Brenda (Entre letras y páginas) asked Susan Kaye Quinn:

Hello Susan, I'm almost finished with The Legacy Human. I recently watched Transcendence (with Johnny Depp as the main actor) and in the movie they mention the Singularity... I was wondering, did you get inspired by that movie specifically? Or did you have your own ideas and then started investigating about the subject?

Susan Kaye Quinn Brenda - The Legacy Human was actually written before Transcendence was released - in fact, I started outlining a year before that! There were two sources for my initial idea spark for The Legacy Human. The first was a general idea that came to me in a long drive to a conference (6 hours in the car!) - my initial concept was about a boy in love with a robot. It was a reverse-Pinocchio story, the inversion of the famous Asimov story Bicentennial man, a story about a robot who wanted to become a man. The second inspiration came when I sat down to outline the story - that's when I stumbled upon Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near (a non-fiction book about Kurzweil's belief that computers will soon be more intelligent than humans). That's when I first became aware of the idea of the Singularity as a *movement* and not just the theoretical idea of computers gaining sentience. After outlining the series, I spent a lot of time in research, then writing, then... I actually held back the story from publication for a year (for a variety of reasons). Hollywood started putting out Singularity/AI movies last year (2014) and even more so this year (2015) - HER, Transcendence, Automata, Chappie, Ex Machina - but I believe they still have a way to go. This is very much the *idea of the decade* and I expect to see it explored a whole lot more in fiction - both on the screen and in books. And my Singularity series - the novels and the short stories - are my personal contribution to that growing lexicon of the imagination. :)

Thanks for the great question!

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