This image is the cover for the book Spike

Spike

The rate at which technology is changing our world--not just on a global level like space travel and instant worldwide communications but on the level of what we choose to wear, where we live, and what we eat--is staggeringly fast and getting faster all the time. The rate of change has become so fast that a concept that started off sounding like science fiction has become a widely expected outcome in the near future - a singularity referred to as The Spike.

At that point of singularity, the cumulative changes on all fronts will affect the existence of humanity as a species and cause a leap of evolution into a new state of being.

On the other side of that divide, intelligence will be freed from the constraints of the flesh; machines will achieve a level of intelligence in excess of our own and boundless in its ultimate potential; engineering will take place at the level of molecular reconstruction, which will allow everything from food to building materials to be assembled as needed from microscopic components rather than grown or manufactured; we'll all become effectively immortal by either digitizing and uploading our minds into organic machines or by transforming our bodies into illness-free, undecaying exemplars of permanent health and vitality.

The results of all these changes will be unimaginable social dislocation, a complete restructuring of human society and a great leap forward into a dazzlingly transcendent future that even SF writers have been too timid to imagine.



At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Damien Broderick

Damien Broderick is Australia’s dean of science fiction, with a body of extraordinary work reaching back to the early 1960s. The White Abacus won two Year’s Best awards. His stories and novels, like those of his younger peer Greg Egan, are drenched with bleeding-edge ideas. Distinctively, he blends ideas and poetry like nobody since Roger Zelazny, and a wild, silly humor is always ready to bubble out, as in the cosmic comedy Striped Holes. His award-winning novel The Dreaming Dragons is featured in David Pringle’s SF: The 100 Best Novels, and was chosen as year’s best by Kingsley Amis. It was revised and updated as The Dreaming. In 1982 Broderick’s early cyberpunk novel The Judas Mandala coined the term virtual reality. His recent novels include the diptych Godplayers and K-Machines, Post Mortal Syndrome (with his wife, Barbara Lamar), and several collaborations with Rory Barnes: I’m Dying Here, Human’s Burden, and The Valley of the God of Our Choice, Inc. Like one of his heroes, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Broderick is a master of writing about radical new technologies, and The Spike and The Last Mortal Generation have been Australian popular-science bestsellers. His long novella, “Quicken,” is the second half of the novel Beyond the Doors of Death, cowritten with Grand Master Robert Silverberg (an expansion of Silverberg’s “Born with the Dead”), and is the closing story in Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection. In 2005 Broderick received the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.

Tom Doherty Associates