Well, yeah, I was happy to pick up Spook since the previous Stiff was so great but couldn't have been more disappointed. Spook is unquestioningly the too quickly researched and written book with the offensive and misrepresentative title. Ms.Roach is neither amusing nor wry or even especially skeptical in her treatment of other worldly matters and her crisp intelligence, so abundant in Stiff, is hardly present. She obsesses about irrelevancies like ectoplasm but happily skips through more meaningful subject matter such as reincarnation and serious, known psychics like Alison du Bois of whom Ms.Roach merely presents as being all too pretty. Ms.Roach is altogether too sneering to a variety of personages in Spook in a way that made me cringe on her behalf. Yikes! What gives?
Too little data makes it easy to hypothesize about wild notions, and this is what this speculative book suffers. BUT don't worry about dying, worry about living. If you're alive now, you likely be breating a hundred or more years from now.
How can I claim this. Easy. We are entering an age of advanced bio/nano techonology, fusing brains cells to chips, making computers out of DNA, figuring out the chemistry of our cells, and so forth--check out Kurzweil's "The Singularity is near." T
The question I have is: will the singularity be equitable?
Take invitro fertilization (IVF) for example. It is very expensive, and few people can easily afford it. Now imagine, say 15 years from now, the exorbitant cost of tweaking IVF embryos with state-of-the-art gene science to produce offspring with significantly improved physical and mental capabilities. Only the richest rich--think of the millionaire space tourists--will be able to afford such cutting-edge science. Then what, except to fall further behind, will happen to our kids when they try to compete against souped-up humans for jobs? Unless we take a stand, the extreme wealth and power gradients that already exist today between us poor slobs and the billionaires will likely grow far worse. This is what I consider in my recently well received strong scifi book Beyond Future Shock . It also what James Hughes considers in his non-fiction book Citizen Cyborg.
