“The Invisible Library is a collection of books that only appear in other books. Within the library’s catalog you will find imaginary books, pseudobiblia, artifictions, fabled tomes, libris phantastica, and all manner of books unwritten, unread, unpublished, and unfound.”
(Cited today in rec.arts.sf.written.)

There is no reason why he should not . . . take her waltzing in Strauss’ Vienna or to the theater in Shakespeare’s London – as well as exploring funny little bars in Tom Lehrer’s New York or playing tag in the sun and surf of Hawaii a thousand years before the canoe men arrived.

Brave to Be a King, a time-travel story by Poul Anderson. I wonder, would he have said “Tom Lehrer’s New York” in any year other than 1959?

Tolkien meets Vinge

This week I read Zelazny’s Lord of Light for about the fourth time; and got to thinking about faces.

The story is set in a world where it is routine to transfer one’s soul every forty or fifty years into a fresh body bought from the vats. Since the new body is not a clone of the old, faces become much less important than mannerisms in recognizing old friends. So what face do they put on your statue?

A talented immortal could be prominent in a variety of fields – and perhaps in conflicting causes. Some might prefer to drop an old face when they drop an old activity, just as some artists have a name for each genre in which they work. Anyway, life is change. “I remember being the man who did that and wore that face, but he’s not really me anymore.”

With Lord of Light technology, it might become customary to make the new body as a ‘child’ of the old body with a random (virtual) mate; that way you get gradual change with continuity. (I first thought the new body ought to be a full sibling to the old body’s natural children – but that would turn marriage into incest.)

“Jane Galt” (Megan McArdle) remarks in passing that “our bodies aren’t really up to the strain of physical labor for our new, improved lifespans.” Which reminds me of a puzzler: In all those stories where a drug/virus confers immortality, what about wear on teeth? Do Tolkien’s Elves grow a new set every century or so, or are their teeth simply made of stronger stuff?

Recent reading: Toast and other rusted futures, short stories by Charlie Stross, most of which can be described as humorous dys-extropian.

2006: This item formerly linked to Charlie’s story “Lobsters”, which is part of Accelerando.

The Lord of the Rings: The Novelization

My readers may not know that I occasionally visit bookstores. At one such establishment this week, I heard a customer say, “I’ll wait a year and a half to read LotR if I have to, because I’m not going to buy it with the movie cover!”

Later: more Novelization