Book Review: All the Birds in the Sky

Charlie Jane Anders
2016
Awards: Nebula, Locus (Fantasy)
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

All the Birds in the Sky is a story in the old traditional pattern of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy and girl become central figures on opposing sides in a potentially world-ending conflict. It had a lot of potential, and certainly some funny, endearing, and dramatic moments. But, on the whole, it did not wear as well as it might have.

The novel is the story of two kids, both outcasts, who meet in elementary school and become frenemies. Patricia is a nascent witch who loves the outdoors and, at least at one point, learns how to talk to birds. Laurence is a techno-nerd who is building an artificial intelligence in his bedroom closet. Their parents are hopeless and the other schoolchildren taunt them both mercilessly.

Saddled with talents they don’t yet know how to control, they struggle through junior high and high school, unaware that they’re being stalked by a ninja assassin posing as their guidance counselor, whose plots they keep escaping by accident.

Eventually they each respectively find groups of people who understand and support them, and who train them to focus their powers in productive but opposing directions. In Patricia’s case, it is a group of witches, and in Laurence’s case, it is a group of astrophysicists working for a multizillionaire inventor patterned a little too obviously after Elon Musk.

Both Patricia and Laurence are trying to solve the problem of global climate changes from their own angles. But Laurence’s team’s experiments go horribly wrong and send one of his co-workers into another dimension of space-time. Patricia helps him out by rescuing the co-worker with witchcraft, but her help, as is the case with most powerful spells, comes with unintended consequences, and unintentionally ratchets up the simmering tension between Laurence’s team and the team of witches.

Eventually the whole thing culminates in a somewhat contrived apocalyptic battle royal of magic versus science, with Patricia and Laurence on opposite sides. The fate of the Earth hangs in the balance while they try to figure out how to end the conflict and how to admit how they feel about each other.

As a coming-of-age romance, it is generally effective and enjoyable. As a science fiction story of an Armageddonish duel between two formidable sides, it is wanting.

There are certainly funny episodes in the book. The first time the birds talk to Patricia is hilarious. And it’s amusing when Patricia jokingly identifies their guidance counselor as an assassin based on his shoes, because, of course, he really is an assassin.

But the way the kids think and talk doesn’t always ring true or consistent; in particular, Laurence is a little too precocious and snarky when he talks to his parents, compared to the way he talks and thinks the rest of the time. Anders also tries just a little too hard to be funny in Laurence’s internal dialog, and most of the time it ends up clanking, like when he interprets his dinner as “turnip slurry.” (FEED author Seanan McGuire does this sort of thing much more skillfully, in a somewhat similar genre with somewhat similar main characters.)

The wealthy inventor Laurence works for is a little too obvious a carbon copy of Elon Musk. Anders relies too much on the cleverness of the very slight changes she makes to his image and company, rather than using him as inspiration and putting her own unique twist on the character.

And although Anders puts all she has into the Transformers/monster-movie-style climax, it is more workmanlike than actually exciting. In general, the backstories of the kids—especially Patricia—and the ramp up to the final confrontation are more interesting than the confrontation itself. In the end, I'm afraid to say that the book falls disappointingly flat.

Book Review: Ancillary Justice

Ann Leckie
2013
Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Clarke
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –
   
I have a knee-jerk reaction against jumping on the reading bandwagon. If everybody is raving about a book, something in me automatically rebels against liking it.

So when I found out that Ancillary Justice won three of the major science fiction awards in 2014—the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Arthur C. Clarke—I have to admit that I was skeptical about it. But I tried to resist my bias and give the book a fair shake.

~~~~~~~~~~

Ancillary Justice takes place in a galaxy where the majority of humans, on all their hundreds of disparate home planets, are ruled by a single totalitarian regime called the Radch. The Radch, which Leckie says she based loosely on the Roman Empire, is a military superpower with countless armies, bases, weapons, and machinery at its disposal.

The Radchaai expand their empire by taking over new planets one by one, co-opting existing governors into their political hierarchy when it is possible and killing them when it is not, drafting a good chunk of the able-bodied adult population into their army, and cowing everybody else into subservience with the threat of the same happening to them.

In addition to being militarily powerful, the Radchaai are also highly technologically sophisticated. Each of their spaceships—whether troop carrier, medical vessel, or warship—is actually a sentient being unto itself, with a central artificial intelligence at its core. And when the Radchaai “draft” conquered people into their army, what that actually means is kidnapping them, wiping their consciousnesses, and then linking their brains into the artificial intelligence of the ship that has captured them. These walking corpses, or “ancillaries,” become (almost always) obedient auxiliary segments of the ship, fully interconnected with each other and the central AI at all times.

The advantage to this is that everywhere an ancillary is, whether on board or on the ground, the ship can see and hear everything that is going on around it. The disadvantage is that the conquered populations of the planets the ancillaries come from are somewhat put off by their people being turned into zombie automatons in service to the Radch.

Our main character and narrator, Breq, is one of these zombie automatons: an ancillary of the Radch warship Justice of Toren. Nineteen years ago, we learn, the entire Justice of Toren was somehow destroyed, and Breq is its lone surviving segment. She has lasted, all alone, for almost two decades, driven only by a desire to find and kill those responsible for destroying her ship.

The novel's story is told in two separate narratives simultaneously. One narrative is the story of the present day, in which Breq is searching for a weapon that will allow her to exact her revenge against the mysterious and, as it turns out, extremely powerful forces that destroyed her ship. The present narrative, and the book itself, opens on the wintry planet Nilt, where Breq has run across Seivarden, one of her former human officers, high on opiates, beaten and left for dead in the snow. Out of some lingering sense of Radchaai responsibility, Breq saves Seivarden, warms her up and dries her out, and then saves her life a couple more times, all the while trying to prevent Seivarden from figuring out who she is. Seivarden becomes attached to Breq, insisting on traveling with her where ever she is going, even up to the end, when Seivarden is confronted with upsetting truths about Radch society that she never wanted to see.

The other narrative is the story of the past, which tells how the Justice of Toren was destroyed and Breq became a lone isolated ancillary in the first place. This past narrative (which was the more interesting, if confusing, of the two) also explores one more key aspect of Radch society: its rigidly hierarchical class structure.

In the Radch, people are born into “houses.” The status of your house largely determines your career success and how others will treat you. Even though there are aptitude tests supposedly designed to ensure merit-based job assignments, the upper-class houses are still disproportionately over-represented in the officer corps, and they treat officers from lower-class houses with no little scorn.
   
In addition, interactions between Radchaai citizens, especially those from the upper-class houses, are highly mannered and governed by strict societal conventions. The smallest change in tone of voice or change in wording can result in a horrible slur. It is difficult for those born into lower-class houses to avoid making mistakes and thus exposing their origins.
   
Nineteen years ago, the Justice of Toren was posted at the planet Shis’urna, a recent Radch conquest. The Radch’s representative in charge of the occupation was Lieutenant Awn. Awn was an extremely competent officer, but she had come from one of the lower-class houses, which made her a bit skeptical of the motives of the Radch ruling class. Breq, even though she was then just a segment of the larger Justice of Toren, nevertheless became personally (ancillarially?) devoted to Lieutenant Awn.
   
The occupation’s offices on Shis’urna were in the city of Ors. Ors was experiencing growing tensions between the wealthier residents in the upper city, who were obsequiously aligning themselves with the higher-status houses in the Radch regime, and the poorer residents in the lower city, who were just trying to go about their daily lives. The upper city residents variously tried to frame the lower city residents for murder and treason, but Awn wasn’t fooled by these shenanigans, and refused to arrest the poor for crimes they hadn’t committed.
   
Then, one day, Anaander Mianaai, the head of the Radch, visited a temple in the lower city, which was a slight to the wealthy, and the tension finally boiled over into full-scale rioting. Dozens of residents of the upper city came rampaging down into the temple grounds where Mianaai and Awn were. The resulting actions of Mianaai, Awn, and Breq caused one domino after another to fall, and eventually ended up causing, among other things, the destruction of the Justice of Toren.

The two narratives get alternating chapters and they intertwine and draw closer through the course of the book, until eventually they join to become the same story and Breq’s revenge is imminent.

