A downloaded personality named Venator has been incorporated into the cybercosm but reactivated so that he can perform a specific task in a robot body. Before his robotic re-embodiement, Venator converses with an aspect of the central intelligence which informs him that:
"Our great peace lies once more under threat." (p. 34)
The entire narrative leaves us in no doubt that this peace is a carefully maintained, managed, even manipulated, passivity. There is a general misconception, here encouraged by Anderson, that "peace" means nothing but passivity. Do we have to choose between violence and passivity? There are more than two options. It is the task of sf to consider every option and we can read utopias as well as dystopias. We need to end and transcend conflict and violence so that society can become more interactive, dynamic and creative, not so that it can be held indefinitely in a static equilibrium.
The cybercosm congratulates itself that:
"Little active hostility to the order of things remains on Earth, and it is ideational or emotional - ill informed, ill organized where it is organized at all, devoid of any significant resources." (p. 35)
That is a death knell. Why should the cybercosm maintain an "order of things"? Everyone, especially those who are hostile, should be given every opportunity to understand and express themselves and to shape their own order of things, both individually and collectively. That is possible. That is what society can aim at. AI is welcome to help - certainly not to obstruct.
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