THE GOLDEN AGE: A Romance of the Far Future

"Consciousness of abstracting prepares us in advance for the fact that (1) things that look alike may NOT be alike; (2) things that have the same name are NOT necessarily the same; and (3) judgements which may be based on reports are NOT reports" *1. Hayakawa is not talking about the type of error made by Phaeton, protagonist of John C Wright's THE GOLDEN AGE:

'"I never quite understood this play. Why didn't they resurrect Yorick out of his recordings, if he was so well-liked?"
'"The noumenal recording technology was not developed until the end of the Sixth Mental Structure, young master."
'"But Hamlet's father had a recording. It came up as a projection on the battlements ..."' (Chapter 4, The Storm-Sculptor).

The more we read about this Golden Age, though, the more appropriate warnings about abstracting and indexing (key terms to Hayakawa and his mentor Korzybski) become. In the far future mankind has become vastly more powerful, turning the solar system into a cross between Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens and the planet Gallifrey. However, FTL travel has not been discovered, and distant frozen Neptune remains an outpost of eccentrics. Instead, there has been an migration inwards and a large part of life occurs in mentality, separate from physical life, where real consciousness can converse with Sophotechs (computers) who do the day to day business of running the universe. As mind has become separate it has been possible to ensure that each individual consciousness is kept and is reproducible - therefore "people" become near-indestructible - after a physical destruction an avatar can nearly always be created. However, as these individuals exist as minds which can be reproduced even while other versions exist, simultaneous versions of people exist as well.

In the midst of this Phaeton arrives, puzzlingly empty of life for someone who should have lived so long. His quest begins - what has he forgotten, how and why?

Phaeton is actually "Phaeton Prime Rhadamanth Humodified (augment) Uncomposed, Indepconciousness, Base Neuroformed, Silver-Gray Manorial, Schola, Era 7043 (the 'Reawakening')". Apart from the historical victory of Graeco-Latin culture obvious in the names, the naming standards of the Oecumene are those of qualification, close to what Korzybski would have called indexing. The implication is that there can be another Phaeton who is "Composed" or of another Era or "Secundus", leading the consequent problem of whether each is an individual or merely an alternate form of the One Platonic "Phaeton". "The question before the Court is whether the relic has sufficient similarity to the prime version to form continuity of identity, and therefore to be considered the 'same' individual in the eyes of the law" (Chapter 9 The Curia). Continuity is an old legal problem, specifically in property law. It was not until 1926 that English law recognised adoption, because of the threat it had posed to calculations of primogeniture. In the Oecumene this continues, although through the nature of persons rather than through familiar inheritance, but it can only continue to be a problem because property continues to a problem - in this new world there are rich men and poor men - "Was it someone too poor to afford Noumenal Recording, or a primitivist who objected on metaphysical grounds to - ", Phaeton asks during the Curia. The question of Who Am I? or Who Is The Real Me? which appears to be a serious metaphysical problem is, in this Golden Age, really no more than a much baser question of Who Benefits? (and who inherits). In addition to the oddly Victorian tone to the identification of poor people and freaks such as primitivists in Phaeton's question, the alternate possibility, which General Semantics would have emphasised - that different versions of people may be equally valid, is disregarded.

Phaeton is helped by his place in the social hierarchy - his father is one of the ruling seven. The offense which lead to the loss of his memory, Phaeton discovers, is that he had challenged the philosophical status quo - he had wanted to break out of the solar system - he had built an FTL craft for this purpose, although it had never flown. Then amidst rows he had agreed to abandon all this. Unfortunately, the Sophotechs did not remove the relevant parts of his mind with complete integrity (a term used in relational databases meaning that all data is compatible and nothing orphaned or unrelated is left within a DB), and so he begins his cause all over again. That is his quest. At the end of this volume he has had the ship restored to him - in the concluding volume he will fly the eponymous Phoenix Exultant.

If there were other civilisations outside this solar system I would be concerned. I would want them to know that other human societies are possible. I would not want a millennial version of Jarndyce Versus Jarndyce to represent the best of humanity. That, though, beneath the flash names, neologisms and glimpses into cyberspace, is what THE GOLDEN AGE seems to be.