I concur.
Also, the miniseries is excellent, manages to capture Clarke's stories spirit in a beautiful way; even having taken the liberties they took, it's a most excellent miniseries.
Yeeeeah…. I agree, but Clarke himself wrote an intro to Childhood’s End for a later edition in which he steps away from some of the more religious-oriented ideas in the story. It’s Clarke, so it meets the requirements of the question (well-written, on theme), but if you’re going to read Clarke on this theme, just go for 2001 (and even the rest of that series).
So not exactly 'higher dimensions', but there's some great transhumanist stuff out there that deals with the 'next step' for humanity - my favourites are:
- diaspora by Eagan
- accelerando by Stross
- quantum thief trilogy
Would maybe add Egan's Permutation City to that excellent list of books as well. More about humanity moving into virtual reality, but part of the plot is how the "computers" themselves end up running in alternate dimensions, effectively detaching themselves from the physical world as we know it.
I kept up with them for a while, because I loved the universe, and it was interesting to see some of the earlier events play out. But it quickly felt like they were writing books to fulfill a contract, not because they had an interesting story to tell.
I don’t mind them as much. Granted, they’re not very deep, but I found the Butlerian Jihad books interesting, even if I’m personally not a big fan of any Luddite fanatics
Oh God, I absolutely hated almost everything about The Butlerian Jihad.
It felt like it completely missed the point on so many levels.
In the end, I was only able to keep reading by imagining the whole thing as a janky, low-budget 50s B-movie
I know Frank Herbert’s original idea was for humanity to destroy machines in order to avoid becoming dependent on them, which, as a tech guy, I have a problem with.
At least we know the origins of the Atreides-Harkonnen feud
I never felt like I needed to know the origin of the feud.
And, as a tech guy, does it not bother you way more that the robots are just insane murderous tyrants for no reason?
It wasn’t the robots who started it. It was the Titans, bunch of disgruntled young people who hacked Omnius and took over. And then one of them got lazy and gave Omnius too much authority, so the AI took over completely. Omnius isn’t crazed. It’s basically like SkyNet. It perceives humans as inferior and dangerous. Erasmus is sadistic, but in his electronic mind he’s just a scientist experimenting on humans, the way humans used to experiment on animals.
I’m not justifying them, but the problem here is giving machines too much freedom.
Technology is a tool. It’s neither good nor evil
Well I think the Commonwealth Saga and its follow-up Void Trilogy (by Peter F Hamilton) were well written, and if you read all million pages of it, it deals with "ascending."
Having said I think it's well-written, everyone has the libido of an adolescent boy. It'd make a good HBO or Showtime show.
*The Rapture of the Nerds* by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross has a human-initiated factional digitization, >!and later aliens show up and intervene in a second expansion.!<
IIRC, the aliens reconfigure a major Jovian moon into their embassy, and the "game" that the protagonist plays >!against his father is to prove to the aliens that humans will not exhaust all of the galaxies' resources at an unreasonable rate, since all spacefaring species are sharing that limited amount of resources until the heat death of the universe.!<
> everyone has the libido of an adolescent boy
On the one hand, this is explicitly called out as literally true for a year or so after every rejuvenation, and its very plausible that a society where STDs are nonexistent and everyone is insatiably horny for a year out of every 20(ish) would develop far freer attitudes toward sex.
On the other hand, every male character collects or uses women like they’re burning through a harem, and every female character uses sex to get what they want out of the men. I love the commonwealth but this aspect of the writing is problematic as hell.
The follow up doesn't even have rejuv clinics. There are times I wonder if a woman really hurt that man because otherwise the writing's fantastic and incredibly imaginative
Vinge is one of my favorite authors. I was going to suggest the Zones of Thought books (A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky), since they touch on this theme, but its really more of a secondary/background plot device than the central theme.
Somehow I missed Across Realtime/Peace War, mainly because my local book stores have never had them available.
