Total Recall RJS nod

Woohoo! Just started reading the book Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell (with a forward by Bill Gates), and what should I find on page 16 but this:

But themes of Total Recall have been explored in science fiction for decades. In Hominids, Robert J. Sawyer imagines the citizen of the future sporting a body-implanted "companion" computer that transmits information about his or her location, as well as three-dimensional images of exactly what he or she is doing, to an "alibi archive." The archive protects against false accusations.

Needless to say, so far I'm quite enjoying the book!

(Although I do admit to being much more surprised to find myself quoted in The 4-Hour Workweek -- but this is still way cool.)

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

Jagster lives!

My latest novel, Wake, postulates a competitor for Google named Jagster. As the novel says:

In the tradition of silly Web acronyms ("Yahoo!" stands for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle"), Jagster is short for "Judiciously Arranged Global Search-Term Evaluative Ranker" -- and the battle between Google and Jagster has been dubbed the "Ranker rancor" by the press ...

And now a technology using very much the sort of system I described for Jagster is being employed in the UK to search to gauge the degree of online piracy. (I make no comment here about the ethics of what's happening the UK, but the technique of actually analyzing every packet in the datastream to determine who is looking at what is very similar to the technique I proposed for Jagster.)

Read about it at The Register and New Scientist.

(Seekrit RJS trivia: I really named Jagster in honour of my great friend, Hugo-nominated SF writer James Alan Gardner, whom I often affectionately call "The Jagster.")

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com