Zendegi
Egan has been accused of being mainly an epic writer who under-develops his characters. It is not always so, for example Martin and Nasim are real persons, like many characters in other novels such as Teranesia, but Caplan is really a fake in black and white: I have met some monomaniac transhumanists with an inflated opinion of their intelligence and worth, but Caplan is far too extreme for a believable character. He wants to achieve personal transcendence through uploading, and sees their schemes as conflicting with his.
Martin does this only for his son, and he does not really believe that he may actually continue to live in Zendegi, or at least he never says so. Nasim and Martin do not see their sideloading project as a means to actually preserve Martin beyond physical death, and only want to build a credible emulation for Javeed.
But Caplan supports the project because he sees sideloading as a precursor of uploading and personal cybernetic immortality. I should not give spoilers here, but you have probably guessed that this story does not have a happy ending. The project has failed, and sideloading technology is not yet good enough to permit preserving people after death.
Even though the Benign Superintelligence Bootstrap Project has not produced any result, their premises in Houston have been bombed by terrorists. Perhaps because the publicity given to other sideloading projects at Zendegi more limited in scope but more successful has made people realize that these projects may actually produce results, and somebody perhaps Caplan himself has wanted to cripple them.
The tragic end is already expected by the reader and does not come as a surprise. Egan knows that the development of disruptive technologies is never easy, never linear, and always troubled. I think uploading technology will be developed eventually, perhaps in the second half of this century, but I am afraid Greg is right, and in the early development stages there will be unexpected problems and major setbacks, there will be unhappiness, and there will be tragedies. And, in fact, the novel ends with a positive thought: Whether or not that proved to be possible, it was a noble aspiration.
Extropia DaSilva February 5, , Anyway, about the uploading debate. I see two flawed assumptions exhibited by its skeptics. Imagine it was , a time when computers used vacuum tubes. I have no doubt that such a prediction would meet with criticisms, explaining how the physics of vacuum tubes renders this idea utterly impossible. But, introduce the new paradigm of computational systems based on integrated ciruits, and such laptops are perfectly feasible. But consider one of the hopes of Henry Markram: So what about downloading the mind to a neuromorphic device, a design based on a comprehensive understanding of cognitive functions?
And then you can imagine gradually replacing everything except the brain. Or consider phantom limb syndrome, in which an amputee feels the presence of a limb located in a particular position in space and, in some cases, can move their phantom limb , even though the limb does not exist. He makes friends along the way and eventually falls in love with a native woman. Fifteen years later, both are living in Iran and living completely different lives. Driven to desperation, Martin Seymour asks Nasim to create a partial mind emulation of him before it is too late.
Although it takes time to get going, I felt for the characters and related with them, the story is believable, and all the right questions are asked: How are we going there? Why are we going? Who are we going to meet along the way? This book had serious competition. I played through Mass Effect 3 while reading this and the controversial ending of the game had me emotionally ruined for about a week.
I think it may have set me up to be more sympathetic toward the ending of this book though. They feel real, and their motivations make sense.
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If I had a complaint, it would be that all of the main characters seem to share identical political, religious, and moral values. It is worth it by the end of the book, but sometimes I wondered if the writer was wasting my time. Fortunately things do move pretty quickly.
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I was also surprised that the story starts and stays clean for the first half or so, and then there is suddenly some profanity sprinkled into things. The writing is otherwise always clear and easy to understand. Nov 20, Alan rated it really liked it Recommends it for: Ian McDonald fans and cultural imperialists. Greg Egan 's foray into near-future science fiction feels like a departure of sorts; his gaze has been focused on much farther horizons of late. But I think this change of pace has turned out to be a really good thing; Zendegi is a taut, plausible future history which, even if it does turn out to be overtaken by events, still partakes of the best of hard sf—rigorous extrapolation from what is known into the dizzying ramifications of what-if.
Martin Seymour is a journalist who goes to Iran just bef Greg Egan 's foray into near-future science fiction feels like a departure of sorts; his gaze has been focused on much farther horizons of late. Martin Seymour is a journalist who goes to Iran just before a tipping point is reached When we meet him, Martin comes across as a fairly shallow character, obsessing over transferring his vinyl LP collection to electronic format it turns out that his musical taste is, well, let's just say that we'd have a lot of common areas to talk about, he and I.
