Pan

Psygast

Part 5 further analyses and. That's got worse. Yeah. Shame on you.

Well, what hasn't got worse is this actual section, which is everybody's favourite part of the show, because it's when we rip everything to shreds to smithereens.

Jack, we, we, we, it's analysis.

Analysis isn't just the bad stuff.

It can be the good stuff too.

We've done most always gush over anything that we've read.

We've done four parts of gushing.

Is there anything like, it might be criticisms of anything we've discussed,

anything that we've missed from our reading.

It might be something you don't like about the novel. What's grinding your gears? Well, Jack, I think I actually want to start with positive, so I'm sorry. There's going to be a bit more gushing. And I think Andy can probably expand on this too. So I think we've actually mentioned it yet, but Flas Ravignon is a sci-fi book, and we haven't really actually tackled any science fiction before on the podcast. So I kind of want to mention just a couple of things about that.

Now, one of the things I like about the book is I think it uses science fiction really wisely.

So there's only really one event in the whole story, which is kind of like outside of like normal in avertcom as like could actually happen. And that is this operation on Charlie. The operation, we don't see it. We don't understand it. It's never explained. And I think that's really to the story's benefit. This one kind of science fiction element is that apparently there is an operation that these characters have kind of discovered that can make someone more intelligent.

That's it.

There's no spaceships, there's no aliens, there's no like, you know, zip-zab-zubiddy. And I, and that is a phrase. And I think that's a really great element. And I think it's using science fiction really well because I think that science fiction at its best, whether it's in novels or cinema, is where you take an element that can kind of tell you more about like an interesting concept or issue in the current day. And I think that's what the story does. You know, the story feels really, I'm going to say really contemporary. I mean, it's not a very old book. You know, it's already written in the 1960s. But I think, you know, as we kind of, you know, we've been talked about David Pearson transhumanism and things like that, you know, as we do kind of start fiddling with human genes and, you know, maybe the question will come up. I'm sure I'm totally in line with the scientist that Key, Keyes mentions, you know, in 30 years, you know, if we have these questions like, you know, should we increase the intelligence of people with their consent, You know, what kind of issues does that raise? What kind of things should we think about? And I think that's a really, really good use of science fiction. I think that's a really kind of intelligent, thoughtful use of that kind of medium. Well, it's interesting you mentioned Pierce, because when we spoke to him, he, you know, he said that when he wants to raise intelligence, he kind of has a little thing in the load of there where he says, I'm not thinking of people, for example, he, in sensitively and rightly so, he says, you know, people with autism, for example, do struggle like socially or emotionally when they've got high levels of intelligence. And he says that that's not something which most people would opt into. So therefore it would need to have like have both of these things alongside each other.

But I think the one thing criticism you can draw of the modern transhumanist movement is

they don't necessarily get into the muddy waters of whether or not it's going

to have nasty side effects in the short term.

Their question and what they're concerned with is how is this right thing to do in the long term?

Can we get people on board with it?

And people like Pierce would probably say that, yeah, a few things would go wrong.

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