![]() ![]() We can hear some faint echoes of Childhood’s End by the time we get done with Echopraxia, but Watts couldn’t be less interested in magic and the supernatural, despite a novel packed with vampires, zombies, Heaven, and the quaintly transgressive conceit that religion might turn out to be as predictively valid as science. Clarke’s quip seemed to give hard SF license to go wonky whenever it felt like it, including Clarke’s own occasional fits of reluctant mysticism his more purely hard SF novels, like The Sands of Mars, didn’t give him that wiggle room, and they haven’t lasted as long as, say, Childhood’s End. Likely a coincidence, unless they talked on the phone before coming to school, but it’s an interesting shift. ![]() That comes from Peter Watts’s Echopraxia, where he attributes it to Stella Rossiter, but exactly the same thought appears in Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Causal Angel (‘‘sufficiently advanced technology should be indistinguishable from nature’’). Clarke’s famous and annoyingly overquoted dictum that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic has given way to ‘‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature’’ (italics mine). ![]() ![]() Maybe this represents some sort of watershed in the development of hard SF: Arthur C. ![]()
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