It I ever see a book in the shops with “Anne Laurie” as the author, I for one will be buying several copies.

But in modern first-world societies, there is no single accepted General Universal Theory of Everything. Even individuals born into the most isolated self-selected communities, like the Amish or the Upper West Side, are eventually exposed to an infinite smorgasbord of philosophical choices. Those of us born on the high-GUTE-seeking “devout” end of the Religious Inclination spectrum don’t have the relative ease of a society where, for instance, Isaac Newton’s extraordinary scientific accomplishments and his studies in esoteric Christian theology were considered equally valid habits of mind. The strain of choosing one self-sustaining GUTE among the many available leads to some very weird biographies – David Horowitz, for instance, pivoted from rigid Marxist to rigid Neoconservative with no sense of irony; he said that if he’d been born a century earlier he’d have been ‘the most committed Talmudist in the local temple’. And some people born to a “non-religious” background end up embracing the Singularity, or Calorie Restricted Immortality, or CSICOP, or Libertarianism, or Cheney’s personal supervision of the detonation of the World Trade Center, with a dedication worthy of Savonarola… or Torquemada.

Sidelight on C.M. Kornbluth: It’s not mentioned in Kornbluth’s Wikipedia biography, but I remember both Frederick Pohl and Damon Knight saying one of the great tragedies of Kornbluth’s life was the fact that his two children were born “mentally defective” or “damaged”. I don’t know if any more specific information has been made public, but given both Futurians’ stress on Kornbluth’s brilliance and his “eccentricity”, I’ve wondered if the kids might have been autistic. Ironic if the man responsible for “The Marching Morons” turned out to be another victim of the syndrome Hunter S. Thompson used in a metaphor about the Kentucky Derby and his own family tree: “You breed fast & a little crazy to fast & a little crazy for a few generations, you end up with very fast and very crazy…

As a deranged, amoral scientist, I immediately think in terms of trading poor people to the Grays in exchange for their advanced technology. The Grays get slave labour for their desert planet… we get quantum computers that can run 5 games of Minesweeper at the same time. Seems a fair swap to me. This is no time for scruples. Or qualms.

Is that you, Grandma?

Sadly, no. Real scientists ( and Sciffy dorks) have been talking about this for decades.

Political fanatics tend to be megalomaniacs — imposing their vision on a poor, imperfect world. It’s their way of achieving immortality.

The “Singularity” types just embody this (so to speak) on a pure level, wanting to enjoy their strange, inhuman anarcho-libertarian world for all time, treating the rest of humanity as an appendage at best.

It would be frightening if their sci-fi visions had any basis in real science. Today its just dorks wanking over SF novels and message boards.

DU

Forget flight; we’d still be arguing about whether crop failure – and this is assuming we’d have progressed to agriculture yet – was due to sorcery or to an angry fertility god.

It’s only when old things die – trees in forest fires, for example – that new things can grow unimpeded. Without death, there would be no physical evolution and nor would there be much social change.

This idiot speaks of weighing evils – harm now through unethical experimentation on other people or harm later through his having to die (OMG Nos!1!) – and yet he thinks nothing of creating a new stress on finite resources without first solving the existing distribution and replenishment problems.

Forget living forever; lots of kids around the world are simply concerned with surviving to the age of majority. Why doesn’t he apply his, um, intellect to addressing that problem?

Yeah, but mikey’s pot pie really sits around the house. No, wait… that’s not… mmmmm, pie!

That’s a character from Dr. Who, but I don’t know uh whom.

I made that joke two centuries ago.

In the past only the gods could fly. And the birds. OK, in the past only the gods and the birds could fly. And the insects. I’ll start again. In the past only the gods, the birds and the insects could fly. Maybe bats too. Damn. In the past only the gods, the birds, the insects and the bats could fly. *What about those baby spiders?* Alright. In the past only the gods, the birds, the insects, the bats and some kinds of infant arachnids could fly. And that is why immortality is inevitable!

Cool! I could tell you about my new pot pie recipe!

mikey

What greater shock could befall a down-to-earth Yorkshire*** couple than to find their son suddenly speaking with a grand RP accent? This is what has happened to Mr and Mrs McCartney-Moore from York, whose 10-year-old son, William, speech-impaired after brain surgery, eventually spoke again, but with a voice like Brian Sewell’s.

*** – first thirty seconds is of Geoffrey Boycott, well-known cricketeer, Yorkshireman and wife-beater.

Does this mean that all English people naturally speak RP underneath but have added a regional accent filter!