I just finished reading Bernard
Wolfe’s science fiction
novel, Limbo,
which, as the review I linked to says, is “one of those novels that
only five people or so read a year but all five of them declare it
brilliant.” I wonder who the other four are? Seriously, though, the
fact that this book is way out of print is criminal (also, as the copy
I read was a moldy first edition from Rutgers, I now have to clean up
the pieces of the book’s binding that have been deposited all over my
house). It has to rank as one of the strangest novels I’ve ever read.
Large chunks of the book are rants about
Freud or
Weiner or
Korzybski. It has some truly
strange sex scenes and some rather embarrassing misogyny. The book is
largely a consideration of cybernetics and their implications for
re-making man. N. Katherine Hayles has a pretty good essay, from How
We Become Posthuman
on Limbo. There are a lot of things that I could say about this
book (and will, I’m sure), especially in light of the fact that Wolfe
considers the possibility of physically remaking the human to be a
losing proposition and that true transcendence can only result from a
wetware upgrade.
As I was reading Wolfe’s novel, I saw some stuff on some blogs that
relates: in this post on Digital
Inspiration,
there’s a discussion of whether or not the failure of
Spresent and
Slideaware represents the beginning of the
end of Web2.0. I don’t think we can make that claim so quickly, and,
probably, such claims are a result of the cave-in that resulted in the
end of Web1.0 (why does no one ever talk about that?). What
interested me about this post is the question of what would actually
constitute the end of Web2.0.