~~~~~~~~~~

All in all, the book turned out to be fine. The main character is appealing, even if a bit (understandably) stiff; Leckie’s writing style is clear and unpretentious; and the societal and governmental structures she has created are complex enough to be believable on a galactic scale. The double plot line is a nice device; it reveals detail and background in a non-traditional order and yet still makes the tension escalate well towards the end.
My only major issue with the book is that the story spends far too much time on political discussions and its characters’ internal psychological struggles for my taste, and not enough on actual physical events. In the rigidly mannered society of the Radch, most interactions require subtle language and careful political maneuvering, which means the characters are almost always repressing their true emotions. This results in a lot of internal distress and agony which we are made aware of in detail, but which they almost never get to actually do anything about.

Certainly some authors have been able to create a riveting story that consists mostly of its characters just thinking or talking to each other. But in this book I found it made me lose interest from time to time in what was happening, and I would put it aside for days at a time between chapters without feeling any great desire to pick it up again.

The complexities of the politics in this story were also very convoluted and I am afraid I found myself having occasional flashbacks to the excruciatingly intricate political maneuverings in C.J. Cherryh’s book Cyteen.

~~~~~~~~~~

One plot device in Ancillary Justice that Leckie got both raves and rants for is that the Radchaai do not make any gender distinctions, either in their language or in their perception of individuals. To the Radchaai, every person is female. When Radchaai citizens go to a planet that does have gender distinctions, they have to study hard to figure out what those local distinctions are—whether clothing or language or physical attributes—and, out of politeness, try to correctly identify the genders of the people they are interacting with. But the whole idea is confusing to them, and internally they still end up thinking of gender-identified foreigners as “male she” or “female she.”

Since the book is told from the point of view of a Radchaai ancillary, every character in the book is therefore referred to as “she,” whether that person is female in her own culture or not. With few exceptions, you never find out if any specific person is actually male or female. And it turns out that the gender of any particular character makes zero difference to the plot—which is probably Leckie’s point.

The idea of characters that identify as neither (or both) male or female is not unique to Leckie; Ursula LeGuin used a similar idea back in 1969 in The Left Hand of Darkness. But what is great about it in Ancillary Justice is that you have to assume all characters are female until proven otherwise—a satisfying reversal of the usual state of affairs.

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.

Book Review: Queen of Angels

Greg Bear
1990
Nominations: Hugo, Campbell, Locus
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

SPOILER ALERT

I am normally a Greg Bear fan, but Queen of Angels did not do it for me. It seemed like a writing experiment that failed. The post-cyberpunk style seemed half-hearted; the multi-threaded plot lines were plodding and uninteresting; and several thematic elements that were initially intriguing and seemed to be being set up to be important turned out to be disappointing dead ends.

The first of these thematic dead ends is the date. The book is set in Los Angeles in December of 2047, on the eve of the binary millennium. This means that on January 1st the year, when expressed in binary form, will flip from 11111111111 to 100000000000. For most of the book it seems like this might be a big deal, but in the end it doesn’t make any difference to anything, and winds up feeling like a piece of geeky trivia that Bear tossed in just to be clever.

In Bear’s 2047, the world is full of automated highways, nanotech, and biogenetic transformation. It is also divided into the haves, who live in luxurious, secure high-rises, and the have-nots, who live in the “jags,” or what used to be the regular old city. And it is also split into people who have been “therapied” and the maladjusted unfortunates who have not—another thematic element which there is a great stir about at first, but which ends up leading nowhere, especially since you can’t really tell who is what, and the supposed anti-untherapied discrimination doesn’t really amount to much.
   
Anyway. The plot starts out gamely enough, with a mass murder: eight students are found dead in the apartment of their professor, famed poet Emmanuel Goldsmith. Police detective Mary Choy is assigned to the case.

(Choy, incidentally, is a full-body “transform” who has had her entire skin replaced with a jet-black, slick seal-skin-like material. It’s cool, but we never learn exactly why she chose that, and what its significance is, if anything.)

At first, Choy thinks that solving these murders is going to be a breeze, but it turns out to be much more complicated than she expects. One problem is that Goldsmith, the prime suspect, is missing and is suspected to have escaped to the banana republic of Hispaniola, where his best friend is the semi-benevolent dictator. Another problem is that she can’t find any hard evidence proving that he is the culprit.

In addition, there is a rogue group of “selectors,” people who appoint themselves to be judge, jury, and executioner of justice against perpetrators of fraud and abuse who haven’t yet been caught by the police. They target powerful mafia bosses and white-collar criminals and put them through mind torture harsh enough to turn many of them into vegetables. Choy figures (correctly) that the selectors are after Goldsmith and that she has to find him before they do, and this sets up a nice bit of suspense.

If Bear had focused more on the murder investigation, he probably would have had himself a pretty good novel. He could have fashioned himself into a sort of post-cyberpunk Raymond Chandler. But, instead, he splits the story into four separate, frustratingly slow-moving plot lines with only light (or, in one case, zero) connections to each other.

In addition to Choy, he follows the story of Richard Fettle, a failed writer who was a friend of Goldsmith’s and who is suffering not only from shock at the crimes but also severe writer’s block and a dysfunctional relationship with a really annoying girlfriend. He gets more and more frustratingly aimless and pitiful over the course of the book.

