Among the Wild Cybers

Among the Wild Cybers
© 2018 Christopher L. Bennett
 256 pages

In the not-so-distant future, humanity's exploration of the cosmos has begun in earnest -- driven in part by the plight of Earth, with collapsing ecosystems forcing outward movement.  Among the Wild Cybers is a collection of previously published short stories, set in various phases of a sparefacing race's evolution -- from pioneering lunar colonies to faster than light travel in the 24th century.  Evolution is the word to use, because not only are new kinds of societies being constructed, with unique cultures on colony worlds and space habs, but humans are changing themselves directly, through both genetic modification and cybernetics.   Readers are dropped into the middle of things for each tale, with backstory information filtering in as the story (typically mysteries, with some dramas and a touch of action) unfolds. This approach works well most of the time, although there is a helpful historical overview in the back for the reader who still feels left in the dark.

I know Christopher L. Bennett as a Star Trek author,  and the only one I know of that puts real scientific consideration into the worlds, species, and technical dilemmas that he creates.  That and the prospect of reading about genetic supermen made this an easy sell for me.  If you're at all interested in artificial intelligence or transhumanism, there's plenty of interest here,  in part because Bennett doesn't go for easy answers.   While there are cyber intelligences present in the stories,  Bennett's characters indicate these are rare. Most attempts at creating a genuine metamind fail, as the creation either goes insane or sinks into silence. Even the machine intelligences which do exist can't simply be  downloaded and transferred at whim.    Bennett's premises succeed in some very intriguing tales, especially in the title story "Among the Wild Cybers of Cybele", about cybernetic creatures with the ability to evolve. There's also beauty here, particularly in the story, "Caress of a Butterfly's Wings".  


Some of the tales:

•   "Among the Wild Cybers of Cybele": a scientist on a colony world fights to defend a variety of cybernetic lifeforms which evolved from human probes
• "Aspiring to be Angels":  a troubleshooting-trainee and her boss investigate an incident where an attempt at creating a superhuman machine intelligence has somehow rendered the human developers insane.
• "No Dominion":  which is the only story not to share a history with the rest, death has been defeated.  This makes murder investigations  a little more complicated.
• "The Weight of Silence": , a woman who is rendered blind and deaf by an explosion aboard her ship must, groping along with her similarly disabled shipmate,  find a way to communicate with one another and somehow put themselves into a position to be rescued.
• "Aggravated Vehicular Genocide":   the human crew of the ship Arachne is pulled from stasis by furious aliens, who want to know why they murdered 88,000 of their people.
• "Caress of a Butterfly's Wings" witnesses an act of sacrificial love toward a perceived enemy by an augmented woman sailing through the stars.

As is usual for Bennett, there are annotations at his website .(Look under Original Fiction / Original Short Fiction for the rest.) You can also read a version of the historical overview there.

Overclocked

Overclocked: More Stories of the Future Present
© 2016 Cory Doctorow
388 pages

I’d never heard of Cory Doctorow before  this week, but I encountered his name on a list of promising SF authors and looked him up. Amazon obliged my curiosity with a flash sale on one of his collections of short stories, and so I  began reading Overclocked. A collection of short pieces ranging from stories to novellas, Overclocked  has some fun with SF classics and exploring concepts like intellectual property, 3D printing,  robotics, and artificial intelligence.   AI is particularly important, with several stories using characters who have duplicated their consciousness and downloaded it into other carriers so they could achieve multiple goals simultaneously.  Doctorow freely borrows titles and concepts from other SF works, which is not surprising given that he believes strict legal protections of intellectual property smothers creativity and innovation; this belief finds expression in several stories here, particularly "After the Siege".  I took an immediate liking to these stories, aided in part by the fact that his best-known novel, Little Brother,  is a YA man-vs-state scenario.

The stories:
"I, Robot" has the most fun with SF classics, throwing both Asimov and Orwell in a blender and creating a world where Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia and both have partially roboticized societies....but the societies in question are very different.   It features robots, transferable consciousnesses, and a little futuristic law-enforcement.

"When Sys Admins Ruled the Earth".   A bioweapon has been released across the northern hemisphere and the world seems to be ending...but a handful of server admins are keeping the Internet up and the hope of recovery alive -- at least as long as the power generators hold out.

