Neutron Star-Dense Cyberpunk, Hugely Influential, Hard to Digest Back in the 1980s, it was William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), Bruce Stirling's SchismNeutron Star-Dense Cyberpunk, Hugely Influential, Hard to Digest Back in the 1980s, it was William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), Bruce Stirling's Schismatrix (1985), Walter Jon Williams' Hardwired (1985), and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) that gave birth to the concept of cyberpunk, shaking things up by mixing dystopian themes with the latest technology extrapolation, early iterations of the internet, cybernetic enhancements, hackers, AIs, and so forth. And of course the excellent later cyberpunk novel Altered Carbon (2002) by Richard Morgan owes a huge debt. But of that group, Sterling's Schismatrix is actually a lot more, it really goes galactic and post-human and explores themes that of human genetic and technological advances that bring mankind closer to the singularity, again before that terms was bandied about so frequently. It apparently was a major influence of the SF creations of Alastair Reynolds and Charles Stross as well.
So it's a bit sad that this was the only full-length outing that Sterling wrote about his Shaper-Mechanist universe, along with a series of excellent short-stories written previously that are included in Schismatrix Plus, namely "Swarm", "Spider Rose", "Cicada Queen", "Sunken Gardens", and "Twenty Evocations". There was enormous potential to expand on any of the seething mass of ideas that are jam-packed into this small but ultra-dense novel that still feels like a serious of vignettes, brief glimpses of a cold and scary post-human universe, ala Alastair Reynolds.
While it gets full marks for its brilliant ideas, free-wheeling extrapolation, and diamond-hard prose, it is also almost unreadable at times, given how much is packed into such tight passages and episodes. There is also a lot of implausible far-future developments, and of course a severe lack of relatable characters just like William Gibson, but then again that is a defining characteristic of cyberpunk in my view, as it's fundamentally dystopian and often a warning of what might happen if we surrender ourselves to AIs, technology, and hyper-capitalism at the expense of our humanity....more
Another Foray into the Agora, Hayden's, Blood Sports, Corporate Intrigue, Classic Scalzi This is another story set in the near-future world of Lock-In,Another Foray into the Agora, Hayden's, Blood Sports, Corporate Intrigue, Classic Scalzi This is another story set in the near-future world of Lock-In, this time focused on a highly commercial blood sport called Hilketa too violent for normal humans to play, but just right for Hayden's Syndrome people to play virtually. It's got all the snappy/snarky/clever dialogue that is Scalzi's trademark style, and he remains really good at it. It's a fast-paced murder mystery, and also explores plenty of serious territory about disabilities - those with them and how they live in a society that may not understand or appreciate their difficulties and special abilities. It's got plenty of VR themes, all explored without any slowdown in narrative momentum. And of course this audiobook could not be narrated by anyone other than THE Wil Wheaton, the dynamic duo in action. It's practically guaranteed a John Scalzi book will entertain and enlighten, which is quite an impressive feat, and this one did not disappoint....more
Completely incomprehensible - either a work of genius, madness, or an overly-fertile imagination I've had this in paperback since WAAAAY back in the miCompletely incomprehensible - either a work of genius, madness, or an overly-fertile imagination I've had this in paperback since WAAAAY back in the mid 1980s when I was a teen, and for some reason I was always on the cusp of reading it and never got it. It was also because the audiobook was available cheaply that I gave it a go. Would love to say it was an incredible work of genius, and that I deeply regret not reading it much earlier - but that would be a lie.
It starts out as a post-apocalyptic far-future Earth survival tale, but from 1/3rd in it dives off the deep end, plunges into talk of wild and wooly cosmological god-minds, alien extra-dimensional beings, ancestral human consciousness, enhanced mental state mutations caused by out of control radiation, and THEN it gets more weird. The words started to flow across my ears in an unintelligible flow that I never recovered from.
I remember thinking that Philip K. Dick's Exegesis was some pretty out-there crazy-ass shit, but this book takes that and dumps it in the kiddie pool. You want the deep end, this is it....more
Elysium Fire: Solid Sequel to The Prefect Elysium Fire (2018) is the sequel to Alastair Reynolds’ The Prefect (now renamed Aurora Rising to designate iElysium Fire: Solid Sequel to The Prefect Elysium Fire (2018) is the sequel to Alastair Reynolds’ The Prefect (now renamed Aurora Rising to designate it as part of the PREFECT DREYFUS series), a complex and detailed police procedural set in the Glitter Band of his REVELATION SPACE series, set before the Melding Plague that destroyed the 10,000 orbitals that sported every conceivable political system, all run by real-time neurally-based electronic democratic voting systems that allow citizens to weigh in on each issue and decision on how to run their societies. This democratic utopia features few formalized rules among the orbital other than keeping the voting systems inviolate and this is enforced by a police force of Prefects based on the world of Panoply, armed with versatile “whip-hounds” in place of an armed military.
Many of the characters from the first book reappear, including Deputy Tom Dreyfus, fellow Prefect Thalia Ng, hyper-pig Sparver, their boss Supreme Prefect Jane Aumonier, and Aurora, the AI that goes psychotic in the first book. You can read this book as a stand-alone, but it makes much more sense to have read Aurora Rising first, and you’ll get even more if you have read the much later books in the REVELATION SPACE series, such as the main trilogy and Chasm City in particular.
