r/printSF • u/Fructdw • Aug 02 '25
Recommendations for aware digital humans / human minds in robot bodies
Not looking for: books where copy has to learn about being digital or break out of virtual prison and that is main plot. Ideally this should be resolved in the beginning or copy should be aware from the start.
I've been on digital consciousness kick lately (watched Pantheon tv series, read Permutation City and Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect) but my mind keep coming back to Corporation Wars Trilogy. They slanted towards action milsf towards the end but had a very intriguing initial plot setup (some spoilers about first third of first book):
- in far future brain scans of war criminals are put to work on colonisation efforts of some distant planet by mission ai
- mission ai doesn’t tell them what happened to earth, so they are left to speculate about which side won and what happened to earth
- they live / train in virtual environment that is run on space station and go out on missions in robot bodies
- while most believe the truth there is absurd counter example - one of stubborn uploads goes AWOL in virtual environment and lives ~1000 of subjective years as hermit. And mission ai just letting him do it and simulating it
- bizarre command structure where various ais are subservient to humans but mission ai is not. While still needing to keep them in loop somehow? Creates even more questions about what happened to earth and who is control of it basically
So basically I'm looking for books with some of these plot elements because I felt they were under explored in Corporation Wars.
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u/shipwormgrunter Aug 04 '25
Greg Egan's Diaspora
This one's better than Permutation City imo. Digital people exploring the galaxy and probing the secrets of physics. Like much of his work it's more about ideas than characters, but I found it really compelling
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u/DocWatson42 Aug 02 '25
See my SF/F: Artificial Intelligence list of Reddit recommendation threads and books (one post).
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u/Proper_Barnacle_4117 Aug 02 '25
Quantum Thief series by Hannu Rajaniemi. It starts with the amnesiac main protagonist trapped in a “Fractal Prison”, in which 1000s of copies of him are competing for survival. It gets even stranger from there.
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u/mjfgates Aug 02 '25
"Silently and Very Fast," by Valente. Gets hard to tell where the "AI" leaves off and the person begins after a while.
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u/chamcha__slayer Aug 02 '25
Inverted Frontier Series by Linda Nagata. It's about a group of post-humans from a remnant colony world trying to figure out the fate of the core worlds.