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Comment by auggierose | Hacker News Reader

OMG. Gateway is one of my all-time favourite books. So brilliant. The Space Merchants is great as well.

He finally hitched that Heechee ride.

Heechee Saga is a wonderful piece of science fiction, making humans think of many controversial themes. Especially likes of us, Hackers, Scientists, IT workers. Some of these themes are;

  - What happens after you die?
  - If possible would you record your consciousness into a computer?
  - If some kind of human recordings and/or simulations are possible 
    what happens to the source person's inheritance/belongings?
  - How would consciousness cope with energy outages?
  - What of human - computer love affairs?
  - Can we correctly analyse Extra Terrestrial artefacts?
  - How would science and society behave in rationing  possible synthetic food 
    in case of global famine or drought?
  - If we ever build synthetic body parts that's 
    absolutely compatible with human bodies and can replace
    old/defect ones who can reach these?

I'm very sorry about Mr.Pohl's death. If a human recording was possible he was someone worthy of binary encoding.

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I loved his work. It was about expanding our horizons. But sometimes the narrative would suffer. Why could super-intelligent energy lifeforms not conceive that matter-based creatures were intelligent, but human science fiction writers could imagine that energy-creatures could be? Do 10^17 super-intelligences inside a black hole have no science fiction writers at all among them?

They were non fiction intelligences. Also they were so afraid of the upcoming doom so they locked themselves in a blackhole and lost track of time outside. (U.S. see the resemblence?). But of course some matters are mind tingling :-) This can't soil his brilliance.

No,not soil certainly. But I remember my great disappointment when the entire Heechee series' ultimate mystery turned out to be - that superintelligent beings couldn't conceive of something a science fiction author could.

by the way universe is amazing. In many many ways :)

If you never played the Gateway game, I recommend it too: http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/540

I first head of Mr. Pohl work by playing that game (and its sequel)

And indeed, it is really impressive and interesting! Lots of food for thought on them.

And considering a game cannot have much story as a book, it is only a glimpse of Mr. Pohl full body of work, but it still is really, really impressive and awesome.

While I enjoyed the Heechee stories, my favorite of his is an oldie he wrote with Kornbluth, "The Space Merchants".

Indeed. It is one of all time my favourite hard sci-fi novels.

Agreed...it's the ultimate lottery ticket...what a brilliant writer!

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