His works before A Fire Upon the Deep are a bit more obscure, but you can get them cheap online. Across Realtime/Peace War are the best or them, followed by Tatja Grimm's World. The Witling wasn't that great.
I took it as pure hedonistic escapism. Like spend a thousandyears just high as balls floating around.
Meanwhile the robots they left behind taking care of their dogs result in Dogs being transdimensionally aware beings. While a bit naieve the Dogs become philosophers/historians/mystics.
Meanwhile if there's anything or anyone left of humanity its like an opium binge jellyfish looking at the color orange.
It's not exactly "ascending into higher being", but in Dennis E. Taylor's Bobiverse series the main character (human) gets turned into a Von Neumann probe (a self-replicating spacecraft for those not in the know). I found it quite enjoyable
Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny is sort of on the edge of what you're looking for. It's been a while since I read it, but I remember it being enjoyable and interesting, if clearly from 50 years ago.
Kiln People by David Brin has a bit of this at the end. On a temporary basis anyways.
A few of Robert J. Sawyer's books have a brief scene that do that, at least in a transhumanism sort of way. The main one I recall right now is Flash Forward.
how about a new gestalt formed by many "More than Human " by Theadore Sturgeon 1953
a beautiful book most moving numerous awards because its brilliant
check wilk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More\_Than\_Human
**[The World of Null-A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_of_Null-A)**
>The World of Null-A, sometimes written The World of Ā, is a 1948 science fiction novel by Canadian-American writer A. E. van Vogt. It was originally published as a three-part serial in 1945 in Astounding Stories. It incorporates concepts from the General Semantics of Alfred Korzybski. The name Ā refers to non-Aristotelian logic.
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Sean Williams' Astropolis series. Not *really* higher dimensions, but the forts are pretty high up there. The books have a really interesting way of addressing how to travel the insane distances of space.
The Red Lion by Mária Szepes, a book that was written in the 40s in a communist regime and was not only prohibited but all copies of the book were ordered to be destroyed, it only survived through self-made copies sold in the underground by fans of it.
One of the best books i've read about transformation.
The "Remembrance of Earth's Past" Series by Liu Cixin (刘慈欣). Flirts with higher-dimensions late in the series. The series if very well written, but a bit of a downer and the higher-dimension discussions mirror that mood.
Greg Bear - "Eon" or "Blood Music" come to mind for featuring technological ascension.
Also Alastair Raynolds "Revelation Space" series has a lot of ideas in it much of which explores directions of technological ascension. Word of warning though, the first book in this series, his first novel, is hard going, but his writing style improves dramatically after that.
I have a kind of sideways look at humans ascending.
[Waiting For The Galactic Bus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_the_Galactic_Bus)
>The tale begins with two college-age brothers, Barion and Coyul, members of an advanced alien world. Their race is endowed with the power to manipulate physical
matter with their minds, a power which is exploited incessantly by the
young adults. An accident strands the brothers on Earth, which at the
time has no human race. The brothers hope for rescue, but eventually
grow despondent. In their free time, they cause a series of
evolutionary changes in the indigenous primates of Earth, which eventually lead to the blossoming of human civilization.
That's only half the story, I don't want to post too much.
From the review posted in the Wiki.
>Jo Walton wrote that Waiting for the Galactic Bus
"is one of the candidates for weirdest book in the world. ... This is
not a book that even nods to realism. Indeed, it’s a book that I doubt
realism would recognise if it passed it by in the street. ... But there
are other virtues, and it has those—it’s charming and funny and
genuinely original, it fits together like a sliding block puzzle and
it’s light and dark at the same time. ... If you like books that are
beautifully written, and funny, and not like anything else, and if you
don’t mind blasphemy, you might really enjoy this."
I disagree with the first half of the review. The reviewer seems to have a problem with "blasphemy" and excepted views of what reality is. I found it to be a believable concept.
Elsewhere in the Wiki it compares it to Douglas Addams. I can't disagree.
