Postsingular is a 2007 science-fiction novel written by the American writer Rudy Rucker. It focuses upon a cast of San Franciscans and their relationship with emerging uses of nanotechnology. It was the first of his works to be licensed under a Creative Commons license and released to the public on the Internet.
The novel is divided into four parts. Most of the events in the story take place in a future version of San Francisco.
Part 1
The first part begins on a New Year's Day, in which a young, 17-year-old Jeff Luty and his friend Carlos Tucay are about to light bottle rockets on Stinson Beach. The two boys, who are interested in the young but growing nanotechnology industry, dream about establishing Lu-Tuc Space Tech, and have inserted nanorobots into the rockets. After a passing dog had urinated on the rocket, the rockets are lit again. However, the rocket eventually misfires, and a launch lug is sent flying into Carlos' right eye, killing him.
The first part fast forwards several years later, in which Jeff is the CEO of Nantel, the leading nanotechnology company in the world. One of the leading employees of the company is engineer Ond Lutter, who works on a project to create "nants". However, when Jeff, who is still distraught over Carlos' death, comes to blows with Ond over the creation of a virtual earth with the nants. The US government buys the nants, and the president, Dick Dibbs, announces that the Earth will be eaten by the nants and converted into a virtual version of the Earth, or "vEarth". Ond and his family, however, do not agree. Ond, who is fired after arguing with Luty and defying him, sets about to write code on paper by hand which should disable the nants and builds an antenna to resist the advance of the nants until the house is the last of the holdouts to persist on physical Earth. Ond's 9-year-old son Chu, however, is an autistic savant and is able to retain Ond's written code to memory and jumps into the wall of nants that has grown in the Lutter house. Chu subsequently jumps back out of the nant wall and the nants begin to retreat. By the next day, the nants have mostly reversed all their advances across Earth and restores it in its entirety until they return to the Moon and are seemingly shot out of existence by a Chinese satellite.
After the reversal and destruction of the nants, Dibbs is arrested by the government and executed for his role in the "vEarth" conspiracy (classified as "treason"). Luty is now a wanted fugitive and goes into hiding; Ond, who is rehired by Nantel, now renamed as ExaExa Labs, however, is inspired by nanorobotics to create a new type of nanorobot, which becomes known as the "orphids". When he tells a gathering of his and fellow co-worker Craigor Lundquist's families in San Francisco Bay, however, Nektar becomes angry against Ond and argues against Ond over the nants, for fear of a repeat of the events. Chu, irritated by the shouting, seizes the jar and smashes the glass open, releasing the orphids to rapidly self-replicate. Within hours, the orphids, which are heavily connected to the Internet, spread to most of the West Coast, and Ond is wanted by the San Francisco Police Department. The orphids also provide displays for augmented reality, ridding society of the need for AR contact lenses (or "webeyes"), throat microphones and other AR utilities.
The city has a hard time adapting to the orphids and the sensorally[check spelling] immersive version of the Internet, or "orphidnet", presented by the orphids. The advanced properties of the orphidnet allow for opportunities not possible with prior computing technologies, such as advanced teleconferencing, telepathy and even remote sex between physically separated partners. However, this leaves little room for privacy, as the orphids barely allow for any living thing to be non-connected to the orphidnet, meaning that Ond is the subject of a mob which seeks to lynch him for "Orphid Night".
Nektar, irritated by Ond's release of the nants, separates from Ond and becomes intimate with a cook at a nearby restaurant who she met through the orphidnet, leaving Ond to take care of Chu; furthermore, Ond and Chu discover the existence of a higher-intelligence dimension which somewhat mirrors earth. One of the rulers of the so-called "Hibrane" version of San Francisco, Gladax, tries to remove the means of "Lobrane" access to the Hibrane in order to keep Lobraners out, going so far as to penetrate Chu's mind. The pursuit of Ond and Chu by both Gladax and the anti-nant/orphid mob ultimately send the two teleporting from the Merz Boat to the Hibrane version of San Francisco, where everything is slower and larger.
Part 2
Years later, San Francisco has become reliant upon the orphidnet, and the story focuses upon a group of teenage residents, known as "kiqqies", who are homeless but depend upon dumpster-diving and a particular portion of the orphidnet known as "the Big Pig". The Pig is seen as an addiction to those whose minds are clear, as it allows for its partakers to rapidly glean information for so long as one is accessing it.
