J2D3

When We Discard Our Bodies

I just read the first chapter of Marshall Brain’s “The Day You Discard Your Body” Like Marshall, I’ve long been annoyed with sci-fi that doesn’t address the idea that we will soon be able to exist separately from our bodies and animate other bodies, both virtually and really. To me it seems an obvious and relatively near term reality based on our rapidly advancing comprehension of and ability to map and model the brain.

So what are the good sci-fi books that really handle the implications of nanotech, virtualization of our consciousness, and the fact that we will soon be able to live bodiless? I like to think Marx’s line from the Communist Manifesto, “All that is solid melts into air” was a truly prescient observation. He was way ahead of his time, pondering this coming future with its pervasive nanotech-based cloud computing and musing about how the man-machine interface will eventually evaporate leaving us in a kind of twilight zone virtureality. And seriously, how is a situation like that going to affect the economy? Is the virtureal future only for the wealthy and insane… or will it consume us all? I’ve ordered a copy of “Queen City Jazz,” but I wonder if a sub-genre of sci-fi should be established to indicate that a bodiless future is properly addressed within?