I’m reading Ken MacLeod’s Dark Light, the middle of a trilogy begun in Cosmonaut Keep and to conclude in Engine City. (I first re-read Keep; it was easier to follow the second time.) “Octopodia” as “the key insight,” how cheeky! But shouldn’t it be dekapodia?
Some quotable bits:
“All that twenty-first-century state-of-the-art information that got downloaded from the ship and printed off and shipped from Mingulay two hundred-odd years ago – it’s still being reprinted, in big leather-bound volumes. . . . The different encyclopedias have become the basis of fucking schools of thought. Grolierists and Britannicists at each other’s throats in the faculties, with a strong faction of Encartists among the students and junior staff.”
and
“Drawing lots is fair, even if it sometimes throws up a freak result. With elections you’re actually building the minority problem right in at every level, and lots more with it – parties, money, fame, graft, just for starters. What chance would that leave ordinary people, what chance would we have of being heard or of making a difference? Elections are completely undemocratic, they’re downright antidemocratic. Everybody knows that!”
Each of Ken’s previous books (The Star Fraction, The Stone Canal, The Cassini Division, The Sky Road) ends with a genocide of AIs by humans. In Dark Light a god is murdered (by other gods) two-thirds of the way along. But I haven’t given up hope that this (treating the trilogy as one) is the book in which humanity and the transcendent minds find a way to live in peace to their mutual benefit.