We also follow brilliant psychological researcher Dr. Martin Burke, one of the only people on earth with the technology and expertise to enter another person’s brain and probe around inside what he calls “the Country of the Mind.” Burke likes to expound at length on his half-baked theories about how our personalities are actually made up of separate segments of personality that all come together in our brains to get reconciled into a whole, and that where psychological problems happen is when these segments can’t get reconciled with each other. Burke is hired by the father of one of the murder victims to probe Goldsmith’s mind and to find out why he committed the murders (if he did). Because, oh yeah, Goldsmith is not actually in Hispaniola, he is still in Los Angeles, hiding out at the house of his publisher, which makes Choy’s later trip to Hispaniola to find him feel incredibly pointless.

And finally, to add a totally random, ridiculously unconnected plot line to all of this, because clearly that is what is most needed, we also follow the adventures of a robotic probe, AXIS, that is out in the Alpha Centauri system investigating the possibility of life on planet Alpha Centauri B-2. AXIS finds mysterious structures on the planet and we are strung along for dozens of pages thinking that maybe they are artificial constructs built by intelligent life, and that something cool is going to come of this story line, only to discover that the structures are just natural byproducts of the tides and algae-like protozoans.
   
Meanwhile, because of the time lag in messages to and from Alpha Centauri, there is a clone of AXIS on earth that the scientists are using to analyze and predict what the real AXIS is doing, and yet another clone called “Jill” which analyzes the other two, and which they are watching on tenterhooks to see if she develops consciousness. Meanwhile, the real AXIS does develop consciousness and then goes into a mental breakdown upon realizing there is no intelligent life on B-2 and it is totally alone.
   
One additional issue is that the speech and thoughts of some of the characters (Choy and Fettle) are in a type of futurespeak (or futurethink) that Bear invented for this book. I’m generally game for learning new forms of speech if it is in keeping with the story, but this is a particularly annoying brand that doubles up on adjectives and leaves out most of the punctuation. For example:

“The metro-federal interface supervisor had the look of the oft therapied a man with guts stamina and manifold problems that he had spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to smooth.”

Bear himself doesn’t seem thrilled with it either, since he starts off using it frequently in the early chapters and then seems to allow it to fade away to almost nothing later in the book.

It seems like Bear had five or six different ideas for what he wanted to write about, and decided to use them all in one story. The result is a big disjointed mess, and I had no investment in any of it. The plot(s) and characters were not interesting enough to hold my attention and to make it worth the slog it took to get through the narrative. It was a disappointment, since Bear’s writing is usually so greedily consumable.

Book Review: Mindscan

Robert J. Sawyer

2005

Awards: Campbell

Rating: ★ ★ – – – 

Mindscan is another of Sawyer’s forays into the gray area between life and artificial intelligence, and into unanswerable philosophical questions such as: what is consciousness? And how can you prove objectively whether someone or something has it? The book is a quick read, but it is not as fully formed or as well resolved as his earlier novel The Terminal Experiment, which dealt with similar topics.

In the prologue to Mindscan, our protagonist, Jake Sullivan, is a young man in his twenties. Jake is having an argument with his father when his father suddenly drops dead due to what turns out to be a congenital defect in the blood vessels in his brain. Jake then learns that he has the same condition that killed his father, and that, in all likelihood, it will kill him, too, at an early age. Jake is then forced to severely curtail his activities to try to prolong his life.

By the time Jake is in his forties, a private company called Immortex has developed a process by which they can port a complete copy of your brain—including memories, thoughts, and feelings—into an artificial, upgradable robotic body that is durable enough to last virtually forever.

In effect, the process splits you into two identical people: one in your original organic body and one in a new mechanical one. To avoid the potential legal hassles that could come from you having two instantiations of yourself, the artificial version stays on Earth and is given all of your legal rights, and the organic original is sent up to an all-inclusive luxury resort on the dark side of the moon, where it whiles away the rest of its natural life in isolated comfort.

Because of this, and because the whole package is very, very expensive, it is primarily done only by extremely wealthy older people who have at most a year or two to live. Jake is atypically young, but he is the heir of a vast Canadian brewery fortune so he has the money to do it. Frustrated by the way his life is circumscribed by his condition, he opts to get the procedure. Afterwards, we follow the story lines of both the original organic Jake and the new mechanical one.

The new mechanical version—the “Mindscan”—has a hard time adjusting at first. His mother, his dog, and the girl he likes are all creeped out by his new form and don’t accept him as the real Jake. Fortunately, he is eventually able to find acceptance and even love with his fellow Mindscans.

Soon after he starts dating his Mindscan girlfriend Karen, Karen’s original organic version dies. Her son then files suit to have her legally declared dead and her assets distributed to him, even though the mechanical copy of her is still alive. The whole thing then turns into a big legal civil rights battle over whether a mechanical body with a mind-scanned copy of a brain is actually the person it claims to be.

Mindscan Jake stays supportively at Karen’s side through the entire trial. As it drags on, though, he starts hearing voices in his head—specifically, his own voice—which makes him suspect nefarious doings at Immortex, including them possibly making additional copies of him with whom he is somehow mentally connected.

Meanwhile, Jake’s original body—the “shed skin”—wakes up pissed off when he realizes that he is the copy of the consciousness that is going to die. (What did he think was going to happen? Of course one of them has to be the original instantiation of his brain, stuck in his original body.) He goes to the moon to live out the remainder of his life, but he remains cranky and has a hard time settling into his new lunar environment.

And then matters are complicated when a doctor on Earth develops a cure for his brain condition. His corporate caretakers/jailers agree to let the doctor fly up to give him the cure, but afterwards they won’t let organic Jake leave the moon. Too many legal complications, for them and for him, they say.

Organic Jake’s anger builds until he eventually takes drastic action to force the issue. This inevitably results in the two Jakes meeting each other—with disastrous consequences.

This book's subject matter had good solid potential. Unfortunately, its execution was awkward and uninspiring.

