“Just thinking out loud . . . How smart’s an AI, Case?”

“Depends. Some aren’t much smarter than dogs. Pets. Cost a fortune, anyway. The real smart ones are as smart as the Turing heat is willing to let ‘em get.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd AUG 21, 2011)

One of the rare books to wear the coveted triple-crown of science-fiction, winning all three major prizes in the genre (the Hugo, Phillip K. Dick, Nebula awards), as well as being included on Time Magazine’s 1995 list, “All TIME 100 Best Novels,” it isn’t hyperbolic to claim that William Gibson’s 1983 classic, Neuromancer, is a must-read in our world of ubiquitous WI-FI, 24-hour connectedness, and the Blue Brain reverse engineering project, a world in which a recent Time magazine cover claimed The Singularity would be upon is in less than 40 years.

If  you – like me – are late to this party, and haven’t yet read this book, you’ll find it hard to believe it was published in 1983, and you’ll undoubtedly see the influence that it has had on a number of later works. Let me put the publication date in perspective: I was 5 and played Space Invaders on a Commodore-PET computer at school and it was almost a decade and a half later before I surfed the net (on dial-up, no less) or, even, had an email account. So I can’t imagine how Neuromancer – a book about hackers who jack into cyberspace and troll the matrix, essentially a virtual reality representation of all computers, and their data-structures, linked on a global network– was received in a 1983 world of Commodore computers.

Case is a “data-thief,” a hacker for hire, who loses his ability to jack into “a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix” when he makes the “classic mistake” of stealing from his employer during one of his runs. His punishment: forced administration of mycotoxin, the ensuing neurological damage locking him out of the matrix, a devastating punishment for a man who “lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace.” High on amphetamines and suicidal, Case scours black-medicine clinics in Chiba City, Japan, which has become, with its “poisoned silver sky,” a “magnet for the Sprawl’s [an eastern seaboard megacity that spans from Boston to Atlanta] techno-criminal subcultures.” That is, until he’s picked up by Molly, a street samurai, with silver lenses “surgically inset, sealing her sockets” and retractable scalpels embedded under her nails, who takes him to see her boss, Armitage .

Armitage, a former Special Forces soldier, has a job for him. He promises to repair Case’s neurological damage if he agrees to work for him. To ensure his complete co-operation, Armitage has time-sensitive sacs of the mycotoxin inserted into his arteries: if Case completes his assignment, Armitage will have the sacs removed; else, the mycotoxin will be released, his neurological restoration undone. Much to his chagrin, Case is given a new pancreas to boot – one that renders him insensitive to the amphetamines he was partial to. Faced with the prospect of living in his “prison of flesh” without the option of pill-popping escape, what choice does Case have but to agree?

But before he can get started on the actual job, Armitage needs a piece of hardware – a recording of McCoy Pauley’s consciousness, a legendary hacker, and one of Case’s mentors. The Dixie Flatline construct—McCoy Pauley survived brain death, or flatlined, three times while jacked into the matrix, hence his nickname, and the moniker for his construct– is locked away in the corporate headquarters of Sense/Net in Atlanta. With the help of a group of cosmetically modified radicals called the Panther Moderns, Case and Molly prepare to break into Sense/Net to steal the construct; they’ll need the Dixie Flatline’s expertise for the actual job. Rigged with a device that’ll allow him to toggle into a “simstim” stream of Molly’s “sensorium” while inside the matrix, Case will infiltrate Sense/Net’s security systems, breaking through the Intrusions Countermeasures Electronics, or ICE, to facilitate Molly’s passage through Sense/Net headquarters.

While things at Sense/Net don’t go exactly as planned – a riot breaks out; Molly breaks her leg – they succeed in lifting the construct, and so the group is off to Istanbul to retrieve the last member of their team, a heroin-addicted sociopath who gets off on betraying people, with a surgical implant that allows him to project images onto other people’s retinas – Peter Riviera.

