After reading (most of) this week stories, I'm really impressed, especially with "Elegy for a Young Elk" and "Under the Moons of Venus". I've always found the whole singularity idea interesting, and while it was just one (incorrect) theory about what had happened in "Under the Moons of Venus", there were hints of it nonetheless, especially in the fact that animals made sentient through AI were apparently a somewhat normal occurrence by that point in time. That, and the way "Elegy for a Young Elk" handled the whole premise reminded me a lot of a Cory Doctorow story I read a while ago called "I, Rowboat", in which humanity had long since left earth, uploaded to computer arrays in orbit, leaving behind the animals and random objects that people had begun to "uplift" (make sentient by adding AI) for utility or as a hobby, among them a coral reef and the rowboat who is the protagonist of the story. I also really liked the way "Elegy for a Young Elk" handled the transition from normal humans to computers and AIs, with the progression from what seemed a lot like the 3D printers that have been made recently to nanobots to the "gods" that basically made the whole world their computer through those nanobots. It was also refreshing that they both managed to avoid the "science and technology are scary and bad" angle even when describing cataclysmic events.
On a less rambling, more discussable note, what does everyone think really happened in "Under the Moons of Venus"? Was it some force protecting life on earth by moving species to Venus just before catastrophic extinction events occurred? Was Blackett right in guessing that it might all be one big calculation in a physics simulation? Was this all planned by the trilobites or something?
I'm not completely convinced that what Blackett believes to have happened really happened. I don't completely trust his POV so I wonder if he really was crazy. To explain his frienship with the Egyptian bibliophile, I would argue that he might be crazy as well. They were both visited by the same psychologist so maybe two crazies just found one another (you know how they say two _insert adjective like stupid, funny,lonely, here_ people will find each other in a crowd). My explanation for the end then becomes that he hallucinated and drug himself and his doctor into the water and drowned. But this would still be a happy ending because he believed he was on Venus. I just don't know how credible Blackett is so I'm not 100 % on board with him ending up on Venus. I'm more 70/30 that he's really there.
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