[re: Revelation Space Poll for Revelation Spacers]
@futurebird @KateOfMind I’m not sure any of the books overlap the time directly, but The Prefect (republished as Aurora Rising, I believe) went into the most detail and one of them is a key player in the book. Other books have fragments of details:
They were a group of eighty people who volunteered for Sylveste’s immortality process. It would do a complete scan and create a copy of you in simulation. Unfortunately, to get the resolution required, it was a destructive scan (later processes avoided this, but by then no one wanted them). In Demarchist society, every decision was made by direct democracy, so the idea that rich people could create many copies of themselves and have more votes was anathema. The destructive scanning meant that they were viewed as moving to computer form rather than being copied, but to prevent later problems the simulations had DRM that ensured that they could not be copied. This also helped convince The Eighty because they would have continuity of consciousness, rather than being copies and having no clear idea of which of them was the real one (whatever that means). This went well until the simulations started developing psychoses and failing. The DRM meant that there were no backups, no way of restoring them to a state before they failed. Sylveste was viewed as having murdered eighty of the most prominent citizens.
Not sure if we could persuade eighty billionaires to volunteer for the same process. Might be easier to send them towards Mars.
I liked the Revelation Space series but Pushing Ice and House of Suns are my two favourite of his books. From your other comments in the thread, you might feel the same way. House of Suns has a very different take on the duplication problem.
https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/113649936819883833
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