This time around there is a mysterious plague appearing at random among citizens in the orbitals that overloads their cerebral implants and fries their brains. There appears to be no connections among the victims, as they are scattered throughout different parts of society and worlds. As Dreyfus and his colleagues investigate case after case, they struggle to find any meaningful leads to understand the source of the “Wildfire” virus.
Meanwhile, there is a new voice of discontent arising, a critic of Panoply named Devon Garlin, essentially a demagogue who claims that the Glitter Band orbitals have no need of the Prefects and encouraging to secede from the group and go independent. So Dreyfus and his fellow Prefects are racing against time to contain the Wildfire virus while also fending off the growing criticism of Garlin, who sows discontent everywhere he goes among the habitats, making the investigation that much harder.
There is also an important subplot in Elysium Fire about two twins, Caleb and Julius, who grow up in a strange family environment and appear to have telekinetic abilities to manipulate quick matter and, later on, polling stations, that most fundamental tool that underpins the Glitter Band’s democratic system. It is not clear what their connection is with the Wildfire or even the timeline they are operating in, so Reynolds keeps their significance to the main story wrapped in mystery even as he fills in their stories and it is only much later in the book that we start to understand who they are and the connection to the Wildfire plague, the AI Aurora, and the demagogue Devlin.
All the complex storylines do get tied up eventually, and the Caleb and Julius relationship gets a surprise reveal that I didn’t see coming. Like all Reynolds books, the storyline is complex and the overall tone is dark, and the characters are far more like real people with flaws and hang-ups and personal issues. Elysium Fire is narrated by John Lee, like all of Reynolds’ books, and his dignified British gravitas is a good fit for the tone of the books....more
Lock In: Great concept, good extrapolation, and fast-paced story Lock-In has an excellent concept, the outbreak of Haden's Syndrome, as described in thLock In: Great concept, good extrapolation, and fast-paced story Lock-In has an excellent concept, the outbreak of Haden's Syndrome, as described in the GR blurb above. In classic John Scalzi fashion, he then explores the concept in fairly rigorous detail, with his breezy style and snarky (sorry, I know the word is overused, but it works) characters. Much like Peter Clines or Michael Crichton, his stories are fast-paced, well-crafted, and very enjoyable. He puts a lot of effort into really imagining the implications of Haden's Syndrome, which is clearly illustrated by the novella at the end, Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden's Syndrome, which in the audiobook version is performed by a host of well-known narrators. I suspect Scalzi may have created that as part of creating the background of the story, but it certainly adds some verisimilitude to the backstory. Of course the main story is narrated by Scalzi's friend and SF community favorite Wil Wheaton, who does an excellent job as always. They are on the same wavelength and deliver a consummate and engrossing 10 hours of SF entertainment....more
Two Distopias, Gibson Style: Dazzling Ideas, But Readers Have to Do the Heavy Lifting I haven't read any William Gibson since his Sprawl Trilogy (NeuroTwo Distopias, Gibson Style: Dazzling Ideas, But Readers Have to Do the Heavy Lifting I haven't read any William Gibson since his Sprawl Trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) in the 1980s and The Difference Engine (co-authored with Bruce Stirling) in 1990. Since then I've known about his Bridge Trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties) in the 1990s and Blue Ant Trilogy (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History) in the 2000s, but while curious I didn't bite. From others I heard that he was focusing more on the social impact of technology and media on contemporary or near future society, and I wasn't in the mood for that at the time.
A voracious reader friend of mine said I really should give The Peripheral (2014) a try as it's both a near future dystopia in the 2030s set after a series of environmental disasters, wars, and overall deterioration in global societies and economies as an extension of existing trends, and a further future in the 2070s where very little is left of conventional societies, with only very wealthy enclaves and competing corporations, nanotechnology, and quantum tunneling that allows data communication with the past, creating new quantum continuums, named 'stubs" that can be exploited for profit etc.
Frankly, I've always found Gibson's books difficult to enjoy, both the characters and plot-lines, due to his lean, clinical, and cerebral writing style that only provides glimpses and sketches of a much larger, very complex world and storyline. He wants his readers to work to connect the dots on their own, think through the implications of new technologies and trends, and piece things together. It's very much the "throw them off the deep-end" technique, so really isn't suited to casual reading. His characters are often considered difficult to connect with, but I did think the main characters here, Flynn, Burton, Conner, Wilf, Cherise, and Lowbeer, are all well-developed and interesting.
The only problem is that I now only have the time & energy for audiobooks, and trying to keep track of events that was is a lot harder than print books. So it was only after I saw and enjoyed Amazon's drama series of The Peripheral that I decided to give this audiobook another chance. And the plot is still so complex that I had to read the Wiki entry to have any chance of keeping things straight. Is that the sign of a successful book when the reader needs a crib sheet and drama just to get a grip on it? Not sure, but the story and future extrapolation were certainly worthy of the drama treatment, even if many people will admit they could hardly understand what's happening~...more
The Dreaming Void: Good Start to a Follow-Up Trilogy in the Commonwealth Universe Much like the Commonwealth Saga, this is a very long, detailed, imagiThe Dreaming Void: Good Start to a Follow-Up Trilogy in the Commonwealth Universe Much like the Commonwealth Saga, this is a very long, detailed, imaginative, and sprawling epic space opera that involves dozens of characters, plots, advanced technologies, alien races, ancient galactic mysteries, nefarious plots and counterplots, all told in an engaging narrative that doesn't get bogged down in exposition like a lot of other hard SF stories. It's far more entertaining than the more grim future vision of Alastair Reynolds, to which Peter Hamilton is often compared to. The human characters here remain far more human than the cold post-humans of Reynolds, which sometimes strains credulity, as they regularly make contemporary cultural references and seem not so different from us, despite being set in a galactic society set in the 31st century, but that largely lies in how you would imagine future humans will be like.