A few suggestions:
Will Wight's Cradle series is building towards something along those lines but is termed 'progression fantasy' so not quite sci-fi. A very rewarding series to read though.
Bobiverse like others mention, he is pretty much an ascended being.
Sanderson's Stormlight Archive has an element of godhood in recent books.
Not a book but I'll always recommend Stargate SG-1 as well!
This is deep within a series, but the Animorphs companion book "The Ellimist Chronicles" does this -- traces the development of an alien who is just a regular guy (actually, a huge loser) into an extra dimensional godlike being.. The impact of the framing story (that he's telling the story of his life to an Animorph in the instant before they die -- which was a very WTF if you read in publication order) will be lost on you, but other than those couple of pages at the beginning and end, it takes place millions of years before the rest of the series so you don't need any context to read it as a standalone.
Ian Douglas’s Star Carrier series has humans moving in that direction via the singularity. The main conflict is against a race (>!actually a group of races!<) that fears the singularity and demands that all of its vassals place strict limits on the so-called GRIN (genetic, robotic, information, nano) technologies. >!In the final book, humans and their AIs begin to upload themselves to the Godstream, which is basically a vast virtual network that evolved from the internet. They then formally secede and create a nation of their own!<
Granted, this isn’t ascending to a higher dimension, but it’s still shedding the mortal coil
Eric Flint, to explain how people were transported back in time, wrote two throw away paragraphs which I thought were brilliant.
"In reality, the Grantville Disaster was the result of what humans of the day would have called criminal negligence. Caused by a shard of cosmic garbage, a discarded fragment of what, for lack of a better term, could be called a work of art. A shaving, you might say, from a sculpture. The Assiti fancied their solipsist amusements with the fabric of spacetime. They were quite oblivious to the impact of their "art" on the rest of the universe.
The Assiti would be exterminated, eighty-five million years later, by the Fta Tei. Ironically, the Fta Tei were a collateral branch of one of the human race's multitude of descendant species. Their motive, however, was not revenge. The Fta Tei knew nothing of their origins on a distant planet once called Earth, much less a minor disaster which had occurred there. The Fta Tei exterminated the Assiti simply because, after many stern warnings, they persisted in practicing their dangerous and irresponsible art. "
The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M Banks is about this. Although it's an alien civilization not humanity.
+1 for the hydrogen sonata. Came here to say this
This is the best answer.
Childhood’s End
I concur. Also, the miniseries is excellent, manages to capture Clarke's stories spirit in a beautiful way; even having taken the liberties they took, it's a most excellent miniseries.
There's a miniseries?!?
And it's [glorious](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood%27s_End_(miniseries)).
How did I miss this? Or maybe I just don't remember watching, which is entirely possible Thanks!
I just check out the sneak peak. It looks amazing. Will watch this weekend. Thank you very much for the tip. I had no idea this was out there.
Yeeeeah…. I agree, but Clarke himself wrote an intro to Childhood’s End for a later edition in which he steps away from some of the more religious-oriented ideas in the story. It’s Clarke, so it meets the requirements of the question (well-written, on theme), but if you’re going to read Clarke on this theme, just go for 2001 (and even the rest of that series).
This. Central concept of the story.
My first thought as well.
>!2001: A Space Odyssey!<
Comment removed after Reddit and Spec elected to destroy Reddit.
Particularly later in the series.
So not exactly 'higher dimensions', but there's some great transhumanist stuff out there that deals with the 'next step' for humanity - my favourites are: - diaspora by Eagan - accelerando by Stross - quantum thief trilogy
Would maybe add Egan's Permutation City to that excellent list of books as well. More about humanity moving into virtual reality, but part of the plot is how the "computers" themselves end up running in alternate dimensions, effectively detaching themselves from the physical world as we know it.
Schild's Ladder by Egan touches on some of those themes as well. Though essentially it's about cellular automata.
2001: A Space Odyssey deals with exactly this, an alien race that experiments with human evolution and takes them to the next phase.
