This week in Google Alerts: Wolfe interview & heart problems

Gwern Branwen · 22 Mar 2011, 02:15 · from 2011-March.txt.gz

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From: gwern0 at gmail.com (Gwern Branwen)
Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2011 22:15:10 -0400
Subject: (urth) This week in Google Alerts: Wolfe interview & heart problems
Message-ID: <AANLkTimYfo8EPUDG_8AEwa3fjCWddyvTihNd71WXo0DR at mail.gmail.com>

http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2011/03/gene-wolfe-engineering-the-future/

Spoilers?

> ?The more science-fictional part of Home Fires uses war in space as a plot device. To get my heroine Chelle off-planet so I would get the time-disparity thing where she hardly ages while decades pass for people on Earth, I needed a war for her to fight. There they were, just waiting in the wings: the Os, the cyborgs. Somebody could probably grab a first-level cyborg and do some reprogramming, and wouldn?t that be interesting? Hook ?em up to a computer, and start tinkering with the software. So I have Rick Johnson, who went to West Point but has been reprogrammed as a spy for the Os.
>
> ??I?m told that I am a fourth-level cyborg now, because I?ve got a pacemaker. The whole thing with my heart problems just dropped into our lives like a bomb, because I had thought that for my age I was in excellent health. Then, after an echocardiagram, I found out I was actually scheduled to die within the next few months unless I had surgery! In the April-May-June quarter of 2010, I was admitted to the hospital five times. They would send me back to the nursing home and something would go wrong ? off in the ambulance and back to the hospital. Riding in an ambulance got to seem normal to me, like taking a cab! (Boy, do those things jolt.)?

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net

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