But Case still doesn’t have any idea what they’re really up to or who Armitage really is. According to his research, there’s no record of Armitage being a part of Screaming Fist, a US military operation that sent US soldiers to infiltrate Russia on a doomed mission in order to glean information about the EMP weapons they knew the Russians would use to thwart the attack. And so, Molly has the Panther Moderns investigate Armitage: turns out he takes his orders from Wintermute.

Wintermute, an Artificial Intelligence, has been orchestrating the gig from the get-go, and now that its team is assembled, it arranges for them to fly to Freeside, a Vegas-like space resort that orbits Earth. Freeside is owned by a rich and mysterious family, the Tessier-Ashpools. No Tessier-Ashpool stock has been traded for more than 100 years, and it is rumored that the family – both original members and clones – exist in a state of cryogenic slumber in their labyrinthine space-station mansion, Villa Straylight, awaiting the time when technology renders man immortal.

Wintermute is housed somewhere in Villa Straylight, as is his AI sibling, Neuromancer. Two parts of super-intelligent entity, they were built with barriers between them to keep the Turing police, the law-enforcement body that regulates the construction of AIs, from destroying them. But to ensure their eventual consolidation and evolution, Wintermute was built with a single, overriding desire – to merge with Neuromancer. However, many non-digital safeguards were put in place, and in order for the fusion to happen, someone must speak a password into a console located somewhere in Villa Straylight. While Case breaks through the ICE that separates Wintermute from Neuromancer, Riviera and Molly will have to convince the only member of the Tessier-Ashpool family not in cryogenic freeze, 3LadyJane, to give them the password. If all goes according to plan, the two entities will fuse, creating an autonomous super-intelligence.

Believe it or not, this is a necessarily superficial sketch of a quite complicated plot, but for all its nuances and drama, I couldn’t get caught up in the suspense of it all: I was too impressed by Gibson’s enviable imagination, and it’s to his credit that the book never feels overburdened by detail. While, for the most part, the characters don’t rise above being clichés of the genre, this is an intelligent meditation on the conditions of autonomous intelligence.

Questioning the conditions of autonomous intelligence, or for lack of a better word, personhood, is as old as human society and has had many moral implications, from granting (and denying) women political participation to the emancipation of slaves, and I suspect in years to come, the ways in which we answer this question will be used to argue for (or against) the rights of machine intelligence. And yet, even as I type this, part of me balks at the assumption that machine intelligence, the kind of intelligence that deserves constitutionally entrenched rights and freedoms, is even possible. Although Turing’s famous test for machine intelligence is quite clear, I can’t ignore my resistance to the claim that any machine that behaves indistinguishably from an intelligent consciousness is an intelligent consciousness. Reading this book forced me to examine why that is: what about our minds am I so reluctant to admit might be reproduced in silicone?

In the current state of things, our brains are phenomenally superior to the best computers not in terms of memory, but of adaptability and processing power. The ways in which we learn and assimilate information is far more sophisticated than the way even the “smartest” computer program learns now. The Dixie Flatline construct, essentially a ROM construct, is not really alive, not really an autonomous intelligence, precisely because it cannot learn or adapt to new material.

In fact, it is the restriction of this capacity, the capacity to bring together information stored in disparate parts of the brain, that renders Armitage so unstable. As it turns out, Armitage did participate in Screaming Fist, known then as Colonel Corto. The sole survivor, Corto was physically and psychologically shattered. Wintermute first makes contact with Corto in a psychiatric hospital in Paris when he’s assigned to a computer-based rehabilitative program. Wintermute essentially constructs the Armitage personality around Corto’s broken psyche. The result is a personality with limited access to itself, and hence, limited assimilative and adaptive capacity, resulting in something more like an automaton, as Case notices, little more than “a statue.”

