Lady of Mazes
by Karl Schroeder · first published 2006
89% recommend11% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Hard science fiction about post-singularity life and how advanced tech, including augmented reality layers, reshapes perception and society. Valued for its ideas on filter bubbles and tech carrying its creators' biases.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
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…http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0451527364/ Heading even further back in time, I love this rendition of Gilgamesh: http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0618275649/ Even in 2000 BCE they thought the world was ancient. Lady of Mazes by Karl Schroeder has one of the best treatments of post-singularity life (and what makes life in general worth living) that I've ever read: http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0765350785/ Nonfiction: The Mythical…
on “What books would you recommend reading? Why?” ↗Lady of Mazes, by Karl Schroeder. Simply the most idea-packed book I've ever read that was actually entertaining. It also has some interesting discussions about meaningful post-singularity life (which are at least…
on “Ask YC: What's the most inspiring sci-fi book you've read?” ↗…I finally remember the name of the book I really wanted to give as an interesting in-depth commentary on all-consuming augmented reality (which is somewhat related to the topic of gaming as opiate): Lady of Mazes, by Karl Schroeder
on “Computers Will Entertain Us to Death” ↗…His novels can be challenging but his ideas are unique and worth the price of admission: * Ventus, his first novel, is about a world that turns accidentally alive (think Gaia) via nanotechnology. * Lady of Mazes turns around how we could use (very advanced) technology to preserve cultures instead of undermining them. * Permanence is about a star-faring civilization so advanced it doesn't need technology, it…
on “Sci-Fi Novels You Should Read” ↗…that created it. And since people and processes aren't neutral (who is, after all), the technology they create won't be, either. Karl Schroeder expounds upon this idea (albeit via science fiction) in "Lady of Mazes", and a little near the end of the Virga series. I highly recommend them.
on “I Used to Be a Human Being” ↗OP here. Bingo! Karl Schroeder is fairly obscure unfortunately... I love Ventus and Lady of Mazes. I picked this handle mainly because it's unique everywhere I've tried to sign up.
on “My Business Card Runs Linux” ↗This is one of the themes brilliantly explored (in my opinion), in the (largely hard) scifi book "Lady of Mazes" by Karl Schroeder.
on “Nvidia Uses AI to Slash Bandwidth on Video Calls” ↗There's a lot of cool scifi mentioned at the start of this but it's missing Karl Schroeder's "Lady of Mazes" (2005) which takes on this concept directly. In it the perceptual layers people computationally put in front of their senses have lead to complete severing of filter bubbles from each other into discrete…
on “We've Lost the Plot” ↗…concept compelling. Let me also recommend basically all of Karl Schroeder's work, which touches on machine intelligence in lots of ways. The steampunk Virga series has AIs which act on behalf of nature, Lady of Mazes has "votes" which are physical embodiments of political movements, and Ventus has sentient terraforming robots who no longer think as humans do.
on “Show HN: Feels Like Paper” ↗One of my favorite sci-fi authors wrote Lady of Mazes, which in part explores what a "finished" tech tree looks like, and how societies might explicitly reject parts of it as part of their values. It explores multiple societies physically overlaid but invisible…
on “The Universal Tech Tree” ↗…companies responses to building features after a player virtually groping another player in a virtual archery space. The model for AR/VR that seems most plausible to me is what's described in the book 'Lady of Mazes'[1] - really recommend people check that out if they find this talk interesting. [1]: http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/lady-of-mazes...
on “Spaces: A New Way to Connect with Friends in VR” ↗…wildly complex, like a social networking system that bases your calendar on your own web of trust. Someday that may be reasonable someday, but we're probably only barely hitting the point where we can get Lady of Mazes-style masks of the world metadata [0]. So you have deeply complex richness in language and culture, but computers took decades to be smart enough to capture it in it's plodding bin-packing way. Either…
on “Saudi Arabia adopts the Gregorian calendar” ↗