Sirat

About the Book

Within the information systems that mankind has created for quite different purposes, the next stage of consciousness is emerging right now. It is already too late to prevent it.

When it does, the human era is over.

We have already created machines that can travel faster than we can. Machines that can lift weights that we cannot. Machines that can perform calculations that would take us a hundred lifetimes. But will we be able to accept a machine that can understand things that we cannot? A machine to whom we shall be little more than domestic pets?

SIRAT is an abbreviation for "Scientific Rationality". That is what it is. Cold reason, plain and simple. It just wants to understand. To know. To comprehend. If mankind should get in the way of that aim, so much the worse for mankind. SIRAT has no antipathy for mankind. It just wants to be a neighbor. A good neighbor. But can mankind content itself with second place?

Deliberately low-key and anti-sensational, this novel attempts to take the prospect seriously and to imagine what it will be like for ordinary people when we have a god for a neighbor.

About the Author

David Gardiner is fifty-three years old. He is a former Belfast teacher, studied Philosophy up to Ph.D. level (but never completed), drifted around doing many different jobs. A lover of computers, electronics and the Internet, keen amateur diver, traveller, lover of Thailand and the Far East. Once fanatical about communal living and alternatives to the nuclear family. Now settled in London with partner Jean and adopted 18-year-old daughter Cherelle. Mr. Gardiner has strong anarchist leanings.