The Big Idea: J.D. Moyer
Posted on September 24, 2021 Posted by John Scalzi 1 Comment
We remember our own lives, mostly… but what if we had access to memories beyond our own lives, and not just in the form known as “books” and “recorded media”? J.D. Moyer offers a vision of how that might work in The Last Crucible, and also touches on writing about memory in such memorable times.
J.D. MOYER:
The Last Crucible’s big idea is the Crucible technology, an artificial parasite that has survived the fall of Earth-based civilization into the 28th century. The Crucible integrates with its host’s nervous system, slowly emulating and enhancing consciousness via a quantum supercomputer. When the Crucible passes to the next host, the simulated mind of all previous hosts survives.
The first two books of the Reclaimed Earth series explored how the Crucible technology could go wrong, but in The Last Crucible, the technology works as intended, creating a powerful community of minds that operates more-or-less harmoniously. When Jana accepts the Crucible into her own body, she also takes on the responsibility of protecting her village, which has survived the centuries only because of the vast knowledge and experience carried on through the Crucible hosts.
The Crucible allows a kind of immortality, but at a price: the hosts must share a physical body, and negotiate who gets to control that somatic form. Jana allows her previous hosts to perceive through her physical senses, thus losing any semblance of privacy (and subjecting herself to ceaseless advice and commentary). But she gains access to knowledge and experience stretching back centuries, including a host who personally witnessed the environmental havoc that ushered in the fall of civilization and the construction of the ringstations that still orbit the Earth.
I wrote The Last Crucible in 2020, a year of historical events so outrageous that I wouldn’t have believed them had they been described to me five years earlier. A real-estate conman in debt to the Russians as president (with a very good chance of four more years — or more), the KGB’s ideological subversion plan to destabilize the United Status coming to fruition, a global pandemic, the global rise of neofascism, religious extremists and conspiracy kooks gaining real political power within the US government, catastrophic wildfires and flooding; it was as if every dystopian novel ever written was manifesting in reality, simultaneously: 1984, Brave New World, The Handmaid’s Tale, Parable of the Sower, Fahrenheit 451, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s cli-fi series, but all at once in a jumbled mess, straining credulity.
And yet everything (pandemics, fascism, religious extremism, climate disruption) has happened before, in one way or another, and humanity has found a way through. Not unscathed, not whole, but still evolving and developing. That was the thread of optimism I clung to while writing this book, that wisdom and the close examination of past experience might ultimately guide us to a better, saner, more compassionate future. Jana’s communal mind, her consorteria of past hosts, provides her with this wisdom, even though the Crucible extracts its price.
Anyone who is paying attention knows that human life in the 22nd century will not be “business as usual.” Fascism and religious extremism are both symptoms of false nostalgia, a longing for an idyllic past that never was. The way of life considered culturally and economically “normal” for centuries (externalizing environmental costs, treating finite natural resources as infinite, economic exploitation of non-whites and labor in general, male control of female bodies, systematic/industrial cruelty to animals) has led us to climate chaos, worker revolt, endless war, and renewed demands for equity. Change is the only option.
The Last Crucible: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s
Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s site. Follow him on Twitter.
Thanks for giving me a chance to share a big idea from The Last Crucible — much appreciated!
For readers who like free books, the @flametreepress Twitter team is doing a book giveaway that still has a few days left.