The story is split into two main storylines, a fantasy-like coming of age story about Edeard, a young man coming into his own powerful telepathic powers in a medieval society, and another far more complex future narrative about the search for a Second Dreamer broadcasting dreams of a utopian world within the Void, a giant black hole that is steadily consuming the galaxy from the center outward. There are far too many characters and factions and plot lines to describe here, but suffice to say if you like complex world-building, far-future technologies and exotic and powerful alien species and AIs, you will be well entertained by this blockbuster trilogy.
Despite its length, I found this trilogy worth listening to in audiobook narrated by John Lee, and it provided me several weeks of engrossing listening during my daily tube commute....more
Feersum Endjinn: An eclectic far-future science fantasy mashup Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Sometimes a book has so many incredible elements Feersum Endjinn: An eclectic far-future science fantasy mashup Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Sometimes a book has so many incredible elements that it defies easy summary. Compound that with the fact that it shares themes with some of your favorite genre classics, and that it is written by the incredibly-talented Iain M. Banks, and you have the recipe for a very unique reading experience. As I read the story, I was forcibly reminded of some classic books in the genre, particularly Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars, Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and Anathem.
The most distinctive aspect of Feersum Endjinn (1994) is definitely the chapters narrated in phonetic spelling by Bascule the Teller, an amiable young man who is seeking a tiny talking ant named Ergates that was snatched away by a strange bird. His section begins like this:
Woak up. Got dresd. Had brekfast. Spoke wif Ergates thi ant who sed itz juss been wurk wurk wurk 4 u lately master Bascule, Y dont u ½ a holiday? & I agreed & that woz how we decided we otter go 2 c Mr Zoliparia in thi I-ball ov thi gargoyle Rosbrith.
Readers who’ve read Russell Hoban’s classic post-apocalyptic tale Riddley Walker will find this literary technique familiar, and it will either draw you in over time or turn you off completely. He seems to be speaking in a Scottish (or North London?) accent, and it’s very distinctive and charming if you can understand it.
Now I did a sneaky thing — I love listening to Iain M. Banks’ books on audio, but strangely some of his lesser-known titles (outside the best-known CULTURE novels like Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games, Use of Weapons, etc) are not available on US Audible, but are on UK Audible. Since my US Amazon account is linked to my Japanese Amazon account, I have access to UK Audible titles. It’s convoluted but so worth it, because I was able to get Feersum Endjinn, Excession, and The Algebraist that way.
Peter Kenny is the incredibly talented narrator of most of Iain M. Banks’ novels, and he has a mastery of a range of characters and British and Scottish accents, and perfectly captures Banks’ ironic and intelligent sense of humor. They complement each other so well, it’s a shame some of these titles are not available on US Audible. Kenny does such a brilliant job with Bascule, making him have a working-class humility and amiability, that Bascule has become one of my favorite Banks’ characters. And you get the added bonus of not having to read the phonetic spellings, if you don’t consider that cheating.
Feersum Endjinn is told from four alternating perspectives, and much of the pleasure of this book is slowly piecing together who the narrators are, what situations they face, a slow reveal of the very strange and complex world that surrounds them, and finally the ways in which they are connected, which all gets elegantly tied together at the end. One pet peeve of mine is that even the best written books sometimes have disappointing endings, so I was relieved to see the story resolved to my satisfaction. This is even more important for stand-alone novels.
So, being careful to avoid any spoilers, here are the main cast of characters:
Count Alandre Sessine VII, a military commander who has been killed numerous times, most recently by assassination. He awakes in the Cryptosphere, having lost his eighth and final real-world life, and now has eight virtual lives (which rapidly dwindle) to discover who has been plotting against him and why.
Hortis Gadfium III, Chief Scientist to the the King and Consistory. When she is contacted mysteriously with warnings that the Encroachment must be dealt with, her investigations bring her in conflict with the ruling powers and drags her into a struggle between the King and rival factions.
Asura is a mysterious woman reborn into the Fastness, who has amnesia but knows she needs to deliver a message, without knowing the content or recipient. Her existence becomes a threat to the ruling powers, forcing her to go on the run as she makes her way further into the inner regions of the Fastness.
Bastule the Teller is the dyslexic narrator whose main job is to dive into the Cryptosphere and retrieve lost information, often by interrogating stored personalities that have been dormant for millennia. He is also on a mission to find his tiny ant friend Ergates, and also becomes entangled with various plots as he delves deeper into the virus-infected chaos regions of the Crypt.