• First and foremost, the legal battle over Karen’s personhood, which takes up a large portion of the book, is unconvincing. The defense reveals surprise information during cross-examination that the judge already knows about but the prosecution doesn’t, which doesn’t seem allowable. Objections are sustained and overruled at weird times for tenuous reasons. And the arguments used by both sides are primarily emotional and philosophical, and practically free of legal content.

• The Mindscans’ physical construction seems inconsistent. They can feel some things (touch, heat, wind) but not others (air pressure, pain, smell).

Wall-e

• It’s strange to me that everyone reacts so negatively to the Mindscans. Almost every organic human they come in contact with on Earth is at least uncomfortable with and often overtly hostile to them. I mean, this isn’t 1938; this is the mid-21st century. Is there really no one ready to accept a sentient robot? Has no one read any Asimov? Has no one heard of R2-D2? Data? Wall-E?

• The story takes place in a North America of the very near future, and the narrative jars badly when the author’s guesses about our current time are wrong. For one thing, in this book, Pat Buchanan is a former U.S. president, when I don’t think he will realistically ever try to run again. In the book, gay marriage is illegal across the U.S., when it looks very much like that tide is moving irrevocably in the opposite direction. And perhaps the saddest non-true historical-future fact in the book is that Christopher Reeve is alive and walking, a testament to advancement in the neurosciences.

• And, finally, the whole Immortex conspiracy business is wrapped up at the end very abruptly, almost as an afterthought. It turns out to be disappointingly unambitious without any real evil intent behind it, and it is quite dissatisfying.

As I said before, this book does raise big, interesting questions, such as: Can you prove an entity has consciousness? How about a mechanical entity? If an entity of any kind passes the Turing test, and no one can tell that it isn’t conscious and self-aware, is that the same thing as it being conscious and self-aware? Should we consider it to be legally alive?

                                               

These questions deserve a solid story line to explore them. As I was reading this book and feeling frustrated by its inadequacies, I remembered that just such a solid story line did exist—in the form of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Measure of a Man.” 

In that episode, a scientist wants to take the android Data apart and dissect his brain for research. Data naturally objects, and eventually the controversy leads to a trial in which Data essentially has to prove that he is a sentient being and therefore deserves not be dissected if he doesn’t want to be dissected. 

The episode is wonderfully done, and is a much better presentation of the issues than Mindscan. The Star Trek trial is much more focused than the Mindscan trial on figuring out appropriate criteria for sentience and the legal provability of self-awareness. And the episode's writers are good at exposing arguments that are either red herrings or are too undefined to use as legal proof.

Book Review: The Integral Trees

Larry Niven

1983

Awards: Locus

Nominations: Nebula, Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Larry Niven has done it again: created a clever, original, self-contained, outer-space habitat of strange configuration and enormous scope. It may not be as fully realized as his Ringworld, but it is still unique and impressive.

                                                  

Niven’s new bio-zone exists in a binary star system thousands of light years from Earth. One of the stars is a tiny, almost defunct neutron star. The neutron star is orbited by an enormous torus of gaseous cloud, which is probably the remnants of a large gas planet destroyed when the star went nova. The whole package—gas torus and central star—orbits together around the system’s other star, a bright yellow dwarf.

The gas torus is filled with oxygen and completely hospitable to a wide variety of life forms. The only catch is that there is no real gravity in the torus, just strong winds blowing around it which create tidal pulls: west-to-east on the inner rim and east-to-west on the outer rim. All indigenous fauna have adapted accordingly, each species having their own form of winged or expelled-gas-driven locomotion. I loved the strange native beasties that Niven created for this gravity-less environment.

And there are a number of neat places for the torus’s inhabitants to live. There are ponds: large globules of water drifting slowly around in the winds. There are jungles: conglomerations of plants and vines held together by a web of their own roots and branches. And there are trees: trees with enormous trunks, some a hundred kilometers tall, growing radially out from the central neutron star to the outer edge of the torus. The trunks are completely straight and smooth except for a small tuft of leaves and branches at each end. These tufts blow in the wind, eastward at the inner end and westward at the outer end, so that from afar, the entire tree looks like an integral symbol.
 

These various habitats are home not only to many native species, but also to humans—perhaps hundreds of them. These humans are the descendants of a handful of Earth space explorers who emerged from cryo-sleep far from home, mutinied against their ship’s oppressive AI guardian, and fled in research modules to start a new life of freedom in the torus. Centuries have passed since the original mutiny and the mutineers’ descendants have forgotten most of their history and science and now live as rudimentary farmers, hunters, and artisans.

I have to admit that I thought this was all a bit goofy at first. But I was sucked in to the story despite myself.

The story starts on one of the enormous integral trees, Quinn Tree, which has recently been pulled into a dry lower zone of the torus by the gravitational field of a passing planet remnant. The tree is dying, suffering from drought, and so is the human settlement on its inward tuft. The chief administrator of the settlement orders a troupe of nine misfits to climb up the trunk to try to find new sources of food and water for their starving village. After the misfits cross the midpoint of the tree they run into another population of humans they never knew about, which has completely different customs and taboos. The two groups fight, but the rotting tree bursts apart during their skirmish, casting the Quinn settlement misfits and one of the strangers adrift. They are all left floating together in the air, clutching a large piece of bark as a life raft.

Through creativity and cooperation, the bark-raft refugees survive and eventually make their way to a jungle. They only just start making friends with the humans living there when the jungle is invaded by a more technologically advanced group of humans from another tree. The whole batch of them—the original Quinn Tree misfits, the same-tree adoptee, and their new jungle allies—are all taken prisoner, brought to the invaders’ London Tree, and made into slaves and/or prostitutes. There they all suffer to varying degrees, trying to survive and doing what they can to stay in touch with each other, and carefully waiting and watching for a time when they can make their escape and get to a tree of their own.

