Run Program by Scott Meyer (2017) review

Run Program will be released on June 20th, 2017

Run Program follows Hope Takeda, who works at a tech company as a lab assistant in an experimental A.I. development program.  The job is far less rewarding or stimulating than it sounds.  Or rather, it was, before the A.I. escaped.  What makes this different from any of the countless "A.I. on the loose" stories is that the A.I. (named Al) is the mental equivalent of a six year old human.*  His motives, personality, and intellectual abilities are akin to those of an average first-grader, if the average first grader could control airplanes with his mind and transfer vast sums of money through online banking apps.  Unsurprisingly, the government isn't too happy about this, and so begins the quest to locate and contain Al, who has plans of his own, dragging in everyone from disgruntled scientists, surprisingly profound soldiers, and a self-declared genius who has decided to call himself The Voice of Reason.

Run Program is a comedy, though not of the wacky Hitchhicker's Guide variety.  To get a feel for Meyer's sense of humor, you can check out his webcomic Basic Instuctions.  There's a lot of observational humor, and a lot of that is workplace humor, which isn't for everyone.  Really, go check out some of his webcomics.  I think that'll be the best indication of whether or not you'll like the book. 

* On a side note, the idea of raising an AI from childhood seems to have been getting more popular within SF in the last decade (and was handled extraordinarily well in Ted Chiang's 2010 novella, The Life Cycle of Software Objects).  Meyer doesn't go deep into the theoretical or technical background on this, but is more focused on the immediate impact of a child with practically unlimited power, and the odd results of that situation.

Review: Old Man's War by John Scalzi (2005)

Cover art: Donato Giancola

The bits I'd heard about Scalzi's Hugo nominated first novel suggested that it was your standard military scifi, with a twist:  In this society, it's the elderly who are sent to war, not the young.  This is a technically accurate description.

In Old Man's War, humans, represented by the Colonial Union, are just one of the numerous species seeking to colonize the far reaches of space.  Information from off-Earth is practically nil, and the CU isn't interested in sharing its technology, which is drastically superior to what's available on Earth.  The only way to travel the stars is to be a colonist (an option only open to refugees from the parts of the world that were nuked in a somewhat recent war) or to join the Colonial Defense Forces as a senior citizen.  Our protagonist, John Perry, does the latter.  If you're wondering how a military with a minimum age of seventy-five is able to function, the answer is simple.  Recruits' consciousnesses are quickly transferred to a souped-up clone of their younger selves (with a green chlorophyll tint and cat-like eyes, as well as enhanced strength, stamina, etc.).  So, a couple chapters in, and the old guys ain't old anymore.  They're still old on the inside, of course, though they could just as easily be forty or fifty as seventy-five.

The one thing Old Man's War manages to do exceptionally well is walk the line between escapist shoot 'em up fantasy and "war, what is it good for?"  The ethical considerations are present throughout, without themselves dominating the narrative.

Despite the novel premise, Old Man's War is a solid, but otherwise pretty run of the mill, military sf novel.  If you're a fan of that sub-genre, you'll probably like it.  If not, I'd recommend Joe Haldeman's The Forever War (1974) instead.

Rating:★★★☆☆

Another post about post-apocalyptic fiction

Last week, I wrote a post about the Guardian's article on the modern popularity of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic literature.  I recently read this article by NPR (titled "Does Post-Apocalyptic Literature Have a Non-Dystopian Future?"), which is worth a read, as it has some good info on the genre at the moment.  NPR's article is better than the Guardian's, because NPR at least realizes that Cormac McCarthy didn't invent post-apocalyptic fiction.  However, as good it managed to be throughout, NPR failed to stick the landing.  Their conclusion reads:

Post-apocalyptic books are thriving for a simple reason: The world feels more precariously perched on the lip of the abyss than ever, and facing those fears through fiction helps us deal with it.

Really?  More "precariously perched...than ever?"  More so than, oh, let's say the Cuban Missile Crisis and the height of the Cold War?   Which was pretty close to the publication date of Shute's On the Beach (1957), Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle (1963), Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Jackson's The Sundial (1958), Ballard's The Wind from Nowhere (1961) and The Drowned World (1962), Boulle's Planet of the Apes (1963) or Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964). Quick question: besides the Kubrick movie, what do all of these have in common? Answer: They were SF/Horror novels. Hey, you know what wasn't mainstream in the 1950s and 1960s but is now? SF/Horror novels. There are more apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic novels now because authors aren't worried about no one being willing to buy them, or of being pigeonholed in a marginalized genre. 

