It's Book Reviews all the way down
Jun. 19th, 2007 09:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluegargantuaHi,
So last night I plowed through the rest of Recursion by Tony Ballantyne. The book was...not bad, but it shied away from a few things that might have been obvious, but were definitely suggested by what was going on in the book.
Right, so the book follows three different people in three different times (separated by 50-100 year time frames). In the past, we have Eva, a woman who's so overwhelmed by the nanny state of 2050 that she tries to kill herself. She winds up in a mental hospital and with a few other patients begins to investigate "the Watcher" they fear controls them. In the not so distant past, we have Constantine, a man with multiple intelligences in his head and a web of software that makes him invisible to society. He's a ghost working for a major corporation and he's engaged in some two-year, top-secret plan which is about to come to fruition. In the "present", we've got Herb. A bored rich kid who decides to terraform a planet with self-replicating Von Neumann machines. It goes wildly wrong and he's arrested by the Earth Authority and sent off to fight an evil AI that threatens the universe.
Each character gets their own chapter and they interleave the chapters (usually Herb, Eva, Constantine). I was tempted to just selectively read each person's story in chronological order and while I didn't, the book wouldn't have been drastically affected had I done so. But anyway, you see Recursion and self-replicating machines and advanced AI and personality constructs, and you expect a more Russian nesting-doll scenario. Totally didn't happen. Despite the name the story itself played out fairly "straight".
Herb's story is probably the strongest (or at least, it's the most interesting). Constantine's story is also pretty good and could make for a nice full-length novel with a few additional plot twists. Eva's is kinda lackluster. It asks a bunch of rhetorical questions and everyone else just shrugs by way of answer.
The book is a better than the back-cover blurb led me to believe, but it's not fantastic. Mildly recommended.
later
Tom
So last night I plowed through the rest of Recursion by Tony Ballantyne. The book was...not bad, but it shied away from a few things that might have been obvious, but were definitely suggested by what was going on in the book.
Right, so the book follows three different people in three different times (separated by 50-100 year time frames). In the past, we have Eva, a woman who's so overwhelmed by the nanny state of 2050 that she tries to kill herself. She winds up in a mental hospital and with a few other patients begins to investigate "the Watcher" they fear controls them. In the not so distant past, we have Constantine, a man with multiple intelligences in his head and a web of software that makes him invisible to society. He's a ghost working for a major corporation and he's engaged in some two-year, top-secret plan which is about to come to fruition. In the "present", we've got Herb. A bored rich kid who decides to terraform a planet with self-replicating Von Neumann machines. It goes wildly wrong and he's arrested by the Earth Authority and sent off to fight an evil AI that threatens the universe.
Each character gets their own chapter and they interleave the chapters (usually Herb, Eva, Constantine). I was tempted to just selectively read each person's story in chronological order and while I didn't, the book wouldn't have been drastically affected had I done so. But anyway, you see Recursion and self-replicating machines and advanced AI and personality constructs, and you expect a more Russian nesting-doll scenario. Totally didn't happen. Despite the name the story itself played out fairly "straight".
Herb's story is probably the strongest (or at least, it's the most interesting). Constantine's story is also pretty good and could make for a nice full-length novel with a few additional plot twists. Eva's is kinda lackluster. It asks a bunch of rhetorical questions and everyone else just shrugs by way of answer.
The book is a better than the back-cover blurb led me to believe, but it's not fantastic. Mildly recommended.
later
Tom
