For fans of Daniel Suarez? Iain McGilchrist?

[ by Charles Cameron — on, as usual, binocular vision, but this time 2020 as well as 20/20 ]

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I’m about half way through Freedom(TM), the second of the books in the trilogy by Daniel Suarez which began with Daemon and (I believe) ends with Kill Decision — I’d have finished all three pretty much as fast as I could lay my hands on them if I wasn’t trying to write quite so much myself. As those who have read or are reading the books know, there’s a lot in there about the difference in perspective between those who have and don’t have “augmented reality” glasses.

Since I tend to like to have at least two lenses through which to view things — and am interested in general in what William Blake called “fourfold vision” — the topic itself is of interest me, quite aside from its potential to illuminate some pretty obscure corners of near future possibilities.

Likewise, I’d like to have some roughly parallel universe with which to compare the one Suarez is providing me with — and this video introducing a game called Ingress looks like a suitable “second lens” to set up a stereoscopic inquiry and arrive at a measure of depth:

YouTube video

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I’m not looking to make a qualitative comparison between the books and the game here, just to ask if anyone with access to both would like to discuss what we can learn from juxtaposing them?

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Because juxtaposition is key. Because, as Iain McGilchrist says in his speech The Divided Brain and the Courage to Think Differently:

There’s an oddity about the brain, which is that it makes all its everything that happens — the multifarious beauty of the world — come out of connections. It exists only to make connections.

Because, as he also says:

Relations matter more than things.

So that a marvelous counterpoint to Suarez’ fast-paced action-oriented techno-thriller imagination is McGilchrist’s slow-paced psycho-stiller contemplative approach:

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I hope you’ll find time to appreciate them both.