What McCarthy did was prove that there was a market for post-apocalyptic fiction that wasn't firmly nested within the market for science fiction and horror.  The NPR article, and much criticism in general, thinks that popularity of a genre must be due primarily to the culture surrounding it, and to that culture only.  There's a lot to be said about why we like post-apocalyptic literature, and there's plenty to be said about what types of post-apocalyptic literature we read now, as opposed to 50 years ago.  The problem that NPR and the Guardian both have is that they look at the rise in popularity of post-apocalyptic fiction, and start with the assumption that there is something about this generation's experience that makes them more prone to writing/reading about the end of the world than were the generations before us.  It ignores that popularity is in no small part dependent upon availability, which is itself dependent on popularity.  

But even with all these caveats, it seems odd to give McCarthy sole credit for sparking this trend.  In the same year The Road was published, we also had Max Brooks' World War Z, Stephen King's Cell, Will Self's The Book of Dave, the TV show Jericho and the movie Children of Men.  And that's coming on the tail of Spielberg's The War of the Worlds, The Dawn of the Dead remake, Atwood's Oryx and Crake, part of Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Vaughan's Y: The Last Man, 28 Days Later, The Matrix trilogy... and this is only going back to the beginning of this century and ignoring the countless genre potboiler post-apocalyptic novels.

Review: Old Twentieth by Joe Haldeman (2005)

Joe Haldeman is best known for his fantastic SF novel The Forever War (1974) which won both the Hugo and Nebula for best novel.  He's and SFWA grandmaster, with five Nebulae and five Hugos (Hugii?) under his belt, the most recent for his 2004 novel Camouflage.   

Old Twentieth seems a synthesis of a few major speculative concepts. The first is a society that is practically immortal. You can set your age to stop advancing at any point you wish, and causes of death are limited to catastrophic injuries.  The second is an interstellar journey.  Eight-hundred volunteers in five ships embark on a thousand-year journey to a planet orbiting Beta-Hydrii.  The third is virtual reality, a fully immersive 'time machine' that will let you experience any year or situation within a safe construct.  The fourth is the rise of true artificial intelligence, in this case, that of the VR time machine, which may or may not be responsible when people begin to die while using it.  It's up to our protagonist/narrator, Jacob Brewer, a 200-something year old VR engineer to figure it out.  Before it's too late.    

Let me start with the positive.  There are numerous scenes from within the 'time machine,' depicting everything from a WWI battlefield, to a romantic encounter in Barcelona, to a day spent strolling through the NYC World's Fair.  These segments are fantastic and wonderfully written. Haldeman's writing is strong throughout, but really shines in these chapters.   

But as a whole, the novel was a letdown, especially compared with the quality of Haldeman's other works.  If you read the list of premises on thought it seemed like a bit too much, you might be right. Or rather, it was a bit much for the book's length.  None of the premises get dealt with in depth, and the book just shuttles through the plot.  For example:   

Immortality.  The novel gives the backstory that the Becker-Cendrek process was initially extremely expensive, leading to a massive civil war and culminating in the death of everyone not already immortalized.  The society that forms in the war's wake is pretty standard sci-fi futurism.  Population control via test-tube babies, cyber-ennui, etc.  The point being, beside some minor details, immortality isn't a significant factor in this culture.  They think of death the same way we do, it's just less frequent.  But in a society where the only cause of death is violent, couldn't death become obscene or taboo?  In a society where there is no death, might it be romanticized (I might draw some argument here, but the romanticizing of death in this society is no greater than it is in ours).   If the only cause of death is serious bodily damage, wouldn't a section of society become reclusive, the only thing standing between them and eternal life accident or malice?  Wouldn't there be a population of hedonists, with no need to worry about disease or health?  Would we have a society where individuals become so specialized communication becomes challenging, or would everyone be a Renaissance man, versed in science and the arts?  Instead of anything like the above, we get a pretty standard future-world, where people just happen to live a really-really-really long time.  

All in all, Old Twentieth was a fun read, but it bit off a lot more than it could chew. 

Ponies by Kij Johnson

One of my favorite contemporary short stories, and winner of the 2010 Nebula award for the short story, is "Ponies" by Kij Johnson.  You can read it here on tor.com or listen to a reading of it here.  (Sorry, audio player wouldn't embed.)