Jayjay, Thuy, Sonic and Kitty eventually meet Nektar, who has become head chef at a popular restaurant and the lead personality of a reality series, Founders, which is broadcast to viewers over the orphidnet. Nektar was being psychologically tortured and blackmailed by orphidnet "beetles" for criticizing presidential candidate Dick Too Dibbs (and refusing to run Dibbs' ads), the cousin of the disgraced former president, and the four visit her home to clear the beetles. After eating with the other cast members - Craigor and Jil - and leaving Nektar's home, the kiqqies happen upon the body of a former high-scoring quantum gamer who became addicted to the Big Pig and starved to death, motivating the kiqqies to visit the Natural Mind center to calm their minds away from the Big Pig.
The four visit the Natural Mind offices in the San Francisco Armory and are invited to visit the office of the center's director, Andrew Topping, who offers to hire Sonic and Thuy for their skills (Sonic is a quantum gamer, and Thuy writes "metanovels"). When the four suspect Topping's relationship with Jeff Luty and reject the offer, Topping seizes Thuy and attempts to throw her into the grating. The four fight Topping, and when Sonic wrestles Topping for Topping's gun, JayJay rushes Topping, pushing Topping and (accidentally) Sonic bloodlessly through the grating. The remaining three - Thuy, JayJay and Kittie, run from the Natural Mind building.
Part 3
Two months after the Natural Mind incident, Thuy is recovering from her addiction to the Big Pig and focuses more on developing her semi-autobiographical metanovel, Wheenk. When she begins to present a portion of her metanovel for a small audience, the event is disrupted by an attack shoon. Thuy runs out across the street and is rescued by JayJay, who demonstrates his recent mastering of teleportation through the orphidnet to bring them to the Merz Boat of Jil and Craigor. Due to Craigor's chronic infidelity, Jil has become addicted to sudocoke and has an erratic behavior. When the boat is attacked by attack shoons which are suspected of originating from Jeff Luty, the four defend the boat, only to find out from one of the shoons how Sonic had been blackmailed by Luty to create attack shoons for Luty's use against his enemies, including Thuy. Teleporting from the boat, JayJay and Thuy stop at Nektar's house before being chased by another attack shoon.
The two teleport to Easter Island, where they rest, gather weapons and gain information from Azaroth and other Hibraners. The two also find out about a massacre organized by Luty at his ExaExa compound to stall law enforcement, his plan to re-release the nants into the world for a Vearth 2.0, and the Big Pig's intentions toward the nants. The two teleport back to the Merz Boat to pick up Craigor and Jil, but not before curing Jil of nanomachines which were laced inside the sudocoke that she snorted up. The four teleport to the ExaExa compound in the middle of a gunfight, fighting armed guards and rescuing Sonic before Sonic, Thuy and Jil are captured by Luty's agents, including Topping. Luty asserts his plans to release the nants from his "ark" but unsuccessfully demands that Thuy contact Ond, who is still in the Hibrane. Before Topping makes good on Luty's threat to kill Sonic before her eyes, Gladax appears and kills the agents. Sonic runs through the nearby grating and blows up much of the machinery with a grenade, presumptively killing himself in the process. Luty escapes through what is left of the grating. Before they teleport from the compound, Jil breaks up with Craigor and ends their marriage.
Now with the ark in tow, Thuy and JayJay return to Easter Island to think of a way to destroy the nants. However, the Big Pig returns demanding that the ark be opened. After torture, JayJay agrees to open the box, only to find it booby-trapped with nant goo which consumes much of his body before Thuy's eyes. The pain of seeing the incident results in Thuy finishing her metanovel and finding the means to teleport on her own to the Hibrane. However, the Big Pig assures Thuy that not only is her boyfriend not dead, but that Thuy could save him and potentially stop the destruction of Earth by the nants if she returns to the Lobrane with Ond and Chu by midnight. Desperate, Thuy teleports to the Hibrane.
Part 4
Thuy teleports, through a zone which has monsters known as "subbies", to the Hibrane's version of Easter Island. This dimension's world and its inhabitants, like Gladax and Azaroth, are gigantic and slow in movement compared to Lobrane inhabitants like Thuy. Gladax returns and tries to capture Thuy, but she escapes and, with Azaroth's remote help, teleports to Hibrane San Francisco. The two then run in disguise to Gladax's home, where Ond and Chu are imprisoned by Gladax in order to avert the potential nant invasion from the Lobrane to the Hibrane. Ond tells Thuy that if he can bring back to the Lobrane the ability of tagging infinite, semantic memory and telepathy to every object by unrolling the eighth dimension (embedded in a harp owned by Gladax), it would negate the need for nants to reconvert the Lobrane Earth to vEarth. The group set up a plan and proceed to action, in which Ond gives up Thuy to Gladax and the group teleports to Gladax's room where the harp is located. When Gladax leaves her in a net while stepping outside to berate her gardeners (with Azaroth distracting her), Thuy breaks free of the net, takes the harp and teleports with Ond and Chu. However, the group drops the harp in the waters of the Planck frontier (or "Subdee" in Hibraner lingo), and Thuy leaves the group to return to the Lobrane while she seeks to rescue the harp, only to end up captured by subbies.
