{"id":14,"date":"2007-05-08T09:14:00","date_gmt":"2007-05-08T17:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=14"},"modified":"2007-05-08T09:14:00","modified_gmt":"2007-05-08T17:14:00","slug":"neuropath","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=14","title":{"rendered":"Neuropath"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve just finished reading a draft of R. Scott Bakker’s soon-to-be-released Neuropath<\/span>. Holy shit.<\/p>\n

The neurology of consciousness. The advantages of nonsentience. People neurologically stripped of their behavioral constraints so that they can make the necessary Big Decisions of life and death without getting caught up in touchy-feeling shackles like conscience and morality. All the major themes of Blindsight<\/span> and a bunch of those from the rifters trilogy thrown in for good measure…<\/p>\n

And does he stick them in a hard-sf spaceships-and-aliens chassis that only hardcore skiffy geeks will read? Does he locate his story in a future so close to the Singularity’s event horizon that society itself has grown strange and forbidding to the average reader? Does he present his arguments through characters so twisted and specialised that most readers have no choice but to regard them as more alien than the aliens they encounter?<\/p>\n

No. He sets it a mere decade into the future, in the context of a serial killer police procedural<\/span>. Instead of aliens and freaks he uses sexy FBI agents and divorced psychologists. This guy is basically writing about Blindsight<\/span>-type issues, but is aiming them squarely at a da Vinci Code<\/span> audience. He is dealing with the same existential questions, but has rendered them accessible for beach readers. He has done exactly what I would have done, if only I’d been smart enough.<\/p>\n

At least Blindsight<\/span> came out first. I can cling to that. Because trust me: when Neuropath<\/span> hits the shelves, it’s gonna be “Peter who?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve just finished reading a draft of R. Scott Bakker’s soon-to-be-released Neuropath. Holy shit. The neurology of consciousness. The advantages of nonsentience. People neurologically stripped of their behavioral constraints so that they can make the necessary Big Decisions of life and death without getting caught up in touchy-feeling shackles like conscience and morality. All the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fellow-liars","category-ink-on-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}