Sandwiched between Russia and Turkey, Georgia is a small country with celebrated cuisine, gorgeous landscapes — and a scarcity of world-renowned tourist attractions. One of the few it does have, unfortunately, is the man born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, the son of a cobbler who became one of humanity’s greatest criminals.
This has presented a quandary for Georgian officials. How, if at all, does a country market a homegrown monster to the rest of the world?
Yearning for the idealised pub of yore is not, however, a new pastime. It’s probably almost as old as pubs themselves. Indeed, reminiscing about how a given pub used to be is a staple of pub conversation. The nostalgic lament is, after all, practically a symptom of inebriation.
Seventy-three years ago George Orwell wrote his famous essay about his favourite public house, the Moon Under Water. He listed 10 qualities possessed by this pub, only to reveal at the end that no such pub existed. It was an ideal he’d wished into being.
In fact the terrorists, opposed to both artificial intelligence and the uplift of nonhuman species to sentience on the grounds that the universe belongs to humans and humans alone, are more faction than mere cell. A civil war erupts across human civilization between the humanists and the transhumanists, crashing the extrasolar colonization project and indeed technological human civilization as such. When the ark ship Gilgamesh returns to Kern’s World 2,000 years later — built by the bedraggled descendants of the Old Empire on a brutalized, ravaged, and poisoned Earth, who have hacked together advanced spacefaring technology from the ruins without being able to understand or replicate it — they are the last survivors of the human race, seeking the only place in the universe humans might be able to live. And Kern’s World is that place: successfully and stably terraformed, humans can live there in the open air unaided, our last refuge in all the universe.
Except the whole place is now overrun with superintelligent giant spiders, who were infected with the uplift virus after the accident and have built their own civilization in the meantime — and who are protected from orbit by the immortal computer intelligence of Avrana Kern, who has determined in the intervening centuries that she likes the spiders better than people.
Google “40-year-old white man” and you’ll invariably come across William Dameron’s photograph. The image — he lies on a pillow staring into the camera, a hand held to his forehead — is indexed near the top of some 10 million search results. He looks to be in his mid-40s, graying handsomely at the temples. A wedding ring can be seen on the appropriate finger (an important compositional element, this). As far as selfies go, it is unremarkable. But as Dameron himself later discovered, this was the appealingly Everyman image that cyberthieves had selected for a global catfishing operation. His face — here listed as “Dieter Falk on the social network VK in Berlin,” and there as “Peter, an I.T. consultant in Melbourne” — was used on dating sites around the world to scam women (and a few men) into believing they’d found love. For Dameron, this discovery held a kind of cosmic irony. “For most of my life, I had pretended to be someone I was not,” he writes in “The Lie,” his debut memoir, “and now I had become the one others pretended to be.”