The Integral Trees is almost Asimovian in that there is very little actual action, and that the story keeps you involved instead by having characters that are sympathetic and interesting, and constantly giving those characters new and complex problems to solve to survive. When there is action, it is exciting, but most of the book is exposition, conversations, problem-solving, journeying, and discovery.

The one character that didn’t really seem to have much of a point was Sharls Davis Kendy, the cyber-copy AI on board the original colonists’ ship, who has been locked in orbit for the past 500 years, waiting for the mutineers to come back so he can discipline them. The Quinn Tree misfits come close to him at one point, and even talk to him briefly, but in the end nothing comes of it and he is relegated to his waiting role once again.

But the rest of the characters and the rest of the story more than make up for the Kendy dead end. And the best thing about the book is the message running throughout about the importance of inclusiveness and the benefits that diversity brings. The original nine from Quinn Tribe are continually thrust into new life-threatening situations, but they overcome every obstacle by opening themselves up to new friends and allies, by working together, and by learning about and making good use of everyone’s skills—even the oldest and the most seemingly physically incapable. Their journey is really all about building a new tribe that includes members from all the varied places they come across, where they all can be free and be themselves. It’s an optimistic and uplifting message, and it doesn’t really ever get too hokey.

Book Review: Accelerando

Charles Stross

2005

Awards: Locus
Nominations: Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

I’m angry at Charles Stross. I’m angry at him for making me like Apocalypse Codex, thereby gearing me up to be excited to read this book, and then having it turn out to be so annoying.

The story is set a couple hundred years in the future, just at the time when our computers are reaching the point of singularity. The combination of processors and circuits that make up our technological network is becoming alive; able to think, adapt, and grow.

Our computing power has also progressed to the point where we can spin off virtual, aware, thinking copies of ourselves. This lets us go off and do ten different things at once (all in virtual, networked environments, of course), bring our copies all back together and reintegrate their separate experiences into our main host body.

Oh, and, also, we have been able to make contact with an intelligent alien race by sending virtual copies of ourselves off into space and setting up a virtual meeting space in a common location with them.

In order to provide enough energy to support all this processing, unfortunately, we have to use our own solar system as a power source. We are dismantling the planets and asteroids, starting from Mercury and moving outwards, turning all the organic material into a ring of metallic, rocky debris surrounding the sun, each piece of which turns the sun’s light into energy. When we are finally finished, we will be left with no planets but only concentric rings of solar-radiation-conducting chunks of rock, acting as a massive power source for all our virtual environments. Stross calls this a “Matrioshka Brain,” and says it can keep us all alive—virtually, of course, in virtual environments—practically forever, after our “fleshbodies” are gone.

Into this situation steps our cast of characters. Main character #1 is Manfred Macx, an “Artificial Intelligence emancipationist.” He somehow makes his living by giving away information—variously and vaguely described by Stross as ideas, innovations, property rights, patents, future information, and paradigm shifts—for free. He does it for the principle of the thing, as sort of a white-hat hacker or an open-source activist. The grateful people to whom he gives these things often give him things in return in a sort of low-pressure, optional barter transaction.

Then there is main character #2, Manfred’s daughter Amber Macx. She is a technological whiz and a charismatic leader with a penchant for drama. She (or a virtual copy of her) spends a lot of her time flying around the solar system in a ship the size of a Coke can, holding audiences in virtual environments. She is the one who pioneered contact with the extraterrestrials, and she is one of the first to realize that the dismantling of the solar system might be a problem.

There are also others, of course; Manfred’s second wife, Annette, who wears mirror-shaded glasses and wearable computing in what must be a nod to Neuromancer, and a sentient robotic cat, Aineko, who is a little odd, in that he is a male calico.

                                                                             

Together this motley crew—under Amber’s leadership—must figure out what to do to save humanity (if, indeed, it warrants saving).

Accelerando uses the premise of unlimited technological possibilities to avoid having to craft a coherent universe for its characters. The concept of virtual reality allows Stross to suspend rules arbitrarily, breaking them and then re-applying them as needed in order to make the plot move forward. It inserts total virtualization into real life in a completely unfettered way that ends up feeling aimless and meaningless. And silly.

On the one hand, anything goes. One crew member on Amber’s ship likes to go around as a velociraptor, for some reason, and her stepmother chooses to appear as an orangutan for a while. Amber likes to decorate her virtual spaceship variously as a fifteenth-century castle or an ancient Persian market. Avatars and objects appear and execute complicated behavioral patterns with a gesture, a wave of the hand, with no apparent programming necessary by anyone, either in the present or the past.

But, at the same time, there are odd restrictions in this otherwise do-anything virtual reality world. At one point, for example, Amber goes virtually to Venus to talk to a virtual avatar of a Venusian entity in a virtual Venusian environment. But she still has to limit her time there, because her avatar won’t survive in that environment for long. Why is that? Why would an avatar need oxygen or heat shielding?

Why did this bother me? I don’t think it’s because it’s a little surrealistic. Roger Zelazny’s writing can be very surreal, and is a thing of beauty. I also don’t think it’s because part of it takes place in a virtual environment per se. Snow Crash and Neuromancer both did that too. But their virtual worlds held together dramatically because they existed according to rules that were internally consistent.