There is one more key character that looms throughout the story – the unimaginably vast Fastness itself, known as Serehfa. It is a massive castle-like structure that is built to a scale far beyond that of humans, and it is inextricably linked to the Cryptosphere itself. Here is a brief image:
At one end of the vast C bitten from the castle a single great bastion-tower stood, almost intact, five kilometres high, and casting a kilometre-wide shadow across the rumpled ground in front of the convoy. The walls had tumbled down around the tower, vanishing completely on one side and leaving only a ridge of fractured material barely five hundred metres high on the other. The plant-mass babilia, unique to the fastness and ubiquitous within it, coated all but the smoothest of vertical surfaces with tumescent hanging forests of lime-green, royal blue and pale, rusty orange; only the heights of scarred wall closest to the more actively venting fissures and fumaroles remained untouched by the tenacious vegetation.
The origins and workings of the Fastness have been lost in antiquity, ever since the Diaspora in which the builders left the world for unknown destinations, leaving a much more primitive populace to live within its mega-architectural confines. The Fastness and the Diaspora are strongly reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, two of my all-time favorite books, while the Cryptosphere feels much like the Metaverse in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and Asura’s story slightly reminded me of Princess Nell’s coming-of-age adventures with the Primer in Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age. Finally, the primitive guild-like Clan Engineers and baroque society left behind after the Diaspora reminded me of the monastic societies in Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, with their limited understanding of a much more advanced past, but who strive to carefully preserve that knowledge nonetheless.
The novel rotates its perspective between the four narrative threads, often not providing all the necessary details or leaving readers dangling at the ends of chapters, so the book does require careful attention, especially Bascule’s parts. It also spends much time flitting in and out of the virtual Crytosphere, which might have given it a cyberpunk flavor, but since the imagery and events in the Crypt often resemble a fantasy quest, the book feels much more like a far-future science fantasy along the lines of Gene Wolfe’s THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN or Jack Vance’s DYING EARTH novels.
Revealing any further plot details would simply ruin your enjoyment of this baroque and playful book. Although Banks is primarily known for his space opera CULTURE books like The Player of Games, Consider Phlebas, Use of Weapons, as well as non-SF novels like The Wasp Factory and Walking on Glass, I’ve found that every book of his I’ve read has been worthwhile, and Feersum Endjinn in particular was a treat....more
Chasm City: Gothic cyberpunk at its dark best Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Chasm City (2001) is the fourth Alastair Reynolds book I’ve read iChasm City: Gothic cyberpunk at its dark best Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Chasm City (2001) is the fourth Alastair Reynolds book I’ve read in his REVELATION SPACE series, though it is a stand-alone and a much better book. The main trilogy (Revelation Space, Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap) featured a lot of good hard SF world-building, but was heavily weighed down by clunky characters, dialogue, and extremely bloated page-count. While Chasm City is not any shorter at around 700 pages, it makes much better use of those pages with a fast-paced plot, complicated and dark but intriguing characters, and flashbacks that form a gripping story of their own.
The main elements that distinguish Chasm City from many other space opera and cyberpunk offerings is its unique “gothic cyberpunk” feel. This comes primarily from the Melding Plague that has attacked the Glitter Band of 10,000 space orbitals that inhabit the Epsilon Eridani system. This civilization, though we never see it much, brings to mind the decadent future milieu of Iain M. Banks’ CULTURE novels. The Melding Plague is a nano-tech plague that attacks advanced technology and morphs it into a bizarre and degenerate conflation of organic and mechanical life.
As a result, the quasi-utopian civilization of the Glitter Band has been reduced to a Rust Belt of decimated orbitals taken over by ruined buildings, machinery, and habitats that have taken on strange and gothic shapes that continually change on their own volition, a seething organic-mechanical landscape that has reduced the high-tech world of Yellowstone and its capital city of Chasm City to a post-cyberpunk melange of low-tech, twisted and crumbling buildings, feral tribes of bottom-dwelling humans that occupy the Mulch, and more powerful elites that live in the Canopy above and occasionally hunt the unfortunates of the Mulch for entertainment.
The environment of Yellowstone strongly recalls the decaying post-apocalyptic worlds of J.G. Ballard’s The Crystal World and The Drowned World, along with elements of the dying earth riot of plant-life profusion of Brian Aldiss’ Hothouse. Everywhere we see signs of decay and collapse, as the machinery that mankind has painstakingly developed over centuries rebels against humans and taken on a life of its own. The use of low-tech also resembles the post-fossil fuel future society of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl.
This is blended with a very dark cyberpunk tale of revenge centered on Tanner Mirabell, a former military operative who leaves Sky’s Edge to pursue a man named Reivich who killed the woman he loved but who was also his former boss wife. It’s a complex web of intrigue and hard-boiled revenge, much in the vein of Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon, and like many of Reynolds’ characters, there is not much to like about these people, who are mostly cold, obsessive, and ruthless. This whole sub-genre was pioneered by William Gibson in Neuromancer, but Reynolds has put a new spin by subjecting his cyberpunk world to the corroding influence of the Melding Plague. It’s definitely a subversive and enticing concept.
Chasm City also has a fully-developed sub-plot that involves Sky Haussmann, a man who is a member of a fleet of generational starships that is heading to colonize a new world. He begins as an ambitious but sympathetic young man, but through various events he starts to make decisions that take him to the dark side, as he morphs into a power-hungry individual who seeks to take over the starships and destroy his rivals. This could have been done simply through flashbacks, but Reynolds again does something different. He introduces his Sky episodes via flashbacks by Tanner Mirabell, who has been infected with an “indoctrination virus” that causes him to recall memories of Sky Haussmann as if they were his own. This virus seems to have been created by a cult that worships the vilified Sky, who was crucified for the crimes he committed centuries earlier.