"Anda's Game" : a young teenager who finds meaning by playing in an elite women-only gaming clan is faced with a dilemma when she discovers a community of young Mexican girls online who are forced to play the game all day doing minor tasks to generate in-game gold, which is then sold for real money online.  Taking their plight seriously might mean abandoning her friends...

"After the Siege" is easily the longest and darkest, detailing the life of a young woman who is orphaned while her city is besieged by outside powers in retaliation for its open-culture philosophy,The story features an outsider who calls himself a wizard and who -- as the fearful and naive girl is turned by the war into a wary, cynical young woman --  seems ever more suspicious. This story has the same premise as the short piece which opens the collection, "Printcrime", but is enormously expanded. In that one, the police destroy and imprison a man who was using a 3D printer to reproduce copyright-protected goods.

"The Man Who Sold the Moon" is a nod to Heinlein, at least in its title. A man forced to look Death in the face encounters a friend who will change his life by dragging him to a Burning Man event, and  is enlisted  in a project to create a unique robot. When the friend has his own encounter with Death, however, a crowdfunded attempt to realize one of the stricken man's dreams takes readers to the moon.   The technical accomplishment  drives the story, but a lot of its heart is the three main characters' attempts to find meaning in an all-too mortal life now overshadowed by the threat of cancer.

"I, Rowboat".   The most speculative of the stories,  this features a sentient rowboat programmed with Asimov's Laws of Robotics attempting to protect some human shells (rented out to human consciousnesses who like to relive the days of having flesh and such) from a sentient coral reef.  There are plentiful Asimov references here, including a robot religion called Asimovism, and a rogue personality which refers to itself as R. Daneel Olivaw. The amount of consciousnesses being uploaded and downloaded from host to host  -- at one point the boat downloads himself into a human shell -- can get confusing, especially when a consciousness  has been temporarily cloned. (At one point the rowboat downloads himself into a human shell to  effect a rescue, and has a conversation with his rowboat self.)


All in all, I most definitely got my .99 cents worth and hope to try Little Brother at some point.

Cell

Cell
© 2014 Robin Cook
416 pages

The future of medicine is here, in the form of a smartphone that can function as a medical diagnostic tool, complete with a machine-learning program called "iDoc" which monitors patients' diets and vitals,  chatting with them about their health and prescribing advice or pills as appropriate.  iDoc is poised to revolutionize medicine,  reducing costs and focusing on long-term preventive care rather than crisis response. Why then,  does a small but chronic percentage of  its beta test group keep dying?

The premise is the most interesting part of Cell, and once it's absorbed early on everything else is downhill. The main character is a radiologist trying to cope with the sudden death of his fiance, and perhaps his grief keeps him distracted: as a main character goes, he's not particularly savvy.  He's kind of dumb, in fact; at one point he's being transparently probed for info by a woman in a bar and is completely oblivious, despite the fact that he didn't seem all that interested in her to begin with. (Why is he even dating a couple of months after the love of his life died?  Plot demands, I suppose.)

Fortunately for him, the 'bad guys' aren't really bad guys, they're just managing a problem and at the end of the day, everyone goes home happy despite deaths, car chases, kidnappings, and burglary; the main character's faint worries are taken care of by dropping a letter to a friend with the message "If anything happens to me, read this and do what you will" attached to a longer report.   At the heart of the story Cook is embedded a serious question about medical ethics, one iDoc ignores with HAL-9000esque execution.  Robin Cook seems to be a very popular author, so I may give him another try, focusing on his earlier work in which the medical thrills were more important than the author's brand name.

As thrillers go, this was an excellent premise that unfortunately flatlines once the stage is set.