I think it is because it feels flippant. It seems too sloppy, too much like magic. Boom! That guy is now a lobster. Isn’t that funny? It is like a piece of abstract art that you’ve been told is a work of genius, but you have a sneaking suspicion that it’s actually been painted by a child.

It also makes me feel like he’s making the story up as he goes along. The plot wanders wildly from side to side and yanks you around. Key plot points are left extremely vaguely explained, from Manfred’s profession to the Matrioshka Brain. In the end, it made me not really care if the solar system was saved or not.

Book Review: The Terminal Experiment

Robert J. Sawyer

1995

Awards: Nebula
Nominations: Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

The Terminal Experiment reads quickly and easily, like a fast-paced thriller, zipping you effortlessly through the plot. It also has a fantastic initial premise.

Unfortunately, although the plot starts off following a tantalizingly interesting opening idea, it switches course about halfway through and plunges off into a much less interesting, almost completely separate story line for the remainder of the book. It ends up seeming like two independent stories stuck together with a minimum of connective tissue in the middle and at the end. And the writing can also sometimes be, well, juvenile.

The main character, Peter Hobson, is a brilliant Toronto-based biomedical engineer. At the beginning of the story he is in grad school and is asked to assist with an organ harvest from the victim of a traffic accident. From the donor’s body’s reactions, Peter thinks that the donor might still have been technically alive when they began the harvesting operation.

This gets Peter thinking. After he gets his doctorate, he invents a kind of a super EEG machine that will detect the instant a person is actually, really dead—no brain activity at all.

The thing is that when his machine reads a person’s brain activity at the moment of their death, it consistently records a powerful last electric impulse that travels from the center of the person’s brain out to the person’s temple where it leaves the head, still intact. It turns out that Peter has accidentally scientifically proven the existence of the human soul.

This, of course, changes the way everyone looks at everything. It gets especially interesting when other scientists using Peter’s machine are able to discover that (a) cows don't have a soul but chimpanzees do, and (b) the soul enters a fetus sometime between the 9th and 10th weeks of pregnancy (which makes both sides of the choice debate unhappy).

This is all great as a cool, thought-provoking plot line. But just as it really gets going, the story veers in a different direction. During a dinnertime discussion only tangentially related to the soul wave, Peter and his friend Sarkar, a brilliant software engineer, decide to do an experiment with artificial intelligence to figure out what it’s like to be dead and what it’s like to be immortal.

Using an invention of Sarkar’s, they create three identical copies of Peter’s brain patterns. One is identical to Peter (a control); one has had all impulses removed that are related to the physical body (this one is supposed to be the dead one); and one has had all fears about aging removed (this one is supposed to be the immortal one).

Then everything goes to hell in a handcart when the three Peter simulations escape out onto the internet and one of them arranges to have Peter’s wife’s former lover killed. The Toronto police start zeroing in on Peter and it becomes a race against time to see if Peter and Sarkar can identify and shut down the errant sim before either (a) they are both arrested or (b) the bad sim kills again.

If the book had just ended after the first half—hopefully after coming to some creative resolution of the soul wave story—it would have been great. The questions it raises are intriguing enough in their own right. But the second half of the book, the sim murder mystery, is awkward and much less interesting. It’s all a bit far-fetched as a scientific experiment to start with and the sims themselves are personally irritating. Plus, it is all centered around Sarkar’s invention while Peter’s invention has fallen, essentially forgotten, by the wayside.

                                                    

The other problem is that the writing, while easy to read and fast-moving, also sometimes feels klunkily immature. The emails that the bad sim sends to set up the hit on the wife’s lover are particularly goofy; they read like a teenager wrote them trying to sound like an adult. The news stories about the soul wave discovery that Sawyer sprinkles throughout the text don’t sound like stories serious reporters would actually write; they have too much witty joking around.

The dialogue of peripheral characters doesn’t always ring true to their professions. At one point, for example, a police detective asks a medical examiner about an autopsy, and the medical examiner says, “the gym teacher who combed his hair over?” it just klunked. I would think an M.E. would say, “the heart attack?” or “the car accident?” to identify a case, but not whether a guy had a comb-over. It seemed not only unrealistic but also needlessly mean.

And one final annoying thing is that Peter is constantly ogling and fantasizing gratuitously about every woman he comes across. The physical appearance of each luscious female character is described meticulously, while all we know of Peter is that he has a bald spot. (And we know nothing physically about his male friend Sarkar; all we know is that he is a devout Muslim and likes Star Trek and Agatha Christie.)

Book Review: 2312

Kim Stanley Robinson

2012

Awards: Nebula

Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Kim Stanley Robinson writes long books. While there are, from time to time, exciting sections, you cannot count on them for constant page-turning action. They are not taut, fast-paced thrillers. And his central characters tend to be opinionated, idiosyncratic, aloof people who have difficulty getting along with others.

But what Robinson lacks in breathless plot pacing and likeable characters he makes up for—in spades—with his imaginative, vivid, and realistic descriptions of other moons and planets, the colonies we humans build in those places, and the remarkable but completely conceivable technology it takes to create and maintain those colonies. No one does a better job at this than him.

2312 is true to Robinson form in all of these ways. It is a good story—not fast moving, generally, but it keeps you interested enough, and there are several parts that are actually quite exhilarating. There are loads of excellent, realistic off-Earth locations and ingenious, not-so-out-of-reach machinery. And the love story is surprisingly touching.

~

The year 2312 comes almost two hundred years after our successful colonization and terraformation of Mars. During that time, human exploration has spread; there are colonies and, in some cases, the beginnings of terraformation on Mercury, Venus, and several of the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune. We have also hollowed out the insides of thousands of asteroids and turned them into mobile, steerable, life-supporting terrariums, which we use simultaneously as space transport vehicles and as biomes for preserving extinct and endangered Earth flora and fauna.

