Customer Reviews

True Mutations

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I just finished the last of the interviews in this book a few minutes ago, and it was one of the best reads I've had in awhile. I purchased the book mostly to read the chapters on familiar names I know and respect (Rheingold, Doctorow, RAW, etc.) but also found myself turned on to many fascinating new ideas and faces.

It seems like every few pages I found myself blown away by some new idea, or new way of looking at an old one. Although I don't agree with everything in here (some of the Transhumanists are waaay too Brave New World for my taste), I found the book to be a wealth of ideas that I'm going to have to go back through again to make a list of follow-up reading.

In the information age, we are examining our entire existence from a vast perspective - the combined perspectives of all of us plugged into computers. We now all share the opportunity to experience a piece of each other's reality tunnels. The observations of Leary and Wilson now resonate in a generation of cybernauts who interact comfortably in a virtual reality, and explore on and off line, as if tinkering with the latest software, vast opportunities for creativity. Robert Anton Wilson said a reality tunnel was an individual's artistic creation. Bob wrote, ". . . each artist finds unique meanings on other levels of abstraction." In the information age, we look for novelty within the vastness of zeros and ones, in entheogenic journeys, in the rewiring of the social networks and rituals, in the rewiring of our neural networks and rituals, in massaging the DNA, in nano measurements and quantum fluctuations, in any manner of artistic reality building.

The only way I ever hope to get a handle on what developments have come out of all this, comes from a handful of really good interviewers who hunger for the enlightened research and observation that, in my mind, signifies something meaningful in this world generally ruled by seemingly insane robotic behavior.

R. U. Sirius' True Mutations was one of those books I carried with me through the day, taking a break to read a chapter when I had a chance, and periodically I would cry, "Yeow! Things are getting interesting!"