerated Age in SF, when such
a thing could have the most cultural impact; and it has indeed had a
lot of cultural impact, with there barely being anything about AI written
since that wasn't in one way or another covered by Robson already in
this original. (And don't even get me started on Steven Spielberg's
movie A.I. from those same years, which rips off so many of Silver Screen's
ideas that Robson should've sued his freaking ass.)
But instead of this being merely a dry hard-science look at all the
issues involved with artificial intelligence, Robson also concentrates
on something else that's become a hallmark of these early-2000s SF authors;
that is, of concentrating just as much on creating complex, ultra-realistic
characters, people we feel like actually exist but just happen to be
stuck in these fantastical situations. In fact, I've talked about this
many times at CCLaP before, of how since September 11th it seems like
the worlds of the mainstream arts and genre projects have been blurring
more and more among the absolute smartest artists out there; take for
a good example JJ Abrams' nearly perfect television show Lost, which
so convincingly concentrated on complex characterization during the
first half of its run that it actually has fans now complaining in its
second half about Abrams "turning a good show into science-fiction crap,"
not realizing that Lost actually was science-fiction crap from day one.-
And so it is with Robson as well, with Silver Screen being as addictive
as it is not just from all its far-out concepts, but also just from
wanting to understand more and more our bewitchingly flawed and complex
hero Anjuli, a half-British, half-Pakistani, freakishly smart, overeating
antisocial nerd; and not only does this particular story rely on such
mindbending concepts as self-sustaining space stations and microscopic
nanobots to propel its plot, but simply as well on the universal struggle
for women to maintain sincere friendships with other women, without
that weird subconscious competitive aspect of it all so common in that
situation, even if this does happen to be the 22nd century and we all
happen to be running around with the internet hardwired to our freaking
brains. (And I'm not exaggerating, by the way -- I mean, literally,
part of this story's plot hinges on Anjuli misreading the actions of
a person around her to her detriment, because of so badly wanting this
person to be a drama-free legitimate female platonic friend, because
of such a profound lack of such a thing in her nerdy antisocial life.)-
It's a remarkable combination of elements, the result of the first generation
of artists in history to not only accept that genre projects can be
capable of greatness, but to demand that genre projects be just as great
as anything else they devote their attention to; it's why you see things
these days like Lost become such a big giant hit with the general public,
why a Pulitzer winner like Michael Chabon can move so effortlessly between
mainstream and genre projects without anyone blinking an eye, why the
goofy pop-culture website that Doctorow and three of his SF-loving friends
started in those early-2000s years has grown to become literally the
most popular blog on the entire planet, with a readership now apparently
a third of the New York Times itself (or so I've heard). Now that a
decade has passed since its beginnings, I think there's no denying anymore
that all these things have combined to become a legitimate movement,
an unstoppable force in fact, that in a mere ten years has almost completely
replaced the snotty, irony-laced postmodernism that used to so dominate
the mainstream popular arts. (And in fact this is yet another belief
of mine that I've detailed at CCLaP before, that postmodernism officially
died on September 11th, and that for the last decade we've had a whole
generation of Web 2.0-embracing nerdy artists replacing it without anyone
barely even noticing, a cross-media movement I've been calling "The
New Sincerity" for lack of a better term, within which the so-called
Accelerated-Age writers in science-fiction definitely fit.) If you want
a tutorial on what this is all about, a "canon" if you will to the works
that have most shaped the collective fictional universe where most of
these books take place, Silver Screen should definitely be on this list
according to nearly any educated SF reader you'll meet. It's making
me really look forward now to her latest books, the much lighter and
sexier urban-fantasy romp known as the "Quantum Gravity" series (Keeping
It Real, Selling Out and Going Under), all three volumes of which were
also sent to me by the good folks at Pyr a few weeks ago, now just sitting
around my apartment waiting to be read. I can't wait.
*And speaking of this movement now being old enough to be able to deduce
some general conclusions about it, and especially while pondering the
idea that science-fiction has always slyly reflected the real-world
social issues of its current times in ingenious, subtle ways.... How
remarkable that the fictional subjects of these Accelerated Age novels
have turned out to be nearly identical to how we now picture the tech
world's actual reaction to the rise of the science-hating Bushist neocons
in the early 2000s; to essentially turn their backs on humanity and
mainstream society altogether, to completely ignore current politics
and the alarming rise of quasi-fascism in the US in the years following
September 11th, to fixate instead on their blogs and their startups
and their Twitters and all their other Web 2.0 "bright shiny future
of humanity" projects. And in fact this is best typified by the recently
released novel Anathem by Neal Stephenson, which I suppose you could
call "the Ulysses of the Accelerated Age" by the person many consider
"the James Joyce of the Accelerated Age" (i.e. the most brilliant, mindblowingl-
y complex author of them all) -- a story literally about intellectual
computer nerds who become honest-to-God isolationist monks, literally
walling themselves off from the outside world in these mountain fortresses,
as fascist neocons slowly take over all the world's national governments
and then quickly destroy most of the planet, the nerd monks riding out
this destruction and rebuilding in their abbots over the centuries by
literally worshipping comic books and "Long Now" style clockwork projects.
If that's not a perfect metaphor for how the tech world reacted to September
11th and the rise of Bushism, I don't know what is.
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