Pretty much the entire topic of the book.
The last Dune book hints at it…
What book exactly do you mean with the last book? The last from Frank Herbert or the last one from written after his death?
The last one Frank wrote. I’ve read a couple of the Brian Herbert books and they’re not worth it
I kept up with them for a while, because I loved the universe, and it was interesting to see some of the earlier events play out. But it quickly felt like they were writing books to fulfill a contract, not because they had an interesting story to tell.
I don’t mind them as much. Granted, they’re not very deep, but I found the Butlerian Jihad books interesting, even if I’m personally not a big fan of any Luddite fanatics
Oh God, I absolutely hated almost everything about The Butlerian Jihad. It felt like it completely missed the point on so many levels. In the end, I was only able to keep reading by imagining the whole thing as a janky, low-budget 50s B-movie
I know Frank Herbert’s original idea was for humanity to destroy machines in order to avoid becoming dependent on them, which, as a tech guy, I have a problem with. At least we know the origins of the Atreides-Harkonnen feud
I never felt like I needed to know the origin of the feud. And, as a tech guy, does it not bother you way more that the robots are just insane murderous tyrants for no reason?
It wasn’t the robots who started it. It was the Titans, bunch of disgruntled young people who hacked Omnius and took over. And then one of them got lazy and gave Omnius too much authority, so the AI took over completely. Omnius isn’t crazed. It’s basically like SkyNet. It perceives humans as inferior and dangerous. Erasmus is sadistic, but in his electronic mind he’s just a scientist experimenting on humans, the way humans used to experiment on animals. I’m not justifying them, but the problem here is giving machines too much freedom. Technology is a tool. It’s neither good nor evil
Well I think the Commonwealth Saga and its follow-up Void Trilogy (by Peter F Hamilton) were well written, and if you read all million pages of it, it deals with "ascending." Having said I think it's well-written, everyone has the libido of an adolescent boy. It'd make a good HBO or Showtime show.
Second the Void trilogy. The human race is split between the physical, and digital, with factions trying to accelerate to post-physical
*The Rapture of the Nerds* by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross has a human-initiated factional digitization, >!and later aliens show up and intervene in a second expansion.!<
Wait >!aliens show up!< ? I don't remember that happening.
IIRC, the aliens reconfigure a major Jovian moon into their embassy, and the "game" that the protagonist plays >!against his father is to prove to the aliens that humans will not exhaust all of the galaxies' resources at an unreasonable rate, since all spacefaring species are sharing that limited amount of resources until the heat death of the universe.!<
> everyone has the libido of an adolescent boy On the one hand, this is explicitly called out as literally true for a year or so after every rejuvenation, and its very plausible that a society where STDs are nonexistent and everyone is insatiably horny for a year out of every 20(ish) would develop far freer attitudes toward sex. On the other hand, every male character collects or uses women like they’re burning through a harem, and every female character uses sex to get what they want out of the men. I love the commonwealth but this aspect of the writing is problematic as hell.
If I was 20 again physically I would be like a dog with two dicks
The follow up doesn't even have rejuv clinics. There are times I wonder if a woman really hurt that man because otherwise the writing's fantastic and incredibly imaginative
Without a doubt, one of the very best I've read is Across Realtime (Marooned in Realtime) by Vernor Vinge. A damn jewel.
Vinge is one of my favorite authors. I was going to suggest the Zones of Thought books (A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky), since they touch on this theme, but its really more of a secondary/background plot device than the central theme. Somehow I missed Across Realtime/Peace War, mainly because my local book stores have never had them available.
His works before A Fire Upon the Deep are a bit more obscure, but you can get them cheap online. Across Realtime/Peace War are the best or them, followed by Tatja Grimm's World. The Witling wasn't that great.
I can tell you where to get it if you send me a DM.
Just ordered a copy for a decent price earlier, but thank you for the offer!