For, sadly, in spite of our success in greening and animating much of the rest of the solar system, we have just about destroyed our home planet. By 2312, global warming, in combination with massive overpopulation, has had catastrophic effects, which Robinson depicts with depressing realism. Earth’s ice caps have completely melted except for two small, carefully tended glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica. Sea levels have risen more than thirty feet, so that Florida and all of the South Pacific islands and the bottom several floors of all of Manhattan’s skyscrapers are under water. Forests have turned to grasslands, grasslands to deserts. Earth is full of poverty, disease, and sharply divided classes of haves and have-nots.

Ironically, the geoengineering that we are doing everywhere else in the solar system won’t work on Earth—the ecosystem is too complex. The bombardments, sunshields, and gas emissions that we’re using in other places would upset the delicate balance of life that is left.

And the incredible political bickering on Earth leads only to indecision. Earth needs an ecological revolution, but the people of Earth variously can’t see it, can’t accept it, and can’t agree on what is needed. So nothing gets done, and the situation gets worse.

~

The first person we meet in 2312 is Swan Er Hong, currently residing in Terminator, a domed colony city on Mercury. At a spry 137 years old, Swan has been a designer of asteroid terrariums, an architect of cities and landscapes, a terraformer, and a visual artist.

Swan is also kind of a mess as a person. She is brash, whiny, cranky, and impatient. She has a tendency towards depression, self-mortification, and self-punishment. She berates herself about early biome designs that seem misguided to her now. She has a cantankerous personal Artificial Intelligence computer (or “qube”) implanted in her head; she once injected herself with alien microbes from Europa for a high without knowing what the consequences might be; she had treatments to implant animal genes into herself so she can sing like a lark and purr like a cat.

But what prevents her from being completely unappealing is that, at the heart of it all, she loves life. She appreciates everything: the croaking of frogs, the wind, the sun, the soil. She can be happy living for days out in the wild of a terrarium, following a pack of wolves. She likes risky sports and other activities that drive her to the limits of her endurance, because they make her feel fully human and alive.

At the beginning of the book, Swan’s beloved grandmother Alex has just died. While Swan is trying to grieve, her grandmother’s associates come to Terminator from across the solar system to pull her into the project that her grandmother had been working on.

                       

Which, Swan learns, wasn’t just ordinary terraformation research. It turns out that Swan’s grandmother had an all-encompassing, Seldon-esque theory of power in the solar system, which predicted that the instability on Earth would eventually lead to a crash, which would in turn mean disaster for the entire Earth-dependent solar system. And her grandmother had enlisted others across the space colonies to help her with an ultra-secret project to save Earth—“to help Earth cope with its problems by ecological means.”

Swan isn’t actually all that thrilled about being sucked into this project until catastrophe hits her personally. The city of Terminator, which Swan helped to design, is built on rails that circle the entire circumference of Mercury at a single latitude. As the planet rotates through its extremely slow day, the tracks in the daylight behind the city heat up and expand, pushing the entire city down the rails towards the night side, where the tracks are cooling and narrowing. In this way, the city is constantly moving, constantly staying slightly ahead of the deadly radiation of the Mercurial sunrise.

One night Swan and Fitz Wahram, a big lumbering co-worker/co-conspirator of her grandmother’s from Titan, go outside the city, farther ahead into the night side, to a concert. As they are returning, a meteor hits the tracks in front of the city, destroying the rails and forcing the city to stop. Terminator’s human residents are all able to evacuate in emergency shuttles, but when the sunrise finally hits the stalled city, everything else—buildings, gardens, forests, animals—burns to the ground.

Swan & Wahram are able to get to an underground conduit and walk for over a month to the nearest shelter where they can be rescued. During the time they are in the conduit, the Interplanetary Police discover that it was not a meteor at all, but a very cleverly disguised missile attack by someone who wants to subvert their project.

The rest of the book is a combination of intense cross-solar-system geoengineering and crime-solving challenges for Swan. She and Wahram and the rest of her grandmother’s allies struggle to get past sabotage, terrorism, and interplanetary politics to reverse the damage to Earth’s ecosystem, while at the same time trying to track down the forces against them and prevent them from doing even more harm. It starts getting particularly sinister when it appears that the relatively new AI “qubes” may be involved in the sabotage—because, of course, Swan has one of them implanted in her brain.

Eventually Swan and her cohorts decide that the time has come to force her grandmother’s revolution on Earth, whether it wants it or not.

I won’t describe what that revolution is here, but I will say that it is a beautiful thing. And that, in contrast to the ideal Hollywood narrative, but in keeping with both Robinson’s style and the way things really work, it is hard to definitively call it either a complete success or a complete failure.

Book Review: Rainbows End

Vernor Vinge

2006

Awards: Hugo, Locus

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

I find myself extremely unmotivated to write this review. It is neither a book I feel good enough to recommend, nor a book I hated enough to slam.

I did end up liking this book better than Vinge's A Fire upon the Deep or A Deepness in the Sky. Mainly because it was shorter than either of them. And also because the plot was a touch tighter and less randomly free-associational. Rainbows End is set in the near future, and starts out with several semi-coherent separate plots which inevitably converge at the climax of the book.

One story line follows the recovery of an elderly man, Robert Gu, from Alzheimer’s disease. Robert had been a brilliant, world-famous poet until he developed Alzheimer’s and descended slowly into dementia. Then, one day, at the beginning of the book, he wakes up again to find that modern medicine has cured him and given him a brand-new start on life. He goes back to school to learn all of the things that he missed out on during his decades of decline, including how to use the ubiquitous “wearables”—wearable computers that let you issue commands through gestures and see feedback displays and virtual images overlaid on the real world through contact lenses.