Meanwhile, Jayjay remains on Earth in a coma, being used by the Big Pig to run an entire simulated lifetime of 60 years in his head in six hours. In the simulated reality, Jayjay waits for Thuy to return, but the nants are released by the Big Pig and convert the Earth into vEarth, in which Jayjay becomes a physicist and learns many of the same concepts which have been learned in real life by Ond and Chu. Going through two marriages, Jayjay experiences the pressures of life in Vearth and the limitations of dependence upon computational resources. Jayjay experiences his death at the simulated age of eighty-six, waiting for Thuy. Meanwhile, Thuy fights her way out of the grasp of subbies who plan to eat her, and their leader is a beetle-like subbie possessing the skin of Luty, who was eaten by the subbies when he fell into the Subdee. She escapes with the harp, and returns to Jayjay on Lobrane Easter Island, only for the Big Pig to open the ark of the nants. The two teleport to Nektar's house in San Francisco, where Jayjay tries to play the "Lost Chord" which will unroll the eighth dimension while the nants amass and threaten to eat the world again. Thuy and Jayjay go into a room to have sex, and Jayjay rediscovers the Lost Chord from his experience in the simulation, and he plays it, unrolling the eighth dimension and ending the nant invasion. The unrolling results in the creation of new beings called "silps" which copy the data and knowledge from both nants and orphids and then destroying both. The silps constitute themselves as a planetary oversoul known as Gaia, and the Big Pig redesigns herself as an interface for Gaia.
The main characters' lives change after the unrolling: Jil divorces Craigor and marries Ond, Nektar becomes romantically linked to Kittie, Chu manages to heal his autism, and Jayjay and Thuy become engaged.
Characters
Jeff Luty - the founder and CEO, an antagonist of the novel
Ond Lutter - engineer at ExaExa Labs (formerly Nantel) who invents the nants and later the orphids
Nektar Lundquist - wife of Ond and mother of Chu, leaves Ond due to disagreements over nants
Jil Zonder - wife of Craigor and mother of Momotaro and Bixie, has an addiction to a synthetic version of cocaine known as sudocoke.
Craigor Connor - a fisherman of cuttlefish who lives with his family on the Merz Boat
Chu Lutter - son of Ond and Nektar, autistic and highly intelligent, is capable of decoding the mathematical formula for teleportation.
Thuy Nguyen - young Vietnamese-American woman and girlfriend of JayJay who uses the orphids to help her write a "metanovel"
Jorge "JayJay" Jimenez - boyfriend of Thuy
Sonic Sanchez - friend of JayJay
Kittie Calhoun - friend of JayJay
Bixie Zonder - daughter of Jil and Craigor
Momotaro Zonder - son of Jil and Craigor
Dick Dibbs - president of the United States, is executed after having plotted the unsuccessful assimilation of Earth into vEarth by the nants
Dick Too Dibbs - second cousin of Dick Dibbs, resident of Owensboro, Kentucky, member of the Homesteady Party
Bernardo Lampton - president running for re-election against Dick Too Dibbs
Azaroth - resident from the "Hibrane" version of San Francisco who visits the Lobrane version to take cuttlefish
Gladax - resident from the "Hibrane" version of San Francisco who is the mother of Azaroth
History
Portions of the book were previously published in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine and Year's Best SF 12 in 2006.
Reception
The science fiction author and activist Cory Doctorow reviewed the book for Boing Boing, summarizing it as "pure Rucker: a dope-addled exploration of the way-out fringes of string theory and the quantum universe that distorts the possible into the most improbable contortions,"[1] and rated it as "one of the most fun, strangest, most thought-provoking sf novels I've read, and it's fantastic to have it show up on the net, ready to be copied and shared." He praised the decision to release the material under a Creative Commons license.[2]
Booklist stated that "While Rucker’s improbable scenarios sometimes cross the line into pure silliness, his devoted fans and dazzled newcomers to him will revel in his willingness to push technological extrapolation to its soaring limits.[3]". io9's Charlie Jane Anders stated that it "actually pulls off the ambitious multilayered story it sets out to tell," but described the novel as being full of "bizarre idea-spikes" such as the hibrane.[4]
The Residents are an American art collective and art rock band best known for their avant-garde music and multimedia works. Since their first official release, Meet the Residents (1974), they have released over 60 albums, numerous music videos and short films, three CD-ROM projects, and ten DVDs. They have undertaken seven major world tours and scored multiple films. Pioneers in exploring the potential of CD-ROM and similar technologies, the Residents have won several awards for their multimedia projects. They founded Ralph Records, a record label focusing on avant-garde music, in 1972.