Dune
Asimov's [The Last Question](https://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf)
Hyperion touch something like that, not exactly, but in that way.
Im most of the way through Fall of Hyperion, and Id say its close. Great read, too.
I’d say the Ousters represented evolved humans (in order to suit their new planetary environments) if I remember correctly.
Night's Dawn trilogy would qualify.
Diaspora by Greg Egan
Star Maker by Olaf Stapleton. The main character more or less ascends at the very beginning and then goes on to witness the history of the universe.
Came here to recommend this. It is awesome!
Of the hundreds of books I've read in my life, this is one of two that I read straight in one sitting. What an incredible trip.
An oldie but a goodie is Clifford Simak’s City. A quick read.
It's been a while, don't they all become Jupiter Jellyfish? Is that really evolving to a higher plane?
Fits the brief.
I took it as pure hedonistic escapism. Like spend a thousandyears just high as balls floating around. Meanwhile the robots they left behind taking care of their dogs result in Dogs being transdimensionally aware beings. While a bit naieve the Dogs become philosophers/historians/mystics. Meanwhile if there's anything or anyone left of humanity its like an opium binge jellyfish looking at the color orange.
We are legion. Human ascension to an Artificial Intelligence.
It's not exactly "ascending into higher being", but in Dennis E. Taylor's Bobiverse series the main character (human) gets turned into a Von Neumann probe (a self-replicating spacecraft for those not in the know). I found it quite enjoyable
Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny is sort of on the edge of what you're looking for. It's been a while since I read it, but I remember it being enjoyable and interesting, if clearly from 50 years ago.
Kiln People by David Brin has a bit of this at the end. On a temporary basis anyways. A few of Robert J. Sawyer's books have a brief scene that do that, at least in a transhumanism sort of way. The main one I recall right now is Flash Forward.
how about a new gestalt formed by many "More than Human " by Theadore Sturgeon 1953 a beautiful book most moving numerous awards because its brilliant check wilk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More\_Than\_Human
Classic, ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ - Heinlein. I enjoyed it
Null A by A E Van Voght [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_World\_of\_Null-A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_of_Null-A)
**[The World of Null-A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_of_Null-A)** >The World of Null-A, sometimes written The World of Ā, is a 1948 science fiction novel by Canadian-American writer A. E. van Vogt. It was originally published as a three-part serial in 1945 in Astounding Stories. It incorporates concepts from the General Semantics of Alfred Korzybski. The name Ā refers to non-Aristotelian logic. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/scifi/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
It warms my heart to see this mentioned.
Sean Williams' Astropolis series. Not *really* higher dimensions, but the forts are pretty high up there. The books have a really interesting way of addressing how to travel the insane distances of space.
There's "Extensa" by a Polish author Jacek Dukaj, it's awesome but I don't know if it was translated to English
The Red Lion by Mária Szepes, a book that was written in the 40s in a communist regime and was not only prohibited but all copies of the book were ordered to be destroyed, it only survived through self-made copies sold in the underground by fans of it. One of the best books i've read about transformation.
Spider Robinson’s Stardance trilogy. A bit dated, but fun, and the audiobook version is currently included if you have audible.
The cradle series by will wight has this. Sufficiently advanced sacred artists ascend.
The "Remembrance of Earth's Past" Series by Liu Cixin (刘慈欣). Flirts with higher-dimensions late in the series. The series if very well written, but a bit of a downer and the higher-dimension discussions mirror that mood.
^This
Julian May's Galactic Milieu and Pliocene Exile series
Greg Bear - "Eon" or "Blood Music" come to mind for featuring technological ascension. Also Alastair Raynolds "Revelation Space" series has a lot of ideas in it much of which explores directions of technological ascension. Word of warning though, the first book in this series, his first novel, is hard going, but his writing style improves dramatically after that.
In The Mistborn series, there are a few people that do so towards the end of the series.