When Case asks “where had Corto been all those years,” he’s asking an age-old question about the nature not just of consciousness, but of our selves. While prostitutes, or “meat puppets” are able to disconnect the connection between their minds and their bodies, a neural cut giving a computer chip temporary control of their bodies– women literally objectifying themselves – in a way that suggests consciousness is strictly neurological, the language Mr. Gibson uses to describes Case’s experience in the matrix – “disembodied consciousness” – and the descriptions of Case’s consciousness piggy-backing on Molly’s experience through the simstim rig are more suggestive of embodied souls – Cartesian ghosts in the machine – than neurologically reductive consciousness.

And just as Case prefers the freedom and bliss of disembodied consciousness, Neuromancer, with its own stable personality, prefers solitary existence to the restrictive loss of self it believes merging with Wintermute would entail. But as the emergent Neuromancer/Wintermute super-intelligence suggests, the two are better together; and perhaps for all its advanced technology and autonomous Artificial Intelligences, Neuromancer really is a humanistic book; perhaps in encouraging Case to get emotionally involved in his work – to find his hate –Wintermute is pushing him to draw on his dual natures, rational and emotional, pushing him to be paradigmatically human.

At the end of all this, the Wintermute wins, and a superintelligent entity is born, one that is “the sum total of all works, the whole show.”  I, like Case and the Tessier-Ashpool matriarch who designed it, can’t really imagine what such an intelligence might be, but if Ray Kurzweil is right, and this day will soon be upon us, I look forward to one thing, the same thing that surprised and pleased me about this book: whatever a conscious AI entity looks like, whatever its motivations and character, whatever fortunes or calamities it spells for mankind, it will undoubtedly answer some of the important philosophical questions about what exactly it is to be human in this all too physical world.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 505 readers
PUBLISHER:	Ace Trade (July 10, 2000)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	William Gibson
EXTRAS:	ExcerptWikipedia on Neuromancer
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Zero History Spook Country Pattern Recognition

Bibliography:

• Neuromancer (1984) / / 
• Count Zero (1986)
• Burning Chrome (1986)
• Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988)
• The Difference Engine (co-authored with Bruce Sterling) (1990)
• Virtual Light (1993)
• Idoru (1996)
• All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999)
• Pattern Recognition (2003)
• Spook Country (2007)
• Zero History (2010)

Movies from books:

• Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

“What does the gentleman think I will do with his extra baht?’ she asks. “Buy a pretty piece of jewelry? Take myself to dinner? I am property, yes? I am Raleigh’s.” She tosses the money at his feet. “It makes no difference if I am rich or poor. I am owned.”

Book Review:

Review by Kirstin Merrihew (MAY 14, 2010)

Unlike much of the world, the Thai Kingdom had avoided inundation by the rising oceans. It had avoided pandemic decimation of crops and population. It had kept the global agri-corporations from accessing and either exploiting or destroying its vast and precious seed banks. It had taken drastic, isolationist steps to preserve itself while most of the rest of the world faltered into massive contraction and potential extinction.

The white shirts of the Environment Ministry enforced the official policy of the Child Queen’s regime, burning fields and villages if genetic blight or plague struck, conducting customs inspections of the expensive goods imported on dirigibles and confiscating and destroying even items supposedly protected by large bribes. And, “mulching” any windups they discovered.

Windups — also called New People — were bio-mechanically engineered creatures from Japan that could pass for human beings except that their everyday movements were jerky — reminding natural people of windup toys. Emiko was one of these windups; she had been imported to Bangkok and was, by constitution, submissive: she had been designed to obey, submit, and please. Her current “master” was neither Japanese nor Thai; he was Raleigh, a Westerner whose “club” was bar, opium den, and bordello among other things. Emiko, who in severely underpopulated Japan would have been valued and accepted, was basically a slave and “genetic trash” here.

