Product Description Dive into the world of The Matrix ahead of the 2021 release of Lana Wachowski’s The Matrix Resurrections! Taking the Red Pill is a thought-provoking, mind-expanding thrill ride through The Matrix, examining the technological challenges, religious symbolism, and philosophical dilemmas the film presents. Renowned scientists, technologists, philosophers, scholars, social commentators, and science fiction authors provide engaging and provocative perspectives: • Inventor and technologist Ray Kurzweil reveals the technological trends that make The Matrix more prophetic than anyone suspects • Sun chief scientist Bill Joy’s classic essay “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” describes the horrors that await as these technologies are developed • Yale philosopher and occasional standup comic Nick Bostrom calculates the odds that we are in the Matrix • Best-selling science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer explores the history of artificial intelligence in science fiction culminating with The Matrix • Economist and philosopher of science Robin Hanson shows how we are controlled by a power as malevolent as that of the Matrix Taking the Red Pill will change how you view The Matrix-and the world around you. Review The Lord: Is never aught right to your mind? Mephistopheles: No, Lord! All is still downright bad, I find. Goethe, Faust The Matrix Revolutions is out and it is proving to be yet a further intensification of the cult phenomenon generated by The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded and the animated offerings from www.whatisthematrix.com, which have recently been collected on VHS and DVD as Animatrix. Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix is a collection of essays that looks at this popular phenomenon from as many different perspectives as the various essay writers represent. While a few of the essays are truly stunning and thought-provoking, some are uninspired and even grudgingly done. The best of the essays treat the films and the cult following around them as a cultural occurrence deserving of attention. Some of the essays attempt to hijack The Matrix for an ideological joy ride and the worst of them are thinly disguised complaints about the attention the film is getting. Perhaps not surprisingly, the voices most bitter about The Matrixs success are those of established S.F. writers James Gunn and Robert Sawyer. Both Gunn and Sawyer begrudgingly catalogue everything in S.F. history resembling even remotely the ideas The Matrix consists of. If only there had been a point to this exercise (besides the obvious effort to downgrade the material in The Matrix)-some meta-observation that served to deepen our understanding of The Matrix phenomenon. Instead, both authors abruptly conclude their essays when their catalogue is complete. Although Gunn is right to give the spiritual godfathers of The Matrix- Stanislaw Lem and Philip K. Dick-their due, his conclusion goes no deeper than The Matrix is the heir to all this, although the film and its makers may not be conscious of it. What makes The Matrix unique is its integration of various elements of the science-fiction pantheon in a startling new way-the reality paradox, evil artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and, of course, lots of firepower. The anemic conclusion manages, twice in two sentences, to remind the reader that these ideas originate in the science fiction pantheon and that one should therefore not kneel at the altar of false gods. Sawyers resentment reaches even further. While he does make some interesting observations in his piece (about Star Wars, 2001 and Star Trek) he dismisses The Matrix, and takes a shameless moment to remind the reader, Thats (AI, i.e. artificial intelligence) what a lot of science fiction has been exploring lately. I did it myself in my 1995 Nebula Award-winning novel The Terminal Experiment
. Sawyers conclusion typifies his disregard for The Matrix (and, one assumes, t