Reynolds deftly interweaves the memories of Sky Housemann with the slowly returning memories of Tanner Mirabell. As we learn more about both characters, we also begin to realize that both Tanner’s story, Sky’s crimes, the generational starship mission, and the Melding Plague itself are linked in far more byzantine ways than we initially thought. As if that weren’t enough, Reynolds introduces a series of plot twists in the final third of the book that force us to rethink what has come before. I’m not sure if all the plot elements and motivations really make sense, but I loved the dark stew of narratives that bring into question every aspect of Tanner’s identity and memories. It’s definitely worth untangling again in a future reading, and I’m so glad that Chasm City showed me what has appealed to his large fan base, since I was not convinced by the REVELATION SPACE trilogy.
John Lee as always does a solid job on the narration — he is well suited to the dark tone of the book and has chemistry with Reynolds ' work. I’ll be moving on to the The Prefect and House of Suns next with a much more positive outlook....more
Ready Player One: The best 80s gamer geek trivia romp yet written Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Were you a hard-core nerd or geek in junior hiReady Player One: The best 80s gamer geek trivia romp yet written Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Were you a hard-core nerd or geek in junior high and high school in the 80s? You know, the ones who clustered at the library or at benches far from the jocks and cheerleaders, who thrilled at quoting lines from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, War Games, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Short Circuit, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Blade Runner, Legend, Dark Crystal, Krull, Star Trek, Conan the Barbarian, etc. The nerdy, awkward, pimply guys with the Members Only jackets and calculator watches whose closest contact with girls was ogling female goddesses in the Deities and Demigods Handbook. Or worse, an uber-nerd who was so uncool that even the other D&D guys wouldn’t accept you – not ME, of course, but A FRIEND, you know. Or perhaps you were a girl equally into the same pop references. I’m sure you knew the kids who were so good at arcade games that they could win them on a single quarter (I mastered both Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace to the point I would go through the moves in the car on the way to the arcade with my eyes closed). Yeah, I’m talking to you, now in your late 30s and early 40s, who have grown into upstanding citizens with real jobs and responsibilities. This book is especially for you, so set aside those income taxes and yard work and read something fun!
The story revolves around Wade Watts, a teenager living in a resource-depleted dystopian future in which the impoverished masses retreat into the giant shared virtual-reality called OASIS, much of which is devoted to enshrining all those precious geek moments from the 1980s. It seems a bit implausible that a virtual-reality MMORG in the year 2044 would feature many planets devoted largely to obscure 80s game trivia (like whole worlds devoted to games like Centipede or Joust, or Flock of Seagulls music videos), but that’s because the creator of the OASIS, James Halliday, was a huge devotee of 80s pop culture. It’s also true that with infinite virtual real estate, no matter how obscure the subculture or reference, you can find enough devotees to create an online community. The more I think about it, the more it sounds like the otaku subculture that Japan is famous for. But seriously, if you question the central conceit of the story, then it just doesn’t hold up. So it’s better to just go along with Ernest Cline, because he will not disappoint.
Wade Watts spends all his time in OASIS and barely cares about the real world, so he’s a bit overweight and out of shape. But in the OASIS, he has a cool avatar and is a well-respected “gunter,” or “egg hunter,” one of millions who make it a full-time pursuit to discover the Easter Eggs planted by Halliday throughout the OASIS. Halliday has declared that he will bequeath his entire estate, including the OASIS itself, to whoever can find the Easter Egg (i.e. Holy Grail) he has planted, but only by following a series of ever more obscure keys to unlock it. Gunters have been feverishly searching for years, but when Wade becomes the first to discover the first three keys, this brings him to the attention of the Nolan Sorrento, an executive of an evil multinational that wants to control the OASIS for profit. Initially he approaches Wade with offers of riches and fame, but when this is rebuffed, he turns into a classic villain stereotype and tries to wipe out Wade and his friends.
This triggers a lightning-paced adventure as Wade and his gamer friends race from one key to the next, each one increasingly difficult, trying to stay ahead of Sorrento and his army of corporate minions who imitate his every move and have huge financial resources at the their disposal, while Wade and his crew have to keep one step ahead in the physical world as well. Each key gets more and more difficult, which allows Cline to drop increasingly obscure and hilarious 80s geek trivia into the story. The book’s pace never really lets up, and is entertaining up to the very end, which is fairly rare for the typical door-stoppers written these days.
Is it plausible as a likely future outcome? Not really. Is it incredibly entertaining and addictive? Absolutely. If you lived through those times, you will enjoy this book like none other. Every time you think he can’t possibly come up with another, more obscure reference that only you could possibly remember, he drops a name (Zork and Battlezone come to mind) that even I had forgotten the existence of for almost three decades. Ernest Cline is an expert on 80s nostalgia, but what can he do for an encore? Is he a one-trick pony? We’ll find out very soon since his new novel Armada is coming in July, and is supposedly based on The Last Starfighter.
I listened to the audibook narrated by Wil Wheaton, fondly remembered as Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation. He is absolutely perfect for this book, with that knowing fanboy voice. I can’t imagine anymore more suited to read it, and he actually gets a little shout-out in the book if you’re listening carefully.
