Book Review: Genesis

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.