Another story line is about high-level international internet security personnel trying to track down a hacker-terrorist somewhere in the net who they think is designing a dangerous semi-biological,/semi-technological virus. Their problems multiply when it turns out there is not just one hacker-terrorist but at least two, one of whom may be one of them, and one of whom may be an artificial intelligence, and who are sometimes working together and sometimes working at cross-purposes.

And still another story line is about a group of UCSD professors who are trying to prevent the shredding of all the books in the main library on campus.

                                                             

All of the story lines eventually come together around Robert Gu. Robert lives with his son and daughter-in-law; they are both Marines working for Homeland Security and are trying to track down the hacker-terrorist(s). Several of Robert’s former colleagues are involved in the subversive anti-shredding movement. And several of Robert’s current schoolmates have been recruited—wittingly or unwittingly—to work for the hacker-terrorist(s). It all comes to a head when there is a big save-the-library-books riot at the UCSD campus, which the hacker-terrorists have arranged to cover up their nefarious viral activities.

Robert Gu is a more interesting main character than the similarly-aged protagonists in Vinge’s other books. He is a touch more well-developed; he has a unique back story and understandable, powerful motivations for his actions. 

But the strength of Gu's character is unable to overcome Vinge's flippant, careless storytelling style. Vinge is, as ever, too clever for his own good. Zillions of new technological ideas spew out all book long like water from a lawn sprinkler. But he doesn’t develop their function enough so that you care about, identify with, or remember most of them. Some are pulled magically out of his hat (or, in one case, from a scientist’s bag) for the first time at key moments when they are needed to solve some immediate problem. And most are left behind, unresolved and partially used, falling forgotten into the background when the next page is turned. 

Many of Vinge's ideas are evocative of earlier works by other authors. Rainbows End draws, of course, from William Gibson's virtual realities and artificial intelligences. But there are also echoes of Neil Stephenson in the avatars that populate the net and the digitally dynamic nanotech "paper," not to mention the appearance of hundreds of thousands of mice as a key plot point. And white westerners lapsing into Asian languages always reminds me of Philip K. Dick.

I did like Vinge's idea of wearable computing (even if it is somewhat derivative of Neuromancer). But I found it preposterous that his characters could be doing so many things at once with their wearable computers without being completely catatonic. Vinge has them occasionally looking distracted for maybe a moment while they’re researching, reading, or silent messaging. But given how in real life people are unable to walk in a straight line while having a conversation on their smartphones, I don't think there's any way humans could be doing all that simultaneously without being totally zoned out and inattentive of the real world.

And his occasional descents into silliness come at just the wrong frequency and strike just the wrong note. They aren’t consistent enough to be Douglas Adams, and aren’t clever enough to be Connie Willis.

Book Review: Neuromancer

William Gibson
1984
Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Philip K. Dick
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

I am of two minds about this book.

On the one hand, I very much appreciate it. It is the very best in cyberpunk writing. It was groundbreaking and radical when it came out in 1984, and it still reads like a fresh, contemporary story today.

Gibson is great at taking abstract technical concepts like computer viruses, hacking, ROM constructs, and artificial intelligence and describing them so that you can picture them; so that they seem physically real. He does this for many things that were brand-new and almost inconceivable to most people at the time.

He also coined the term “cyberspace” and used the word “matrix” to describe the virtual environment of the internet, even though the internet didn’t really exist fully yet for most people.

Neuromancer is fast-paced and slick. People go swinging around the matrix at the speed of light and also zip around physical space very quickly as well; it’s no big deal to go from one end of the BAMA (Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis) to the other, even just for dinner.

Its characters have talents and body modifications adapted to this new environment. The protagonist, Case, is a cyber cowboy with an enhanced nervous system whose trade involves jacking into the matrix and hacking around stealing information. Case meets up with a number of colorful people, including Molly, a sort of mercenary who has retractable razor blades implanted under her fingernails (like Wolverine, although Wolverine actually came first) and high-tech mirrored lenses embedded over her eyes that give her access to all kinds of real-time information.

On the other hand, I don’t really like this world. It’s hostile. Everyone seems high on something most of the time. No one can trust anyone else and no one is sure if they’re on the right side. You can't ever be sure if what you’re looking at is real or a hologram. No one has a home; Case just rents various “coffins” (cheap tiny hotel spaces) to spend the night.

I don’t like Case or Molly or any of the people they run into (with the possible exception of Wintermute, who is actually an artificial intelligence and not a person).

I also don’t understand anyone’s motivation for doing what they’re doing (with, again, the exception of Wintermute).

The premise of the story is that Case used to be one of the best cyber cowboys out there, but he made the mistake of stealing a piece of information from an employer, who then fried his nervous system so he couldn’t jack into the matrix anymore. When a mysterious new employer needs someone to do the most dangerous, complex hacking job ever, they hire him to do it and are willing to pay for the extremely expensive operations required to fix him. Yet I didn’t think that Case ever really proved why he was so good (like, for example, Ender Wiggin proved over and over).

Case develops a romantic relationship with Molly, who has been hired by the same mysterious employer to be the muscle on the hack job. But they seem to get together just because they’re in the same place at the same time, not because they really are interested in each other.

Neil Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash, which came out in 1992, draws a lot from Neuromancer, both in its atmosphere and in its story line. But I liked the characters and the world of Snow Crash much more. 


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.