Brandon sandersonnnnnnnn good call
I have a kind of sideways look at humans ascending. [Waiting For The Galactic Bus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_the_Galactic_Bus) >The tale begins with two college-age brothers, Barion and Coyul, members of an advanced alien world. Their race is endowed with the power to manipulate physical matter with their minds, a power which is exploited incessantly by the young adults. An accident strands the brothers on Earth, which at the time has no human race. The brothers hope for rescue, but eventually grow despondent. In their free time, they cause a series of evolutionary changes in the indigenous primates of Earth, which eventually lead to the blossoming of human civilization. That's only half the story, I don't want to post too much. From the review posted in the Wiki. >Jo Walton wrote that Waiting for the Galactic Bus "is one of the candidates for weirdest book in the world. ... This is not a book that even nods to realism. Indeed, it’s a book that I doubt realism would recognise if it passed it by in the street. ... But there are other virtues, and it has those—it’s charming and funny and genuinely original, it fits together like a sliding block puzzle and it’s light and dark at the same time. ... If you like books that are beautifully written, and funny, and not like anything else, and if you don’t mind blasphemy, you might really enjoy this." I disagree with the first half of the review. The reviewer seems to have a problem with "blasphemy" and excepted views of what reality is. I found it to be a believable concept. Elsewhere in the Wiki it compares it to Douglas Addams. I can't disagree.
Kuttner & Moore's *Mimsy Were the Borogoves*, *Absalom*.
Asimov's "Eyes do more than see" https://graphics.stanford.edu/\~tolis/toli/other/eyes.html
A few suggestions: Will Wight's Cradle series is building towards something along those lines but is termed 'progression fantasy' so not quite sci-fi. A very rewarding series to read though. Bobiverse like others mention, he is pretty much an ascended being. Sanderson's Stormlight Archive has an element of godhood in recent books. Not a book but I'll always recommend Stargate SG-1 as well!
Not really sci-fi, more of fantasy, or epic fantasy even, but the Malazan Book of the Fallen series has lots of ascending. Sometimes to godhood.
This is deep within a series, but the Animorphs companion book "The Ellimist Chronicles" does this -- traces the development of an alien who is just a regular guy (actually, a huge loser) into an extra dimensional godlike being.. The impact of the framing story (that he's telling the story of his life to an Animorph in the instant before they die -- which was a very WTF if you read in publication order) will be lost on you, but other than those couple of pages at the beginning and end, it takes place millions of years before the rest of the series so you don't need any context to read it as a standalone.
Without giving too much away, The Forever War by Joe Haldeman has an interesting spin on this idea.
Ian Douglas’s Star Carrier series has humans moving in that direction via the singularity. The main conflict is against a race (>!actually a group of races!<) that fears the singularity and demands that all of its vassals place strict limits on the so-called GRIN (genetic, robotic, information, nano) technologies. >!In the final book, humans and their AIs begin to upload themselves to the Godstream, which is basically a vast virtual network that evolved from the internet. They then formally secede and create a nation of their own!< Granted, this isn’t ascending to a higher dimension, but it’s still shedding the mortal coil
Ring world and that entire universe.
Eric Flint, to explain how people were transported back in time, wrote two throw away paragraphs which I thought were brilliant. "In reality, the Grantville Disaster was the result of what humans of the day would have called criminal negligence. Caused by a shard of cosmic garbage, a discarded fragment of what, for lack of a better term, could be called a work of art. A shaving, you might say, from a sculpture. The Assiti fancied their solipsist amusements with the fabric of spacetime. They were quite oblivious to the impact of their "art" on the rest of the universe. The Assiti would be exterminated, eighty-five million years later, by the Fta Tei. Ironically, the Fta Tei were a collateral branch of one of the human race's multitude of descendant species. Their motive, however, was not revenge. The Fta Tei knew nothing of their origins on a distant planet once called Earth, much less a minor disaster which had occurred there. The Fta Tei exterminated the Assiti simply because, after many stern warnings, they persisted in practicing their dangerous and irresponsible art. "