Hi. I'm a new forum member.

May I suggest for discussion my book Pink Noise, recently published by a small press as a deluxe illustrated hardcover. It's science fiction, dealing with the subjects of what makes us different from digital intelligence, the meaning of the body, and the price of immortality. In order to illuminate this, the story employs the conceit that, some time in far future, we supposedly learn how to "upload" our minds into a vast computer network, existing without body and potentially immortal.

One such "posthuman" is a brain doctor. Trying to save a comatose girl, he plugs his own electronic mind into her brain in order to replace the damaged part. But he discovers more than he expected.

Karl Schroeder says about this book: "Pink Noise is daring in all the ways that science fiction is supposed to be daring. Not only is it great fun to read and filled with moments of touching grace and emotional power, but Pink Noise is also the most thorough-going exploration of the posthuman condition that I have read. Korogodski succeeds in giving us a very human story of loneliness and loves lost that’s also a mind-bending exploration of all the ways that technology could change what it means to be human. He’s raised the bar for the rest of us."

Library Journal says: "Explosive in its approach to language and imaginative in its portrayal of a life lived in cyberspace as well as in the real world, this postcyberpunk adventure injects the genre with a long-awaited freshness. A good choice for both adult and YA fans of hard sf and postmodern fantasy."

Stylistically, the story is a prose poem in disguise. As Joe Hadelman, a many-times winner of the Rhysling Award (for best best poem of speculative fiction), says: "An exciting, terrifying rush of words, deftly combining hard science and poetic imagery. I don’t know whether 'magnetorheological' is a word. If not, it should be!"

You can find more about the book at http://www.pinknoise.net. A sample is available: http://www.pinknoise.net/pdf/PinkNoise-Sample.pdf. The illustrations can be found at the artist's website: http://www.guddah.com.

And, naturally, feel free to ask me any questions.

Leo

Pink Noise was reviewed last Friday by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing:

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/10/15/pi ... -sf-n.html

Pink Noise: hard-sf novella about the strange battles of the posthuman
Cory Doctorow at 6:35 AM Friday, Oct 15, 2010

Leonid Korogodski's publishing debut Pink Noise: A Posthuman Tale is a dense, hard-sf novella that takes a serious crack at imagining the priorities, miseries and joys of posthuman people. It's a tall order: creating believably nonhuman post-people means that you necessarily give up on a certain amount of empathy and sympathy for your characters who are, by definition, doing things whose motivations we can't purely understand.

Korogodski's solution is to garland the tale with a kind of scientific poesie -- a superdense rush of technical explanations for the atomic structure of the human -- and posthuman -- mind, written with the kind of passion that a pornographer might reserve for a detailed description of someone's reproductive organs, and the kind of lyricism that a poet might use to describe the same parts (albeit by allegory). This, for the most part, really works -- Pink Noise manages to be a story that sucks you in and spits you out again some 120 pages later, having somehow convinced your mind to care about the trials and tribulations of people who can't properly die and who are mostly made from computation.

The book comes with a series of technical appendices explaining the neuroscience, astrophysics, evolutionary computing and linguistic tricks that make the book hum, and when these aren't sufficient, the author has left sidebars and footnotes in the text of the story itself. These are fascinating little essays, but I don't reckon you need to read them to get the story.

What's the story? Nathi is a transhuman brain doctor, someone who can repair neurological insult in those people who stubbournly insist on having meat bodies. He is called in to rescue a comatose girl who has suffered a grave nerve insult, and so an instance of himself is inserted into her mind, whereupon he discovers that he is not who he thought he is, and neither is she. This leads to a daring escape, an epic space-battle, and a series of bizarre and imaginative flashbacks explaining the economics and geopolitical carnage left behind by the Singularity.

Silverberry Press have packaged the novella and its technical essays in a slim and handsome hardcover, with several black-and-white illustrations from Bulgarian artist Guddah. I'm sorry to say that these illustrations left me very cold, being the kind of computer-enhanced "futuristic" illustration that my eyes generally slide past at science fiction conventions.

I taught Korogodski at the Viable Paradise sf writing workshop some years ago, and it's always good to see a student doing well. This is a promising debut from a writer who isn't afraid to be as technical as he needs to be in order to tell his story.

SFBook reviews Pink Noise:

http://sfbook.com/pink-noise.htm

"This is a very detailed, daring and quite brilliant exploration of the posthuman condition that manages to convey the emotional journey that technology could inflict on the human psyche, examining the very nature of consciousness, emotion and the loneliness of existence.

This book is one of the most impressive works of literature I have read in some time, both utterly original and technologically head-spinning. The pace is relentless and the prose almost poetic in places, with a real sense of grace and emotional power. Pink Noise is the explosive birth of a new star in science fiction."

Pink Noise has been chosen as the Book of the Month for December on SFBook.com:

http://sfbook.com/sfbook-book-of-the-month.htm

Anyone can now vote for the Book of the Year among the twelve Books of the
Month:

http://sfbook.com/sfbook-book-of-the-year.htm

Leo