BTW, I’d like to ask our readers in their teens and 20s who’ve read Ready Player One: not having lived through the 80s, did you find these pop references interesting or not? I’d think full enjoyment really hinges on that, but would like to hear your opinions....more
Reamde: MMORG techno-thriller for geeks who love quirky infodumps What else would you expect from Neal Stephenson when he does a techno-thriller. It's Reamde: MMORG techno-thriller for geeks who love quirky infodumps What else would you expect from Neal Stephenson when he does a techno-thriller. It's not some airport newsstand throwaway, this is a mega-novel with a universe of diverse and three-dimensional characters such as Chinese hackers, game developers, Russian mobsters, British spies, Al-Quaida jihadists, crooked businessmen, right-wing survivalist nut-jobs, etc, all bound up in an ultra-complex techno-thriller plot that ranges across the planet and the virtual territory of T'Rain, a MMORG that is central to the characters and plot and that is deeply engrossing in its own right.
There are two kinds of Neal Stephenson book in my opinion: sprawling info dumps packed with fascinating characters, intricate plots, and laced with quirky humor and erudite discussions of unexpected topics -wait, that's just one type! The difference is some are really entertaining, and others are unbearably annoying and unreadable. The good ones for me are Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, and Diamond Age; the unbearable ones are Anathem and Seveneves (pretty sure the Baroque Cycle would fall into this group too if I weren't already forewarned to avoid it). I'd say Reamde belongs in the good group as well, though it doesn't have quite to philosophical depth of the others, but is certainly as entertaining....more
Redemption Ark: Promising ideas ruined by excessive page-count Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Redemption Ark (2002) is the follow-up to RevelatRedemption Ark: Promising ideas ruined by excessive page-count Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Redemption Ark (2002) is the follow-up to Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds’ debut novel and the second book in his REVELATION SPACE series of hard SF space opera in which highly-augmented human factions encounter implacable killer machines bent on exterminating sentient life. The first entry had elements of Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Iain M. Banks’ CULTURE novels, Peter Watt’s Blindsight, Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon, and even some Lovecraftian elements for good measure. There were plenty of good ideas, detailed world-building and post-human technological modifications, but the characters were cold and unappealing, and the pacing was glacial.
Redemption Ark is the middle book of main 3-book REVELATION SPACE sequence (Chasm City and The Prefect are stand-alone novels set in the same universe), and unfortunately this book shares the same weaknesses as the first book, which is why I settled on a 3-star rating. Despite lots of promising concepts and tantalizing glimpses of the remorseless and powerful Inhibitors, the majority of this very long book (694 pages) is wasted on the protracted conflict involving Nevil Clavain, a defector to the Conjoiners (telepathically-linked hive-mind humans who rarely act like it); Skade, a militarily-trained Conjoiner whose mission is to retrieve the “hell-class” weapons that have been stolen from them; Antoinette Bax, a Demarchist who allies with Clavain when he splits with the Conjoiners; Ilia Volyova and Ana Khouri, two carry-over characters from Revelation Space who control the Nostalgia for Infinity, a ship that has become fused with its captain John Brannigan after being infected with the nanotech Melding Plague; an autistic Conjoiner named Felka who comes in mental contact with the terrifying Inhibitors; and Galiana, the founder of the Conjoiners, who has been absent for decades on a deep-space mission but carries both an alien consciousness and (maybe, just maybe) some hints for human survival.
All the elements are here for a rip-roaring hard SF space opera, and perhaps with a much more ruthless editor this could have been possible, but instead we get a glacially-paced story much like the previous offering, where characters talk, debate, scheme, and speculate for about 70% of the book, with just 30% of real action and plot-progression. This is a common complaint of mine, but it seems like this has actually been SF readers’ preference over the last decade or two, based on the book length of hard SF practitioners like Alastair Reynolds, Peter F. Hamilton, Stephen Baxter, Vernor Vinge, Kim Stanley Robinson, Dan Simmons and Iain M. Banks. So perhaps I’m in the minority here, but I don’t see why brilliant SF ideas and characters can’t deliver a great story in just 300-400 pages. I often wish I was given remit to edit these books down to that length, travel back in time, and read the trimmed-down versions instead. Just wish-fulfillment, alas.
In any case, what I found most frustrating about Redemption Ark (besides the generally unconvincing distinctions between various classes of post-humans who all seem to think and behave fairly similarly despite their supposed differences) is that at least 300+ pages are devoted to an interminable struggle to get control of the “hell-class” doomsday weapons of mysterious origin. Supposedly made by Conjoiners sometime in the past, exact knowledge of who made them and how has been lost, what they can do is unknown, and no new ones can be created.
As Clavain and Slade chase each other across known space, continually trying to wrest control of the weapons cache by subterfuge or force, the reader is left wondering what the point of all this is. After all, we know at the end of Revelation Space that the ultra-powerful and utterly-remorseless alien machine-intelligences known as Inhibitors are intent on destroying all sentient space-faring races, having successfully done so countless times over hundreds of millions of years. So it’s crazy that the various factions of super-intelligent humans hope that a handful of doomsday weapons can be used against them. But it doesn’t take advanced neural implants and hyper-intelligence to know that these weapons are as likely to harm them as a sling-shot is to destroy the Deathstar. But that is exactly what they assume, even as the Inhibitors begin some very-ominous terraforming activity in human-occupied space that are obvious preparations for wiping out the human vermin they have been alerted to.