But he, and Zendegi , get deeper. Martin ends up staying in Iran, at first involuntarily but then by choice. He marries Mahnoosh, runs a bookstore, and has a son named Javeed. Parallel to this runs the story of an expatriate Iranian named Nasim Golestani, whose pioneering work with non-destructively mapping minds leads to her involvement in Zendegi, a virtual reality company with a worldwide network of full-immersion arcades and a consuming need for more realistic non-player characters. She's able to build on her earlier work to create Proxies for Zendegi, snapshots of mental processes which aren't truly sentient but which do convincingly emulate sentience Nasim's success becomes even more significant when Martin finds out he's closer to dying than he ever thought he was.
Book Review – Zendegi, by Greg Egan
He wants Nasim to make a Proxy more advanced and complete than anything she's ever done This is an order of magnitude more complex than anything Nasim's done so far; and if she can do it at all, she's not sure she should. Egan's book is a sincere, humanistic tale with complex, believable characters, whose motivations are honest and valid even when they conflict.
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The science in the book is as rigorous as he could make it. The politics are plausible—even if events in Iran and elsewhere don't turn out anything like these, they could. And, Egan eventually gets into some deep waters philosophically, musing on the meaning of mind and considering the ethics of creating things like minds and then using them either for fun or profit—even if the things themselves don't seem to mind.
Just how human does something have to become before we begin treating it as something worthy of its own autonomy? Considering how often humans treat other humans as chattel, it's not at all surprising that misgivings about Proxies receive short shrift among the entities that stand to profit from their use. What is surprising, though, is where Egan's considerations take him; it's a much more nuanced position than I would've expected.
Zendegi is something of a return to form for Egan, or at least so it seems to me, a reminder of why I started reading his novels in the first place. In venturing back into the territory of a Bruce Sterling or Ian McDonald , Greg Egan has crafted a tale worth reading—on several levels. Nov 25, Tomislav rated it it was amazing Shelves: I have found much of his work to be more true to the concepts than to the characters, and of course that limits his appeal beyond a select subset of SF readers.
Sort of the best of both worlds. The setting is singular as well. The novel was written in , and set in its beginning in Iran during a slow-building uprising against the theocracy. Australian journalist Martin Seymour is covering events, and becomes involved with the events leading up to the change of government. There is a very realistic feel to these events as it is not some sort of fantasy conversion to western values, but more a tipping of which group is in charge. Egan himself traveled from Australia to Iran, at some personal risk, to research the culture and circumstances of contemporary Iran.
I understood HCP to be an attempt to build an exact model of a human brain at the level of individual neurons, somewhat akin to the Human Genome Project, but with a significantly larger dataset size. The second setting is 15 years later, in the future Iran that has resulted. Both Martin and Nasim now reside permanently in Iran, in somewhat changed circumstances.
It is enjoyable to discover through reading what has happenend in each of their lives during the intervening years, so I will not spoil it with plot synopsis. I was fascinated to read Egan making extensive use of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging fMRI for purposes of identifying brain activation maps of individuals in order to impress something of their personalities into the HCP data set, to create more realistic character proxies in the Zendegi virtual reality space.
He calls the process "side-loading".
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But as a biomedical engineer working in MRI, I did have an issue here. Egan shows that he does understand this, but the problem to me is a matter of scale. The resolution of MRI is on the order of millimeters, and one cubic millimeter contains billions of neurons. I just do not see how the detail necessary to impart specific soccer skills or specific parenting values could be captured. Increasing the power of the scanner by "an order of magnitude" would not really help either, as the blood oxygenation takes place all over an area up to 1 or 2 millimeters from the activation anyway.
Be that as it may, by that point, I was more interested in the fate of the characters and the nature of their experience. Just near the ending are some unexpected plot twists. Others may find them abrupt, but I think some of the reversals are worthy of consideration in the reader's time immediately after finishing. Realmente, espero otro tipo de historias por parte de Greg Egan. Apr 17, Froggy rated it really liked it Shelves: Greg Egan's books usually contain High science fiction, the sort of things that really makes the readers imagination sparkle with the wonder of the ideas they hold.
