X17

Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Read August 31st 2010. A very short story with little preamble, it seems to be about a man waking from an operation to enhance his brain only, his new found abilities allow him to realise the procedure will result in his death shortly and the one thing he does while he still can is improves the procedure so it doesn't kill you for a year and forces his friend the inventor into the undergoing it, knowing that with a year of these enhanced cognitive abilities his the inventor will be able to do what he knows needs to be done to work on it but hasn't got the time.
I really liked it actually, basically the theme is Yudkowsky's idea that if you could use your intelligence to improve your intelligence, that's plainly the most powerful thing you could possibly do with it. (EDIT 08/07/11: This idea has stuck with me, and the other day I was thinking about whether maxing intelligence in RPGs should be the most powerful way to spend your attribute points, and it occurred to me that as intelligence increases, so do some symptoms...like boredom with life, ennui, OCD, seemingly trivial obssessions. I think you'd become alien to everyone around you, and likewise you'd stop caring about them. You'd cease to be the person you were, or even recognisable as human any more at some point, I think. In an RPG there should, at least, be rising "costs" associated with unusually high intelligence that rapidly - if you use spells to exponentiate your intelligence - cut off your character from the world!)
4/5 (2 in the current system?)
Category:Short stories
Category:Works
Category:Science fiction short stories
Category:Hard science fiction short stories
Category:Short stories with 2 rating
Category:Short stories read in 2010
Category:American short stories
Category:1990s short stories