There is also the matter of Daniel Sylveste, the scientist from Revelation Space who might have access to ancient alien knowledge that could help humanity to combat the Inhibitors. Well, despite almost 700 pages, we learn absolutely nothing about his fate. Ditto for the alien Shrouders and Pattern Jugglers, two fascinating species that play no role in this book. Clearly they are being saved for the final book, Absolution Gap, but I would have appreciated even a few teasers. At this point I am far too invested to give up, as I do want to know what happens to humanity against seemingly impossible odds, but I have little confidence that the final installment will improve on the weaknesses of the first two books.
I listened to the audiobook, which is narrated by John Lee, who does most of Reynolds’ books. This time there were fewer scenes featuring characters with Russian or Eastern European accents, so it was easier to follow than Revelation Space. Still, I took a number of very long walks to finish off this book, and chances are I would have given up if I were reading it in print form....more
Permutation City: Bursting with ideas about artificial life, virtual realities, digital consciousness, etc Originally posted at Fantasy Literature PermPermutation City: Bursting with ideas about artificial life, virtual realities, digital consciousness, etc Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Permutation City (1994) won the John W. Campbell Award and is probably Greg Egan’s best-known book. It is a very dense, in-depth examination of digital vs.physical consciousness, computer simulations of complex biological systems, virtual reality constructs, and multi-dimensional quantum universes. Yeah, pretty intimidating stuff. In fact, it was so over my head the first time I gave up in defeat. Then it started to bother me - such mind-boggling ideas were worth another attempt. So I listened to the book again and…I think I got some of it. The final third of the book is still beyond my comprehension, but the first two thirds present two carefully-described ideas that are worth examining - Dust Theory and the TVC universe. Piqued your interest? If so, read on.
Permutation City details attempts in the mid-21st century to create an artificial universe based in the Autoverse, a computer-generated environment where digital copies of wealthy people can enjoy a limited form of immortality in virtual reality. Most books would be content to go with that, but Egan is just getting started. Mysterious entrepreneur Paul Durham is pitching to aging millionaires a far-superior and more secure version of the Autoverse, and also hires solo programmer Maria to create a digital simulation of the early conditions on Earth that gave rise to life. He is stingy with the details, but Maria needs the money to help her ailing mother, so she signs on.
The only way for Paul to test the quality of the digital copies of his clients’ consciousnesses is to try it on himself. But each time he makes a copy, they choose to terminate themselves almost immediately. After numerous tries, he decides to remove their bailout option, forcing a copy of himself to remain “alive” and cooperate with him to further the project. This bears a superficial resemblance to Robert J. Sawyer’s The Terminal Experiment, but that book took the cheap Michael Crichton techno-thriller route, whereas Permutation City is exponentially more intelligent and ambitious.
During his experiments with his digital copy, he discovers that even if he rearranges the chronological order of distinct slices of the copies’ consciousness, his copy still experiences events in an internally-consistent way that defies expectation. There’s no was for me to explain it, other than to quote the text:
Now he was…dust. To an outside observer, these ten seconds had been ground up into ten thousand uncorrelated moments and scattered throughout real time - and in model time, the outside world had suffered an equivalent fate. Yet the pattern of his awareness remained perfectly intact: somehow he found himself, “assembled himself” from these scrambled fragments. He’d been taken apart like a jigsaw puzzle - but his dissection and shuffling were transparent to him. Somehow - on their own terms - the pieces remained connected.
Imagine a universe entirely without structure, without shape, without connections. A cloud of microscopic events, like fragments of space-time … except that there is no space or time. What characterizes one point in space, for one instant? Just the values of the fundamental particle fields, just a handful of numbers. Now, take away all notions of position, arrangement, order, and what’s left? A cloud of random numbers.
But if the pattern that is me could pick itself out from all the other events taking place on this planet, why shouldn’t the pattern we think of as ‘the universe’ assemble itself, find itself, in exactly the same way? If I can piece together my own coherent space and time from data scattered so widely that it might as well be part of some giant cloud of random numbers, then what makes you think that you’re not doing the very same thing?
Is your mind completely blown at this point? I had to read this through these passages several times, attempting to process them. Only by transcribing this was I able to grasp the idea. It may be completely outlandish, but I give Egan kudos for sheer daring. It is a variant of quantum mechanics, but goes a full step beyond that by postulating that the universe can and does take shape from pure randomness each and every moment of our subjective existence. What was he taking when he came up with that? I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen that in hard SF of the time, as this was written back in 1994.
He labels this bizarre concept Dust Theory, and this forms the foundations for an even more dazzling idea, that of the Turing-von Neumann-Chiang (TVC) universe. Again, this is subject matter enough for another book itself. The only way to explain this is to quote Egan again at length:
There’s a cellular automaton called TVC. After Turing, von Neumann and Chiang. Chiang’s version was N-dimensional. That leaves plenty of room for data within easy reach. In two dimensions, the original von Neumann machine had to reach further and further - and wait longer and longer - for each successive bit of data. In a six-dimensional TVC automaton, you can have a three-dimensional grid of computers, which keeps on growing indefinitely - each with its own three-dimensional memory, which can also grow without bound.
