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Product Description
Damien Broderick has been a leading Australian SF writer since the ‘70s. His novel The Dreaming Dragons was listed in SF: the 100 best novels. His recent nonfiction book, The Spike, is a mind-stretching look at the wonders of the high-tech future. Now in Transcension he brings to life one of the futures he imagined in The Spike, a world pervaded by nanotechnology and governed by artificial intelligence. Transcension may be Broderick’s best book yet.
Amanda is a brilliant violinist, a mathematical genius, and a rebel. Impatient for the adult status her society only grants at age thirty, but determined to have a real adventure first, she has repeatedly gotten into trouble and found herself in the courtroom of Magistrate Mohammed Abdel-Malik, the sole resurrectee from among those who were frozen in the early twenty-first century, the man whose mind was the seed for Aleph, the AI that rules this utopia.
Mathewmark is a real adolescent, living in the last place where they still exist, the reservation known as the Valley of the God of One's Choice, where those who have chosen faith over technology are allowed to live out their simpler lives. When Amanda determines that access to the valley is the key to the daring stunt she plans, it is Mathewmark she will have to lead into temptation.
But just as Amanda, Mathewmark, and Abdel-Malik are struggling to find themselves and achieve their potentials, so is Aleph, and the AI's success will be a challenge to them and all of humanity.
Amazon.com Review
In Transcension, Damien Broderick extrapolates a powerful science fiction novel from aspects of his speculative-science nonfiction book, The Spike, and creates a fascinating world at the edge of profound transformation.
In the near future, the brilliant lawyer/cybernetician Mohammed Kasim Abdel-Malik is killed by street thugs, but his body is rushed into cryonic suspension. His mind becomes the source for the Aleph, an artificial intelligence that will rule the world. In the Aleph-ruled technotopia, Amanda Kolby-McAllister is a math and music genius who's almost 30, but she's trapped in adolescence by law and nanotech. Rebellious and bored, she attempts to catch an illegal and highly dangerous ride on the back of a subterranean Maglev freighter. Arrested, Amanda swears before the revived Abdel-Malik, now a Magistrate, that she will never again sneak into a Maglev hangar. But she conceives of another way to ride the supersonic train by entering the tunnel through a ventilation shaft in the Valley of the God of One's Choice--where outsiders are forbidden. Mathewmark, who is a genuine adolescent, lives in the Valley of the God of One's Choice. Devout Luddites, the Valley inhabitants are outraged because the Maglev has opened a blasphemous vent into their Valley, but Mathewmark is more intrigued than disturbed, and his curiosity opens a way for Amanda to lead him into temptation. He helps her enter the Valley and the vent, with consequences that will bring them together with Abdel-Malik and the Aleph, and may completely change existence on Earth. --Cynthia Ward
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