Review: The World, the Flesh & the Devil

The World, the Flesh & the Devil by J.D. Bernal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Clarke so strongly recommended this concise speculative essay in Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations that I just had to read it - tonight. Despite the title, this is less theological then cyberpunk, but from the dieselpunk 1920s. This visionary published in 1929 a considered, thoughtful and logical pronouncement on the future that included space travel"

Once the earth's gravitational field is overcome, development must follow with immense rapidity. Without going too closely into the mechanical details, it appears that the most effective method is based on the principle of the rocket, and the difficulty, as it exists, is simply that of projecting the particles, whose recoil is being utilized, with the greatest possible velocity, so that to economize both energy and the amount of matter required for propulsion.

including such conveyances as the recently trotted out light-sail:

...form of space sailing might be developed which used the repulsive effect of the sun's rays instead of wind. A space vessel spreading its large, metallic wings, acres in extent, to the full, might be blown to the limit of Neptune's orbit.

This seer would not be surprised by the dreams of nanotech and in this own Brave New World moment foresaw cybernetically transformed humans and brain-in-a-pan immortality:

If a method has been found of connecting a nerve ending in a brain directly with an electrical reactor, then the way is open for connecting it with a brain-cell of another person. Such a connection being, of course, essentially electrical, could be effected just as well through the ether as along wires. At first this would limit itself to the more perfect and economic transference of thought which would be necessary in the co-operative thinking of the future. But it cannot stop here. Connections between two or more minds would tend to become a more and more permanent condition until they functioned as a dual or multiple organism.

Even this tether can be snipped for a truly unfettered apotheosis:

Finally, consciousness itself may end or vanish in a humanity that has become completely etherealize...

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