And when the simulated TVC universe being run on the physical computer is suddenly shut down, the best explanation for what I’ve witnessed will be a continuation of that universe - an extension made out of dust. Maria could almost see it: a vast lattice of computers, a seed of order in a sea of random noise, extending itself from moment to moment by sheer force of internal logic, “accreting” the necessary building blocks from the chaos of non-space-time by the very act of defining space and time.
By this point Egan had either excited computer science and quantum physics geeks into paroxysms of pure ecstasy, or driven liberal arts majors running screaming in the other direction. Initially I just couldn’t get it, but after transcribing it, I find it makes some sense if you accept the initial assumptions (a big if, of course). But believe it or not, this is still the halfway point of Permutation City, and things get EVEN MORE MIND-BOGGLING as it proceeds. The question arises of whether the TVC universe is infinite or will collapse from entropy as most theorists expect of our own universe. Paul Durham’s answer is:
The TVC universe will never collapse. Never. A hundred billion years, a hundred trillion; it makes no difference, it will always be expanding. Entropy is not a problem. Actually, ‘expanding’ is the wrong word; the TVC universe grows like a crystal, it doesn’t stretch like a balloon. Think about it. Stretching ordinary space increases entropy; everything becomes more spread out, more disordered. Building more of a TVC cellular automaton just gives you more room for data, more computing power, more order. Ordinary matter would eventually decay, but these computers aren’t made out of matter. There’s nothing in the cellular automaton’s rules to prevent them from lasting forever.
Durham’s universe - being made of the same “dust” as the real one, merely rearranged itself. The rearrangement was in time as well as space; Durham’s universe could take a point of space-time from just before the Big Crunch, and follow it with another from ten million years BC. And even if there was only a limited amount of “dust” to work with, there was no reason why it couldn’t be reused in different combinations, again and again. The fate of the TVC automaton would only have to make internal sense - and the thing would have no reason, ever, to come to an end.
In Part Two, the story jumps forward in time, to after the TVC universe, now commonly known as Elysium, has been created and six thousand years have passed internally. Moreover, the artificial life that Maria set the initial conditions of, called Autobacterium Lamberti, has gone through billions of years of virtual evolution using the unlimited computing power of the TVC universe, resulting in an entirely new intelligent species. They are insect-like, group-minded, and increasingly inquisitive about their world. However, they are unaware of the creators, humanity, or that their world was created by artificially.
As they start to investigate the founding principles of their world, Paul Durham and Maria become concerned that their experiments will threaten the fundamental principals of the TVC universe, due to a very byzantine thought process that suggests, to the best of my understanding, that it is the understanding of a given universe and its physical laws and properties that determine those laws and properties. So as the Lambertians begin to examine their world more closely, they are undermining the laws set in the Garden-of-Eden configuration. Here are some excerpts:
I think the TVC rules are being undermined - or subsumed into something larger. Do you know why I chose the Autoverse in the first place - instead of real-world physics? Less computation. Easier to seed with life. No nuclear processes. No explanation for the origin of the elements. I thought: in the unlikely event that the planet yielded intelligent life, they’d still only be able to make sense of themselves on our terms. It never occurred to me that they might miss the laws that we know are laws, and circumvent the whole problem. They haven’t settled on any kind of theory, yet. They might still come up with a cellular automaton model - complete with the need for a creator.
We can’t shut them down. I think that proves that they’re already affecting Elysium. If they successfully explain their origins in a way which contradicts the Autoverse rules, then that may distort the TVC rules. Perhaps only in the region where the Autoverse is run - or perhaps everywhere. And if the TVC rules are pulled out from under us…
What a fascinating question - what happens when the artificial life you’ve created starts to investigate its own origins? Will it guess correctly? Or make up its own explanations, religious or otherwise. Flipping the perspective from the created to the creator is just one of the many mind-expanding ideas that Egan seems to have in endless supply.
The end of the book involves Paul and Maria’s efforts to make contact with the Lambertians and convince them that they are indeed creations of humans, and that they should believe in our universe’s laws in order to maintain them. It was pretty difficult to follow this part, even after two listens, but if you could understand Dust Theory and the TVC universe, then perhaps this will make sense to you as well. My mind was somewhat overwhelmed by this point, but I can’t say for sure if it’s the fault the writer so much as my own ability to understand. While many books may have more entertaining characters or plots, Permutation City is one of the most ambitious explorations of digital consciousness, artificial life, and the fundamental assumptions behind our quantum universe that I have ever encountered. It’s not an easy read, but it will expand your mind.
Notes on the Audible version:
Just as he was for Quarantine, narrator Adam Epstein really is hopeless, especially his atrocious Australian, German, Italian, Russian, and Chinese accents. It would be one thing to do all those accents in the most stereotyped and insulting way possible, but he somehow manages to switch accents for the SAME CHARACTER mid-dialogue. It’s like a painful sketch on Saturday Night Live. Sometimes I was reduced to tears of laughter hearing how awful they were. It makes me wonder if he modeled his accents on the bad guys in action movies. He also regularly mispronounced words. Of the many cringe-worthy mistakes he made in this book, I laughed the most at his misreading of “causal structure” as “casual structure”. However, it’s not surprising that his audiobooks are just $1.99 each, but it’s really a disfavor to Greg Egan’s work. In the end, I would probably appreciate Permutation City much more if I had read the Kindle version (which is only $2.99). I still might not fully understand it, but at least I can do better accents....more
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