Emiko caught the eye of Anderson Lake, a representative of AgriGen, a so-called “calorie company,” i.e., one of the multinationals that had a stranglehold on genetically modified grains and other foodstuffs which were being sold at exorbitant prices to other starving nations. He ostensibly ran the SpringLife factory that produced next-generation kink springs which were commonly used to power items that had formerly run on oil. Lake’s factory employed not only Thais and “yellow card” Chinese refugees but also, on the dangerous manufacturing floor, towering elephantine megodonts with four tusks that sometimes rampaged. Lake’s factory was more of a sham than a real enterprise, however. His true preoccupation was trying to ferret out the top secret storage sites of the Thai seed banks and to do whatever he could to shift high officials away from isolationism and toward free trade. Lake hoped Emiko could become a valuable informant, but he also found himself vulnerable to her trademark silky skin and sexual charms, complicating both of their existences.

Meanwhile, Jaidee, the Tiger of the white shirts, a fervent believer in guarding his country’s borders and long-term survival, misjudged the changing political winds in the Kingdom. Accused by his superiors of overstepping his authority, he was made a scapegoat by those aligning for a crucial showdown regarding the country’s future. The immense pressure on the Kingdom to open itself to “free trade” and to “share” its seed bank with the world might crush Jaidee, not to mention Hock Seng, a scheming yellow card Chinese employee of Anderson Lake’s, and…Emiko.

Emiko had heard rumors of a place to the north where other New People had a community of their own, and she wanted to escape Bangkok and find her own kind. But as the city became a powder keg waiting to be lit, she got more, not less, entangled with Lake, Raleigh, a genetic scientist, and other mercenary or exploitative examples of humanity. She also discovered hidden strengths (and aggressions) within herself she’d never guessed at before. Would Emiko affect the entire course of history in the Thai Kingdom? Or would that be left to others, and would she end up as a bystander, a witness to ecological disaster?

The Windup Girl vividly depicts a dystopian future ushered in by radical climate change and the reckless depletion of our natural resources as well as mismanagement and “generipping” of our crops and other food sources. Paolo Bacigalupi invents a scenario that one hopes is not too prescient but which compellingly grabs the reader and doesn’t let go. This, Bacigalupi’s first novel (he had previously written award-winning short stories), creates characters and plot with assurance that builds immediate and continued reader confidence in the integrity of the unfolding story. His characters are blemished, greedy, ambitious, and ruthless. They often act “badly” but as one might expect in their unforgiving environment. The world in which he enfolds them leaks disease and death but continues to display irrepressible human ingenuity. Bacigalupi’s future is one where science’s interference with nature has led Mankind to the brink. Emiko and the other windups represent one tangent of scientific development that might outlive human beings, and although the idea of articifial “life” surviving us isn’t a new idea, Bacigalupi’s version teams with innovative perspectives about her construction and status. Although Emiko is reasonably accused of having no soul. the author convinces the reader that she possesses an inner life and has a survival instinct at least as insistent as that of any natural person.

This novel is a 2010 Hugo Award nominee — along with five others. Looking at the list through my own bias for science fiction that deals with space travel and alien civilizations in other star systems, I noticed a trend this year with a bit of a jaundiced eye: most of the nominees were about a dystopian future/fantasy earth. I’d hoped for more subject matter breadth. But when I read the publisher’s summary of The Windup Girl, it wasn’t to be passed up. Whether it actually wins the Hugo or not, this novel is visionary, gritty, cautionary and highly intelligent. It definitely ranks in the top echelon of science fiction. Bacigalupi is a great and already polished talent, and I expect many more terrific (but maybe not quite so terrifying) tales from him.

Editor’s note:  The Windup Girl has won the Nebula Award and tied for the Hugo Award. It has also been chosen as Time Magazine’s book of the year.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 233 readers
PUBLISHER:	Night Shade Books (April 20, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Paolo Bacigalupi
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of another 2010 Hugo and Nebula Award Nominee: The City and the City by China Mieville And another 2010 Hugo Nominee: WWW: Wake by Robert J. Sawyer

Bibliography:

• Pump Six and Other Stories (2008)
• The Windup Girl (2009)
• Ship Breakers (2010)
• The Alchemists (2011)
• The Drowned (May 2012)

