Poul
Anderson
2000
Awards:
Campbell
Rating:
★ – – – –
I
don’t know what the Campbell Award judges were thinking when they read this
book. Genesis is a confused, undeveloped,
sometimes pretentious story that veers from one partially-formed idea to
another in a style akin to that of Vernor Vinge. The one advantage that this
book has over Vinge’s novels is that it is relatively short.
The
main character in Genesis is
Christian Brannock, a man from near-future Earth. As a boy, Brannock dreams of discovering
life in other star systems. As an adult, he finds work building transmission
towers on Mercury; there he works with a semi-intelligent robot, Gimmick, with
whom he is connected mentally, and the two of them come just shy of sharing a real
consciousness. By the time Brannock reaches old age, Earth’s massive global computer
network has acquired sentience. And when Brannock is about to die, because he had
worked so closely and successfully with Gimmick, the sentient global computer
network invites Brannock to upload his consciousness into it so that he can
live essentially forever, virtually, as a part of its AI brain.
The
sentient global computer network then somehow acquires the capability to spin
off nodes of itself to do multiple separate assignments simultaneously, and to transport
itself and its nodes anywhere at will. It spreads its nodes far and wide across
the galaxy and the nodes take copies of Brannock’s consciousness with them as
they go. Over many millennia, the virtual Brannock is able to observe and
record thousands of different stars and planets—just what he dreamed of as a
boy.
Finally,
after several million years of exploration, the virtual Brannock gets bored and
asks to be shut down. Instead of shutting him down, though, the central computer
consciousness gives him a new assignment: go back—in physical form—and check on
Earth. By this time, Earth is only about a hundred thousand years from being
sizzled by its enlarging sun. And “Gaia,” the node of the galactic central
brain that was left behind to protect Earth, has been behaving weirdly: her
reports are getting more confusing and abrupt, and she doesn’t appear to be
doing anything about protecting Earth from its impending sizzling.
The
plot that I’ve just described is all basically fine. It’s everything about the
rest of the book that is problematic.
For
one thing, over the years that Brannock’s consciousness explores the galaxy, we
get bits and snatches of what is happening back on Earth in the form of little periodic
vignettes of human adventures. Only one of these vignettes is even semi-connected
to the main story line, so they seem scattered and hodge-podge. It feels like Anderson
had some random short stories that he wasn’t sure what to do with, so he just stuck
them into this book where ever he thought they would fit.
For
another thing, the writing is a bit pretentious; Anderson likes to use words
like “sunsmitten,” “coolth,” and “laired” and is not able to make them sound
natural. His descriptions are also unhelpfully poetically vague, especially at
dramatic moments of tension when we most need him not to be poetic and vague. Most
of the time, all he gives us is flashes of light and snatches of things almost
seen. At one point when Gaia attacks Brannock’s aircraft, Anderson describes it
thus: “Arcs leaped blue-white. Luminances flared and died. Power output
continued; the aircraft stayed aloft…the dance of atoms, energies, and waves
went uselessly random.”
Another conflict with Gaia is pretty much just described as “strife
exploded.”
And
for another thing, what happens after Brannock reaches Earth seems
unnecessarily convoluted and pointless. He splits into two parts: Brannock the
A.I, which takes the physical form of a metallic robot, and Christian the man emulation,
which takes the physical form of a human. (Maybe—or maybe Christian the man
emulation is just a virtual copy of a man in a virtual environment. It’s not
really clear, as it’s also unclear why he needed to split into two parts in the
first place).
Brannock
the metallic robot goes off to explore Earth’s surface. There he has his own
little adventure, meeting up with the few humans who remain on Earth and trying
to find a way to contact his home central computer core and tell it about Gaia,
who, at this point, has gone completely off her rocker and is trying to kill
him. It’s unclear where the home central computer core is in all of this, and
why it couldn’t find out itself what is going on with Gaia, and why the core is
not still on Earth since that’s where it all started anyway, and why Gaia is
just a node and not the center of the galactic AI brain.
Meanwhile,
Christian the man emulation goes off into some kind of maybe real, maybe
virtual environment in which he meets Laurinda, the consciousness of a woman
who was uploaded into Gaia long ago just like Christian was uploaded into the central
galactic brain. Christian and Laurinda discover that Gaia has been running
experiments, recreating various times in history and then letting them play
out, to see how history might have wound up differently with different starting
parameters. They take tours of the different scenarios, to try to see what Gaia
is up to, and are horrified because as soon as Gaia determines that a given
scenario is not going to result in the outcome she wants, she destroys it. But
it is unclear to me why Laurinda doesn’t know all this already, since she’s a
part of Gaia’s consciousness, and whether the scenarios are virtual or real,
and if they’re real, where the heck are they stored and how she's able to get Christian's and Laurinda's hair and costumes to be chronologically appropriate instantly, and if they’re virtual, why Christian
and Laurinda are so horrified at the scenarios’ destruction, since they’re not real.
It’s
also unclear what Gaia hopes to gain from these experiments. At one point, Laurinda
says that it seems like Gaia is trying to create a “genuinely new form of
society.” What does that mean? Why is she trying to create it? What is she
going to do when she gets it? If it’s virtual, what’s the point? And if it’s
real, where is she going to put all the people in her simulation if she refuses to protect Earth from destruction?
Anyway,
eventually Christian, Brannock, and Laurinda have to try to stop Gaia from
doing her experiments but by then I’d long since stopped caring. And I never
really got answers to any of my questions
There
are many directions that Anderson could have
developed more in this book, any of which would have provided good fodder for thought-provoking
fiction. But instead it felt haphazard and undeveloped—like he was making it up
as he went along.