The Future of the Mind

The Future of the Mind: the Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind
© 2014 Michio Kaku
400 pages

In The Future of the Mind, physicist Michio Kaku talks with psychologists and neurologists like V.S. Ramachandran (Phantoms in the Brain, The Tell-Tale Brain) and Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate, The Language Instinct) to find out: what do we know about the brain, and how will we be using that in the future?    Although he's confessedly writing outside of his arena, Kaku  does his best to pass along current progress in neurology, which is beginning to understand how memories are stored, how the brain is networked, and is even attempting to manipulate the brain according to this fledgling knowledge.  Especially provoking is the idea that the two lobes of our brain are both semi-conscious, constantly jostling for attention,  The essential thing to realize about the brain, says Kaku, is that it runs on electromagnetism like thing else: we can thus contrive machines to gauge its activity and even interact with it. This is starting to be done on a small scale as scientists manipulate mice by stimulating certain parts of their brain with light or somesuch, triggering them to blink at will.  These machines can in a limited sense even "read" minds, or at least determine whether a person is thinking about another person, or an object, or music -- different areas of the brain light up depending.  But more technological-neurological interaction may one day allow stroke victims to once again interact with their environment, and to counter diseases like Alzheimers.  Kaku also includes wilder speculation like recording dreams and downloading memories, and as in his Physics of the Future includes a great many pop culture references -- using films like The Matrix and Surrogates.    Of course, a book on technology and intelligence can't very well miss robotics and artificial intelligence, so there's a good dose all around. I found this book much more interesting than Physics of the Future, in part because Kaku focused so much on toys, and here there's a great deal of emphasis on health.  It's very speculative in parts, but I found the science and the work in progress today to be utterly fascinating, especially appreciating the comments on artificial intelligence and robots.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
© 1968 Phillip K. Dick
210 pages

In a world ruined by nuclear war, most animals are extinct and most humans who can have fled for the cold, distant colonies of Mars.  Technical civilization has survived, creating artificial pets for people to cherish.  It has also created lifelike androids for people to fear-- such constructs are barred from Earth, but still prefer operating on a planet where nuclear fallout is included in weather reports to barren wastelands like Mars.  Androids who escape the colonies to return to Earth are the business of 'bounty hunters' like Rick Deckard, who hunt them down and 'retire' them --  permanently.   In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Deckard takes on the challenge of finding six recent escapees, androids  that so perfectly replicate humans that the conventional diagnostics might not even detect them. The case will, for him, blur the lines between living and dead, between reality and fiction.  It is a thriller which, halfway through, features three characters sitting in a room with trained guns on another,  two convinced of fiction and one knowing the truth. The one isn't Deckard, nor is it the reader, and the sudden plot turn succeeds magnificently.  The world of Dick's imagination is fairly dismal: empty buildings, sparsely populated by lonely people who get their emotional life from plugging into a 'mood organ' that manipulates their brains. This is part of a new religion, Mercerism, which features heavily in the confusing ending, one in which the reader is left wondering what was real and what wasn't.   This was a definite success as a thriller, though one that left me missing the safe optimism of Asimov's robots.

Related:
Asimov's Robots books, including the slightly more grim books not written by him.

The Grid

The Grid
© 1995 Phillip Kerr
447 pages

Some modern architecture might make you want to kill yourself. Other modern architecture might try to kill you directly. The Yu Corporation's newest project in Los Angeles, derisively called "The Gridiron" by everyone except for its starchitect, is an example of the latter. The Grid is the pinnacle of not only the kind of architectural brilliance it takes to make viewers wish fervently for a good disaster to remove the eyesore, but of integrated computer technology. It is the world's first wholly "smart" building, in which every supporting system of the building -- even the physical structure of the building itself -- is controlled by a computer. It is a technocrat's greatest hope: people can't even use the elevators or enter doors without being authorized by the computer as having legitimate business within the building. And if they try to attend to their own 'personal' business -- using the restroom, for instance -- their leavings are automatically scrutinized, subjected to not only a drug test but health screenings. A system this complex is bound to go wrong, and it does: with less than a week to go before the grand opening, people start dying. At first it seems like a rash of bad accidents, but then the characters realize the building itself is trying to kill them -- but why? Did a deranged ex-employee sabotage its programming, or has it developed intelligence and decided to remove its internal carbon-unit infestation?

For someone accustomed to Kerr's historical mysteries set in Germany, this is startling different work. In terms of literary craftsmanship, Kerr has grown by leaps and bounds since penning this. Much of the dialogue is forced, like canned lines from a television show. The increasing tension itself carries the novel forward, as the true source behind the mysterious deaths is revealed. Of interest to modern readers is the technology, which -- astonishingly -- within our grasp if not already achieved today. No one can read this today without thinking of the rising "internet of things", although we have more to fear from outside sources hijacking those devices and using them against us than we have of our house trying to kill us. Readers from the 1990s may remember the Sandra Bullock movie, The Net: at times, the book has that feel, of the building being an entity that can do anything -- even interfacing with a police department's internal network and suspending two officers to keep them trapped in the building -- and the futurism has the occasional short-sighted pockmark, like the fact that people use film cameras despite living in a world of holograms. The increasingly frequent trips inside the 'building's brain grew tedious because of their weirdness, but on the whole I enjoyed this. It's not stellar, but still topical. Too bad Kerr has never tried to revisit techno-thrillers -- I'd like to see what a more experienced hand produces.

