It has been argued by some very smart people, like Marvin Minsky, that the actual material of your brain is not important to the mind that is "you", only the patterns therein. This gives rise to the idea of "uploading", or copying the contents of your mind/consciousness to computer memory at the point of your death to ensure immortality (William Gibson deals with this often, notably in The Winter Market).
Now, the problem I've always had with this concept is that, even if quantum mechanics demands that you must destroy the original in order to copy it perfectly, they can still make multiple copies of "your mind" once they have the information. It seems silly to me to imagine that any two copies will "share" the consciousness of one mind - surely there are now two separate minds which (assuming they're conscious at all) will have two divergent sets of experiences. So, why would you expect that either of them would be a continuation of YOUR consciousness? Oh sure, they would have your memories and personality, but your "awareness"???
Similarly, I don't think I would use the Star Trek transporter (rats!!), if it existed. Call me superstitious, but it seems to me, that when it takes your body apart bit by bit, you are DEAD. A new being identical to you (it even thinks it's you!) is then assembled out of your atoms, and everything SEEMS hunky-dory. Sorry, not me, mister.
So, anyway, I thought it was totally cool to find this Algis Budrys book (Rogue Moon), published in 1960(!) that addresses all these issues. I'm certain it's not the first "teleporter" story ever written, but I bet it was the first, maybe one of the few, to really think things out. It's also fairly technical and realistic, in a late 50's sorta way.
The dialog is a bit odd. It reminds me a lot of the hardboiled writers like Chandler and Spillane, where everybody's a tough guy (or gal) with a snappy, smart-alec line at the ready. A little hard to follow sometimes, not because of any slang they use, but because of the abrupt way they react to each other's emotional short-hand.
This novel seems to have prefigured (if not influenced) the works of several others: the inscrutable alien artifact found on the moon in Clarke's 2001, the Star Trek transporter, and the shattered psyches of the returned explorers in Gibson's Hinterlands.
Well, sorry to have written a whole essay here , but this is the only place I can think of to tout this most impressive forgotten classic, where someone might actually appreciate it.
Budrys' other novels, Michaelmas and Who, are also supposed to be very good, if you ever have a chance to pick them up. <i></i>
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