A Postscript to the Wave IX Review: Artifical Intelligence, Virtual Reality and Related Epistemological Considerations in the Invisible Tower Trilogy and Tally-Ho, Cornelius!

My review of Jean-Paul Garnier's Wave IX on the British Science Fiction Association webpage (HERE) has led me to the following considerations:

Moving beyond computer-generated literature to computer-generated reality and culture, my Invisible Tower trilogy engages a range of AI-related issues.  In Book I Echoes, computer-generated realities, computer-generated medicine (and ersatz medicine), as well as AI-assisted remote viewing are explored.  In Book II We Reign Secure, the character and nature of AI “consciousness” are represented, moreover with a sensitivity to the “unknown” properties of such phenomena, and sketched with an acute and detailed sensitivity as to how contacts among individuals, society and AI might produce startling (but also vague and obscure) effects upon psychology, media, and politics. Political consciousness, political movements, and political theory are sharply challenged by the new technology, and at an ever-accelerating rate.  Some of the revelations—if in fact things are revealed at all—are Miltonic.  In Book III The Sky-Shaped Sarcophagus, the eponymous artifact is a point of departure for exploring related mysteries, moreover holding those mysteries afar off, as is appropriate to the many philosophical entanglements and “unknowns” attending the subject.

 

 

A pastiche blending Michael Moorcock’s Second Ether trilogy and the Jerry Cornelius “brand”, my novel Tally-Ho, Cornelius! presents sharply-drawn contacts with virtual reality, nanobots, postmodern theology, post-artificial intelligence, synthetic beings, theoretical physics, political physics, authoritarianism, “experts”, and related phenomena of institutional corruption at a number of levels.

  

Click the respective cover images to view the Amazon descriptions and reviews.