Communion Of Dreams

A good friend of mine, who is a big science fiction fan, read an early version of Communion of Dreams and loved it, providing me some valuable feedback and support.  And he was *really* excited when he heard that I was going to write more in the same ‘universe’ as the book, wanting to know what happens after the events portrayed in Communion.  When I told him that I would be working on a prequel to the book rather than a sequel, he was disappointed.  “But I wanted to know what happens after the Singularity!” he protested.

[Mild Spoiler Alert]

As you are probably aware, the notion of a technological Singularity occuring, when we create the first true artificial intelligence which is superior to human intelligence, has been a popular one in SF for some time, and actually took on the term Singularity following coinage (I think) by Vernor Vinge.  In many ways, Communion of Dreams is my take on that moment when humankind crosses this threshhold, embodied in the character of Seth, the expert system who makes this transition.

The folks over at the Singularity Institute are working towards this goal, and wanting to help us prepare for it.  Cory Doctorow has a brief blog entry up at BoingBoing this morning about his experience speaking at the Singularity Summit hosted by Ray Kurzweil at Stanford last year, along with links to some vids of that event now hosted at the Institute.  It is worth a look.

I am intrigued by the notion of a technological Singularity, but think that it is fundamentally impossible for us to know what happens after such an event has matured.   Oh, sure, there’s good reason to speculate, and it is rich and fertile ground for planting ideas as an author, but…

…but I think that in many ways, leaving Communion as the end-point perhaps makes the most sense.  It is analogous to ending a book with the death of the character from whom everything is presented as a first-person account.  Because just as we do not know what happens after death, we do not know what happens after an event such as a technological Singularity.  For, in some very real ways, the same kind of transcendence will take place.

Jim Downey