Atopia Chronicles – Quick Review

In short: awesome. Go purchase it right away. Longer version: keep reading.

Spoiler alert!

This 6-part series explores a dystopian world where a new technology based on interconnected smarticles (smart particles) gives humans unprecedented mental abilities, spread across the real and many virtual worlds, especially for those who got smarticles implanted at birth. One of the main benefits is having a proxxi, a virtual self who has “root access” to all of your body – mind and limbs. Your proxxi is actually you, but autonomous and always on your side.
Technology is so advanced that phuturing – predicting the future based on previous and current events – becomes the norm, but not without someone trying to cheat the system.

The overall story develops over a relatively short timespan, involving several characters who grew together on Atopia, a floating platform governed as a libertarian independent state. The prose is somewhat verbose at times, and is relatively slow-paced, but it’s a very interesting read nonetheless. In a few words, it really makes you think about humans and technology.

Something dreadful yet funny: there are people who are trapped in their own augmented/virtual realities – by mistake or voluntarily.
Augmented reality is so well integrated -transparent I’d say – that people tend to physically go to places less and less, letting their proxxi take control of their body to take care of mundane activities. Some even lose their body, which is still “living” somewhere, and because their brain is alive and well, they can communicate transparently with other people who have smarticles.
An extension of this is human beings choosing to keep living in virtual reality even after their body dies – or even letting their proxxi to live after their death.

On a less pleasant note, relations between humans change profoundly if everyone has the gift of ubiquity. Giving all of yourself to someone else no longer has the same meaning.

In my opinion Mather has done an impressive job. He seems to keep a low profile, but his ideas are very powerful and I suspect some of them will turn out to be true.