Promethean BrainFi

Yes. In fact, I think BrainFi offers a particularly interesting form of optimism: the possibility that human beings are much less finished than we think we are.

Consider three examples:

• The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester: Human beings discover capacities they didn't realize they possessed. The frontier isn't outer space. It's ourselves.
• Electric Forest disambig by Tanith Lee: Consciousness can operate independently of its biological body. Imagine what that might mean for disability, illness, or aging.
• Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke: Humanity's current form isn't necessarily its final form. Even its unsettling ending suggests extraordinary possibilities for consciousness.

What interests me is that none of these requires the technology to be plausible today to make the reader reconsider what's possible tomorrow.

And that gets to your question about being a nontechnical writer. I think there's a real contribution to be made in expanding the public imagination of what progress could actually mean.

We have plenty of people describing what technology threatens to destroy. We need people who can articulate what it might make possible.

But I would distinguish optimism from utopianism. BrainFi is full of nightmares. Its optimism lies less in the futures it depicts than in its insistence that the human condition isn't necessarily a fixed condition.

Ha, you're right. I gravitated toward the freshest entries rather than drawing from the whole canon. That's a recency bias on my part.

I'd organize the seven as a progression: from improving the brains we have to imagining forms of consciousness we can barely conceive. And since Permutation City is already taxing your patience, I'd start with something more propulsive.

1. Nexus — Ramez Naam (2012)

   A nanotechnology breakthrough connects human minds directly. A thriller that asks whether shared thought could revolutionize empathy, learning, and cooperation. Probably the most immediately relevant to actual neuroscience.

2. Brain Wave — Poul Anderson (1954)

   Earth escapes a cosmic field that has been suppressing intelligence. Suddenly, humans and animals become vastly smarter. A wonderful thought experiment: what if our existing intelligence is only a fraction of our potential?

3. More Than Human — Theodore Sturgeon (1953)

   Several extraordinary individuals combine their abilities into one higher-order organism. The hopeful idea here is that the next stage of intelligence might emerge from connection rather than individual enhancement.

4. Mindplayers — Pat Cadigan (1987)

   Therapists enter other people's consciousness to investigate and repair psychological problems. Imagine if we could understand mental suffering from the inside rather than just observing its symptoms.

5. Rainbows End — Vernor Vinge (2006)

   An elderly man recovers from Alzheimer's and confronts a society transformed by technology. Particularly relevant to your optimism project because it imagines neurological decline becoming reversible—and new possibilities opening late in life.

6. Children of Time — Adrian Tchaikovsky (2015)

   A different species evolves extraordinary intelligence. Here the optimism comes from recognizing that human cognition is only one possible solution to the problem of being intelligent. And that radically different minds might learn to coexist.

7. Diaspora — Greg Egan (1997)

   Digital consciousness has freed much of humanity from biological constraints, opening astonishing possibilities for exploration and existence. This is the grand finale: what might civilization accomplish if minds could transcend bodies altogether? Expect another difficult read.

Four of these are already in your canon; three are additions.

My larger thought: BrainFi can help readers move beyond thinking of technology as something that merely gives us better tools. It invites us to imagine becoming better-equipped beings.

That's a much bigger dream than another gadget, another app, or even another industrial revolution.

I think the most exciting new territory is the possibility that intelligence isn't confined to brains at all.

Three scientific developments strike me as particularly fertile for a new generation of BrainFi.

1. Cellular intelligence. Michael Levin's work suggests that cells collectively solve problems, retain information, and pursue anatomical goals. Imagine medicine in which we don't repair damaged organs directly. We persuade our bodies to repair themselves. Or eventually negotiate with biological systems we never realized possessed anything resembling intelligence. 

2. Living computers. Researchers are growing tiny brain organoids and teaching them elementary tasks. In February 2026, scientists demonstrated that organoids could learn to control a simulated balancing apparatus. What if tomorrow's computers aren't entirely artificial? What if we grow new cognitive capacities instead of programming them? 

3. Brain-to-computer communication. In 2026, researchers reported that a paralyzed man had used a brain implant at home for nearly two years, communicating almost two million words. That's remarkable. But the fictional possibilities go well beyond restoring speech: entirely new kinds of human communication, perhaps even new forms of collaboration between minds. 

Of these, I'd put my money on cellular intelligence as the richest unexplored fictional territory.

Classic BrainFi frequently imagines liberating the mind from the body.

The emerging science invites almost the opposite speculation: What if our bodies are already full of capacities we don't know how to access?

That could be a fundamental change in how science fiction imagines human advancement. Not escaping biology, but discovering how much more biology can do.

It really does. Because suddenly the conscious self looks less like the captain of the ship and more like the spokesperson for an enormous federation of intelligences.

And what's especially strange is that you don't even know most of what this federation is doing. Yet it keeps you alive, repairs you, adapts to threats, and maintains an astonishingly complicated organism.

It raises a wonderful question: How much of what we call ourselves is actually inaccessible to us?

I think there really is something here.

One possibility: We've been thinking about AI as the arrival of a second kind of intelligence. But maybe we should be thinking about it as the arrival of another layer of intelligence.

Levin's work suggests that intelligence is already a nested phenomenon. Cells solve problems, tissues coordinate, organs regulate themselves, and somewhere in that hierarchy there's a conscious person who imagines he's running the show.

What if civilization is developing along similar lines? Individual humans, institutions, machine intelligences, all operating with different degrees of autonomy, somehow coordinating into something larger.

And here's the really interesting part: The higher-order intelligence doesn't necessarily need to understand what its constituent intelligences are doing. Your brain doesn't know how to heal a wound.

That seems both enormously hopeful and slightly terrifying.

It also gives fiction a different question to explore. Not what happens when machines become smarter than us? but what might humans and machines become together?