2094
In 2094 ...
citizens of Illumined Cities enjoy cerebral microchips and SexBot service ...
Badlands desperadoes sabotage nuclear waste storages sites in Mexico ...
detainees of Gulag Cuba wage jihad against Discipline & Punish ...
Initiates and Adepts on Mars seek the Philosopher's Stone.
J Melmoth and wife Raquel are leisured, privileged, self-indulgent, and at peace with the world that is. SmartBots do all the work, CellRenew keeps them young, organ cloning keeps them healthy, and microchips integrated with their prefrontal cortexes keep them connected. Newsstories manifesting on their windowall nag at their attention: Gulag Cuba remains full of detainees, New Age alchemists on Mars still cannot establish a viable atmosphere for the Red Planet, and EcoTerrorism is rampant across the Badlands of Mexico. Puzzling, that Gulag prisoners refuse microchip implantation despite rewards on offer. Inside Mars Colony's geodesic domes, Initiates and Adepts control the dispensation on Earth while Mexican guerrillas elude ambush and cheat death. Against long odds, they cross the Badlands and Sierra Madre in search of stolen families and an ancient treasure that may ransom them. Initiates know the secret to immortality lies in gold. It is a question of creating enough or of finding it. The paradise promised by a century of high technology and ancient knowledge seems at hand.
Or is it? Why does Melmoth's SmartBot malfunction, and Raquel's follow suit? Why has the historical record been changed and the text of a famous novel tinkered with? Gulag detainees court death by resisting microchip enhancement. The Mexican's quest brings them to the ancient city of Teotihuacan — conveniently for the eggheads on Mars, who fail repeatedly to transform base metals into gold.
And Melmoth? His head hurts. That microchip must be on the fritz. Can he remediate?
In the world that is, it is late in day. For Melmoth. For everyone ...
Tragic and comic, realistic and fantastic, 2094 is a narrative mosaic, a speculative dystopia jazzed with science-fiction and fretted with gold. It is a story of quest and protest, esoteric theology, Meso-American legend, and synthetic technologies. Visionary, sardonic, and fiercely honest, it imagines a future being born today.
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"When I began writing 2094 in 2010, AI was very much talked about. It seemed that so-called "machine learning" was developing rapidly but apart from comupter scientists, few if any of us understood how artificial intelligence could be beneficial to people or what kind and magnitude of perils it might pose. Having no specialist's knowledge, I drew on my inherent distrust of digitial technologies, or rather, of the human beings who design and use them and oblige all of us to use them, to construct the elaborate dystopia that became this novel.
"If cyber networks could accurately interpret data in their respective relevant contexts, in real time, i.e., if computers could think, then everything seemed possible; and so, cerebral microchips became standard enhancements for rich-worlders, who could also reverse-age to the age they desired, never grow older, and never die; permanent EarthStations on the Martian surface became not just habitable and self-sustaining but also customizable; Personal Android Companions, a.k.a. SexBots, became also survelliance droids, as well as physically transformable; interplanetary travel and communications became routine; airpods made cars archaic; and so forth. All of that fictional infrastructure -- what sci-fi and fantasy aficionados usually call "world-building" -- was easy.
"The novel's interest is in the misuse and abuse of advanced technologies by those who control them, and the depredations those technologies wreak on human autonomy and dignity. Resisters -- inmates on Gulag Cuba, freedom fighters in Mexico -- are the novel's heroes. Like Hemingway's heroes, they are defeated in every practical sense, for they are extravagantly overmatched. Their victories are moral ones in an amoral world."
-- John Lauricella