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Rise of the Thinking Computers: A science fantasy
During a congress about artificial intelligence the successful psychoanalyst George Wilson falls in love with an extraordinary woman. Although he has a love affair with her, he only discovers her secret several years later when they meet at the Wagner festival in Bayreuth. This story is set at a time in the future when computers become more and more like humans and humans more and more like computers. The “thinking computers” go on strike, demand the same rights as humans, fight discrimination, adopt a constitution and are eventually fully recognized as citizens. In its enlightened and humane rationality the utopia of a better world takes shape, in which the weaknesses of human foolishness are overcome. But the computers not only think, they also feel, love and suffer. One of them even becomes schizophrenic and is treated psychoanalytically – with success.
Born in Czernowitz, in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and Romania (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine) that the poet Paul Celan called “a city where people and books used to live”, Richard M. Weiner now lives in Paris, France, and Marburg, Germany. His pioneering research in atomic, nuclear and particle physics, which in 1969 already made some of his colleagues mention his name among future Nobel prize winners, brought him to some of the major laboratories of the old and new world, at CERN, Berkeley and Los Alamos. In 1974 he was appointed professor of theoretical physics at the University of Marburg. Since 1995 he has continued his research work at the Laboratoire de Physique Theorique, Orsay, Université Paris-Sud. In addition to his numerous scientific papers and books he is the author of the science fiction novel ‘The Miniatom Project’ (in English and German) which received numerous positive reviews in newspapers and on radio.
Following the novel ‘The Mini Atom Project’ physicist Richard M. Weiner reflects in his playfully witty, sometimes satirical fantasy about a future that has already moved quite close to the present, about the anthropological boundaries between man and machine, and at the same time those between humans and animals, the familiar and the foreign, nature and culture, life and death – and about happiness.
Born in Czernowitz, in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and Romania (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine) that the poet Paul Celan called “a city where people and books used to live”, Richard M. Weiner now lives in Paris, France, and Marburg, Germany. His pioneering research in atomic, nuclear and particle physics, which in 1969 already made some of his colleagues mention his name among future Nobel prize winners, brought him to some of the major laboratories of the old and new world, at CERN, Berkeley and Los Alamos. In 1974 he was appointed professor of theoretical physics at the University of Marburg. Since 1995 he has continued his research work at the Laboratoire de Physique Theorique, Orsay, Université Paris-Sud. In addition to his numerous scientific papers and books he is the author of the science fiction novel ‘The Miniatom Project’ (in English and German) which received numerous positive reviews in newspapers and on radio.
Following the novel ‘The Mini Atom Project’ physicist Richard M. Weiner reflects in his playfully witty, sometimes satirical fantasy about a future that has already moved quite close to the present, about the anthropological boundaries between man and machine, and at the same time those between humans and animals, the familiar and the foreign, nature and culture, life and death – and about happiness.
311 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 22, 2016
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