Genesis, Part One, Chapter VI

Does anyone know what Industrial Revolution by Poul Anderson is?

Anderson's Genesis (New York, 2001), Chapter VI, pp. 57-83, is twenty seven pages of text. However, I have been laboring under a misapprehension. The chapters that I have so far referred to as Chapters I-VI of Genesis have in fact been Chapters I-VI of Genesis, Part One. There are two Parts, each with chapters numbered from I. Thus, although the novel concludes with a Chapter XII, it comprises twenty nine chapters.

Part One, Chapter VI, begins by informing us that it is set seventeen hundred years after Part One, Chapter V, which introduced Laurinda Ashcroft. Often, a future history presents a list of dates in a Time Chart or Chronology. It would be interesting if someone were to try to compose such a chronology for Genesis. However, there are few textual clues towards any dating system.

I already know from previous readings of the novel that:

Part One, Chapter VI, describes an over-elaborate society whose members express their group loyalties and rivalries through complicated Games apparently because they have no more serious business to engage in;

although this chapter, like a later one (Part One, Chapter VIII), does involve characters and conversations, it does not feature either of the continuing characters, Christian Brannock or Laurinda Ashcroft;

although I will have to reread to recall details, this chapter marks a decisive turning point in human-AI relations - from now on, AI is in charge.

However, I will have to reread the chapter in detail to do it justice and that might not happen immediately. As discussed a few posts ago, Sheila will return from hospital soon and will need extra support for a considerable period. Besides that, I am also trying to engage in other reading, viewing and activity! However, there is so much of substance in Poul Anderson's fiction that it is difficult not to return to it. Even if posting slows, it will not cease.

For me, a significant point was reached recently when Terra Central's remark that the conflict between instinct and intellect makes mankind mad reminded me that mankind had solved that precise problem in Anderson's very first sf novel, Brain Wave. Also, although the phrases "time travel" and "hyperspace" indicate major bodies of work by Anderson, Genesis presents an alternative to both of them. And it is only one of his several approaches to AI. As stated several times before, Anderson seems systematically to examine every possible answer to a question or implication of a concept.