The Affinities (Robert Charles Wilson) читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги

Author’s Note

Science fiction is a genre that famously generates new words. Readers may have noticed the word “teleodynamics” in The Affinities and assumed it was another such science-fictional neologism. But I didn’t invent the term; I borrowed it from Terrence W. Deacon’s fascinating Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011). In Deacon’s book the word refers to the kinds of thermodynamic processes that are intrinsic to living things, and by extension to human consciousness. And while at one point Deacon hints that teleodynamics might eventually help us understand social interactions, he nowhere suggests anything even remotely similar to what I describe in The Affinities. In other words, I thank him for the loan of a useful word and a fascinating concept, and I apologize for extrapolating it far beyond anything he ever intended.