His inclusion of "Wang's carpets" in his book Diaspora, for instance showing how 2 dimensional patterns ever moving on a football field sized map could be extrapolated into complex 3 dimensional beings living in a quite separate reality to the one we observe. So upon starting to read Zenegi, I had high hopes about advanced intellige Greg Egan's books usually contain High science fiction, the sort of things that really makes the readers imagination sparkle with the wonder of the ideas they hold.
So upon starting to read Zenegi, I had high hopes about advanced intelligence being created, Ghosts in the machine, immortality though computer storage. What the story actually is about is the very start of all this and about mans humanity and morality. Set in the middle east, revolving around the life of a western journalist turned native and a westernized native returned home. The book talks about the rise of technology through game software, and how advanced brain scanning and mapping techniques could bring about the rise of artificial entities.
I remember the book ended rather abruptly and I was struck with a disappointing feeling of okay, where is the sc-fi, but then I reflected, this was sc-fi of a gentler, more thoughtful sort, less extreme, but containing ideas that could well lead to the miracles we envisage the future contains. Nov 04, Raja99 rated it it was amazing Shelves: Why I Read This Book: I'm a big fan of Greg Egan, and had been on my local library's waiting list for the hardcover for about a month before it arrived.
Then I saw that it'd been added to the Kindle store—and, more to my tastes, Baen's ebook store where it's cheaper, can be downloaded in several formats, and has no DRM. Egan's previous novel, Incandescence , is set in the far future and is somewhat inaccessible as a result.
Zendegi has two parts; the former is set in the very near future and is arguably the most accessible and one of the most readable things Egan has done. The second part is set a few decades later; it's slower-paced, but reaches a very satisfactory conclusion. Aug 20, Ben Payne rated it really liked it. This is a near-future SF novel, set in Iran, dealing with the potential precursors for intelligent AI.
It's possibly the most human book I've read of Egan', and certainly one of the most accessible. The science is definitely more background, here, compared to some of his far-future books, and the novel focuses more strongly on character. I've often thought criticism of Egan's characterisation was unfounded; to me he writes very believable, intelligent, three-dimensional characters, and that's ve This is a near-future SF novel, set in Iran, dealing with the potential precursors for intelligent AI.
Virtual Azimi enables football fans to play games with Azimi's proxy, and it is a huge success, boosting Zendegi's popularity. Javeed loves Zendegi and Martin often takes him to local gaming booths where together they participate in role-playing games. One day Mahnoosh is killed in a car accident, and Martin has to raise Javeed on his own. Then Martin discovers he has terminal cancer, and concerned that Javeed will grow up without a father, he contacts Nasim and asks her to create a Virtual Martin that Javeed can communicate with in Zendegi.
Nasim conducts MRI scans on Martin while prompting him with images and memories.
Zendegi is a science fiction novel by Australian author Greg Egan, first published in the United Kingdom by Gollancz in June It is set in Iran in the near. In the near future, journalist Martin Seymour travels to Iran to cover the parliamentary elections. Most would-be opposition candidates are disqualified and the.
But Zendegi comes under fire from religious fanatics. Iranian clerics denounce Virtual Azimi as "an afront to God and human dignity". Nasim continues developing Virtual Martin in secret. While she knows that Virtual Azimi has no consciousnesses, she is not sure what Martin's proxy is turning into. Meanwhile, Martin's health is deteriorating and she sets up a VR session for him to evaluate the current state of his proxy. Martin enters Zendegi using Javeed's avatar , making Virtual Martin think he is talking to his son, but the proxy overreacts to Javeed's Martin's behaviour and this upsets Martin.
After Martin dies, Nasim has second thoughts about what she is doing. The Virtual Martin she has created from fragments of Martin's brain is far from human. She realises that CHL are right: Egan began writing Zendegi in early Early drafts of the novel based the fictional unrest in Iran on actual reports of previous protests in the country.
To gather more information, Egan spent two weeks in Iran in October , his first trip outside of Australia. His interest in the country stemmed from contact he had had with Iranian refugees in Australia. Egan applied for his Iranian visa in June , and in August that year he learnt that a synopsis of the novel that he had sent to his publisher, which included mention of the overthrow of the Iranian regime, had been leaked.
Egan's concern was if Iran picked it up, they might deny him a visa, or worse, arrest him in Iran. Fortunately for Egan, only a few sites had published it, and his publisher was quick to put out an official, less revealing summary.