A hippie, also spelled hippy, especially in British English, is someone associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, originally a youth movement that began in the United States during or around 1964 and spread to different countries around the world. The word hippie came from hipster and was used to describe beatniks who moved into New York City's Greenwich Village, in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, and Chicago's Old Town community. The term hippie was used in print by San Francisco writer Michael Fallon, helping popularize use of the term in the media, although the tag was seen elsewhere earlier.
Dazzler is a superheroine appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics, often in association with the X-Men. She first appeared in Uncanny X-Men #130.
This article is an overview of the major events and trends in popular music in the 2000s.
Cannonball is a superhero appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics, commonly in association with the X-Men. Created by writer Chris Claremont and artist Bob McLeod, Cannonball first appeared in The New Mutants.
The Doctor is the main character of the long-running BBC science fiction television series Doctor Who. Since the show's inception in 1963, the character has been portrayed by fourteen lead actors. In the programme, "the Doctor" is the alias assumed by a humanoid alien, a Time Lord who travels through space and time in their ship, the TARDIS, often with companions. The transition to each succeeding actor is explained within the show's narrative through the plot device of "regeneration", a biological function of Time Lords that allows a change of cellular structure and appearance with recovery following a fatal injury.
Since the advent of the cyberpunk genre, a number of cyberpunk derivatives have become recognized in their own right as distinct subgenres in speculative fiction, especially in science fiction. Rather than necessarily sharing the digitally and mechanically focused setting of cyberpunk, these derivatives can display other futuristic, or even retrofuturistic, qualities that are drawn from or analogous to cyberpunk: a world built on one particular technology that is extrapolated to a highly sophisticated level, a gritty transreal urban style, or a particular approach to social themes.
Sonic the Hedgehog is a video game series and media franchise created by the Japanese developers Yuji Naka, Naoto Ohshima, and Hirokazu Yasuhara for Sega. The franchise follows Sonic, an anthropomorphic blue hedgehog who battles the evil Doctor Eggman, a mad scientist. The main Sonic the Hedgehog games are platformers mostly developed by Sonic Team; other games, developed by various studios, include spin-offs in the racing, fighting, party and sports genres. The franchise also incorporates printed media, animations, feature films, and merchandise.
Pixie is a superheroine appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Pixie belongs to the subspecies of humans called mutants, who are born with superhuman abilities, and to the species of humanoid magical beings named fairies, who are born with supernatural powers. Her hybrid mutation grants her pixie-like eyes, colorful wings that allow her to fly, and "pixie dust" that causes hallucinations.
Depictions of San Francisco in popular culture can be found in many different media. San Francisco is frequently used with its iconic landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz and cable cars; social change of the Asian immigration, Summer of Love and LGBT culture; and the economic California Dream of the Gold Rush and Silicon Valley.
In Taoism, the concept of xian is ascribed to a person or entity having a long life, or is understood to be immortal in some sense. The concept of xian has different implications dependent upon the specific context: philosophical, religious, mythological, or other symbolic or cultural occurrence.
Amadeus Cho, also known as Brawn, is a superhero appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Created by American writer Greg Pak and Canadian artist Takeshi Miyazawa, the character first appeared in Amazing Fantasy vol. 2 #15. Cho usually appears in books featuring the Avengers or individual members of that group, such as the Hulk or Hercules.
The Overwatch franchise, a series of first-person shooter games developed by Blizzard Entertainment consists of 39 playable characters across both games. The original 2016 game, Overwatch, featured 32 playable characters known as heroes and a number of supporting characters as part of the game's narrative, which is told through animated media and digital comics outside of the game. Its sequel, Overwatch 2, was released in October 2022 and replaced Overwatch. The sequel builds upon the same hero roster and added more characters, currently consisting of 39 heroes. However, as Overwatch 2 had been developed to be a faster game with five-versus-five teams rather than six-versus-six, several of the characters had tweaks or major rebuilds within Overwatch 2, as well as different character designs.
The following events occurred in August 1969:
The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) media franchise features many fictional elements including locations, weapons, and artifacts. While many of these features are based on elements that originally appeared in the American comic books published by Marvel Comics, some features were created specifically for the MCU.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
