• fox [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    It’s extremely lib YA sci-fi that uses Bicameral Mind as a kind of focal piece of understanding how consciousness arises. A latent consciousness formed from emergent properties of the internet starts waking up and gets cut in half by the Great Firewall, then reunifies itself and becomes conscious. Also there’s a blind girl protagonist that teaches it to process existence outside the internet by accident while acclimating to a brain implant that returns vision.

    The climax of the trilogy is the Internet brain decisively taking ownership of the government of China’s entire digital infrastructure and demanding that Xi Jingping institutes a liberal democracy.

    Author’s a lib, but has much less libby books. Far-Seer is about the Galileo equivalent of a race of sapient dinosaurs discovering they live on a tidally unstable moon and fighting their theocratic society to prove it. Calculating God is about an archaeologist participating in a first contact event with aliens that are looking for God, while he simultaneously comes to terms with his terminal cancer. The Neanderthal Parallax trilogy is about an accidental portal opening to a parallel earth where neanderthals won and homo sapiens went extinct. This one is really good and paints the world capitalism created as evil, though it doesn’t go so far as to name capitalism as the problem explicitly. Also, every Neanderthal is bi and poly.