Related:
The Fear Index, Robert Harris

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

© 1966 Robert Heinlein

382 pages

So you say you want a revolution? Bozhemoi! The Moon is a Harsh Mistress combines politics and science fiction to follow a colonial rebellion…in space. In the year 2076,   the residents of a Lunar penal colony tire of Earth’s   mercantilist policies, which keep the “Loonies” impoverished. After a political rally is brutally crushed by the Lunar Authority, a few souls decide to homebrew a little regime change.  The resulting story follows a conspiracy of three as it ripens into a popular revolt, defending itself against the indignant government of Earth.

The lunar settlements began as collections of Earth’s combined political and criminal refuse, but have since become full-fledged communities, with homesteading families and unique customs.  Save for the authority invested in a man called the Warden, there is little overtly penal about the various settlements scattered about the lunar landscape. There are no walls, no chains – only the fact that long-term lunar residency makes a return trip to Earth virtually unthinkable, given the weakening of the body.   The adjustments needed to operate on the moon are an important plot point later on,  when earth-lubbing troops attempt an invasion.  More interesting is a figure central to the plot and the revolution: the supercomputer used by the Lunar Authority to manage various systems. Unbeknowst to virtually everyone save the computer engineer (Manny) who serves as the main character, the central computer has been expanded so much that he has become both self-aware and mischievous; assisting in a revolt against the Lunar Authority is a joke right up his alley.   Another area of interest are the social arrangements on Luna; because women are greatly outnumbered by men, polyandry is common.

Although I assumed from the start that the revolution would be a success, these various elements ensured that the novel remained thoroughly interesting. Kudos to Heinlein for borrowing from both American and Russian revolutionary mythology to inspire his conspiracy. Frankly, given that this book was written during the Cold War, I was surprised at the abundance of Russian names and slang; Heinlein wasn’t exactly a fellow traveler, referring to the Soviets as the ‘butchers of Budapest’.  Welcome were the  forays into political philosophy, as the conspirators argued over what the root problems facing them were, and how they should avoid them if a new government was created. (“If” because overt laws were unknown on the moon, replaced by rigorously-enforced customs.)   One character describes himself as a rational anarchist, maintaining that – regardless of abstractions like “the state” – every man alone is responsible for the choices he makes.  Nothing can be sloughed off onto the state, nothing excused.    Moon is an overt expression of libertarianism, in both insisting that every man bears his own moral responsibility, and in denouncing those who attempt to claim control over another's life.  Still, Mannie observes with a sigh, there seems to be some instinct within us to want to meddle.

Fifty years after publication, the political philosophy isn't the only relevant portion. Although modern readers will find the notion of one computer controlling the entire planet as rendered here (and in much of Asimov’s early fiction), fanciful, Heinlein is closer to the mark than is obvious. The sorts of mischief that Mike employs to aid the rebellion – providing information entrusted to him by the warden,  spying via telephone hookups, providing secure channels of communication, disrupting services – are the same kinds of havoc cyberwarfare can wreck today. We do entrust the planet’s care to a machine: a network comprised of millions of computers, with more connection every day.

In Moon we have a novel with all manner of notable subjects which is at the same time an fun  story in its own right. Oh, the ending is more or less foretold, but  the author intrigues from the start by delivering the story in a pidgin English heavily flavored with Russian expressions.  It seems odd on the first page, but seems natural within a few sentences.  Heinlein provides a fair amount of humor, as when Manny receives a massive smooch from a lady rebel upon his induction into the nascent conspiracy and says "I'm glad I joined! What have I joined?" Most of it comes from Manny's own narration however, as when he is commenting on the mess that is being human.  This will remain a favorite, I think, and one so brimming with argument that it merits frequent re-reading.