d copies of your chemist, if you wish, with all of his knowledge and skill, and no human limitations

at all." After some investigation, Burckhardt learns that his entire town had been killed in a
chemical explosion, and the brains of the dead townspeople had been scanned and placed into
miniature robotic bodies in a miniature replica of the town (as a character explains to him, 'It's as
easy to transfer a pattern from a dead brain as a living one'), so that a businessman named Mr.
Dorchin could charge companies to use the townspeople as test subjects for new products and
advertisements.
Something close to the notion of mind uploading is very briefly mentioned in Isaac Asimov's 1956
short story The Last Question: "One by one Man fused with AC, each physical body losing its
mental identity in a manner that was somehow not a loss but a gain." A more detailed exploration
of the idea (and one in which individual identity is preserved, unlike in Asimov's story) can be
found in Arthur C. Clarke's novel The City and the Stars, also from 1956 (this novel was a
revised and expanded version of Clarke's earlier story Against the Fall of Night, but the earlier
version did not contain the elements relating to mind uploading). The story is set in a city named
Diaspar one billion years in the future, where the minds of inhabitants are stored as patterns of
information in the city's Central Computer in between a series of 1000-year lives in cloned
bodies. Various commentators identify this story as one of the first (if not the first) to deal with
mind uploading, human-machine synthesis, and computerized immortality. [12][13][14][15]
Another of the "firsts" is the novel Detta är verkligheten (This is reality), 1968, by the renowned
philosopher and logician Bertil Mårtensson, a novel in which he describes people living in an
uploaded state as a means to control overpopulation. The uploaded people believe that they are
"alive", but in reality they are playing elaborate and advanced fantasy games. In a twist at the
end, the author changes everything into one of the best "multiverse" ideas of science fiction.
In Robert Silverberg's To Live Again (1969), an entire worldwide economy is built up around the
buying and selling of "souls" (personas that have been tape-recorded at six-month intervals),
allowing well-heeled consumers the opportunity to spend tens of millions of dollars on a medical
treatment that uploads the most recent recordings of archived personalities into the minds of the
buyers. Federal law prevents people from buying a "personality recording" unless the possessor
first had died; similarly, two or more buyers were not allowed to own a "share" of the persona. In
this novel, the personality recording always went to the highest bidder. However, when one
attempted to buy (and therefore possess) too many personalities, there was the risk that one of
the personas would wrest control of the body from the possessor.
In the 1982 novel Software, part of the Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker, one of the main
characters, Cobb Anderson, has his mind downloaded and his body replaced with an extremely
human-like android body. The robots who persuade Anderson into doing this sell the process to
him as a way to become immortal.
In William Gibson's award-winning Neuromancer (1984), which popularized the concept of
"cyberspace", a hacking tool used by the main character is an artificial infomorph of a notorious
cyber-criminal, Dixie Flatline. The infomorph only assists in exchange for the promise that he be
deleted after the mission is complete.
The fiction of Greg Egan has explored many of the philosophical, ethical, legal, and identity
aspects of mind transfer, as well as the financial and computing aspects (i.e. hardware, software,
processing power) of maintaining "copies." In Egan's Permutation City (1994), Diaspora (1997)
and Zendegi (2010), "copies" are made by computer simulation of scanned brain physiology. See
also Egan's "jewelhead" stories, where the mind is transferred from the organic brain to a small,
immortal backup computer at the base of the skull, the organic brain then being surgically
removed.