It’s the difference between Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Nirvana.)īut in any case, you will not be disappointed by Roberts’s kaleidoscopic, stimulating take on what happens when brain-to-brain implantable assistants go on the marketplace under the innocent guise of “hands-free Twitter.” As always, he refreshes all classic tropes that fall under his pen. Rucker, a Boomer, is still holding out for peace, love and understanding, while Roberts, Gen X, is more inclined to a post-Watergate, Jimmy-Carter-malaise take. (Parenthetically, I wonder if the nearly twenty-years difference in age between the two writers is a partial explanation for their varying approaches. SF is indeed truly an unbiased laboratory for trying out contradictory hypotheses. Yet when reading each excellent persuasive writer, you are convinced for the duration of their book that each man’s predictions are the only correct path. In Adam Roberts’s newest, the same kind of brain adjunct results in war and chaos and extermination-with a metaphysical sliver of bright side.

In several of Rudy Rucker’s recent books, neural prosthetics allow direct brain-to-brain communications, or telepathy, and the result is to boost humanity to a new era of understanding and grooviness-albeit not without some glitches along the way. One science fiction writer’s utopia is another science fiction writer’s dystopia.

The This by Adam Roberts