“The murderer ran left, into a smaller alley, where still I followed him. He was fast. He was faster than me now. He ran like a soldier. The distance between us grew. The stallholders and walkers in Besz stared at the killer; those in Ul Qoma stared at me. My quarry vaulted a bin that blocked his way, with greater ease than I knew I would manage. I knew where he was going. The Old Towns of Beszel and Ul Qoma are closely crosshatched: reach their edges, separations begin, alter and total areas. This was not, could not be, a chase. It was only two accelerations. We ran, he in his city, me close behind him, full of rage, in mine.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Kirstin Merrihew (AUG 15, 2009)

Think of the now-passed-into-history segregated American South where Caucasians and African Americans, then called Negroes, lived in the same cities and towns but attended different churches and schools, sat in different areas in theaters, used different doors and water fountains, and often ignored one and other when walking down the same streets. Think once-enforced apartheid in South Africa. Or think of Berlin while the Wall separated it and Belfast’s volatile Protestant/Catholic duality.

The citizens of the city states Beszel and Ul Qoma in China Miéville’s The City & The City live in a somewhat similar situation: they co-exist on the same land, but they have separate facilities and they go to extremes to “unsee” the “foreign” co-residents of mutual geography somewhere in Eastern Europe, perhaps in the Baltic. Beszel and Ul Qoma could be fantasies for how Croats and Serbs might prefer to live if the topographical superimposition of two architecturally distinct cities were actually feasible.

Certainly Miéville devotes large chunks of his novel to attempting to persuade the reader to buy into this state of affairs under which the Besz and the Ul Qomans drive on the same streets but just “avoid” each other, where they speak distinct languages (Besz and Illitan), dress differently, and respectively tip their cultural hats to Slavic and Turkish influences.

From birth forward the citizens are indoctrinated to be politically correct, not merely in speech but in what they see and hear; in their entire sensory filtering system. They learn to identify only their own kind and winnow out and discard input from the other city, especially in the “crosshatched” areas where the two cities intersect most energetically.

Ul Qomanhas accepted some international assistance to modernize and expand its economy,while Beszel remains modest and underdeveloped.

The official and only legal means of transiting between the two cities is at Copula Hall, where, as with the famed Checkpoint Charlie in divided Berlin, each side has its own border guards and scrupulously regulates immigrants and visitors.

No resident of either city seems to know why there is such a strict separation between them and what precisely maintains the division. Is it predominantly the rigid conditioning (one might say, the brainwashing) of the citizens? Or is there something more, something preternatural, that holds the dual structure in place?

An ancient, common precursor civilization has tantalized some archeologists with a few bits of evidence, and there is a small group of unificationists who want to erase the longstanding separation. They are, of course, opposed by the “nats,” or nationalists, on both sides who desire to retain the status quo, fearing that a union would eliminate the cultural differences they cherish.

But all these groups are restricted in the extent to which they may act by a mysterious entity called “Breach.” First of all, Breach only takes jurisdiction if someone in one city has “breached” the other. In other words, if there is proof that someone in Beszel deliberately focused on someone or something located in Ul Qoma, he or she would be in “breach,” a crime that Breach would deal with by removing that offender, probably permanently, from the cities. The same, naturally, applies to Ul Qomans who might breach Beszel. The actual fate of those removed is kept secret from the cities’ populaces,increasing the aura of impenetrability surrounding Breach. The cities’citizens aren’t really sure what Breach is, but since Breach moves onto breach crime scenes with what seems nearly whirlwind speed and serves as judge, jury, and “executioner“ of sentence with unquestioned authority, the general impression among ordinary people is that Breach may be something supernatural that preserves and protects the cities…perhaps having emerged with the cities from the Precursor Era.

Reading the early parts of The City & The City, Breach’s nebulous, ominous,omnipotent feel reminded me a little of the smoke monster on television’s Lost. Tim Powers’ 2001 novel, Declare, a mind-bending genre crosser complete with a fearsome, superhuman “guardian angel,” also crossed my mind. All three “entities” emanate dark, enigmatic retributive powers that don’t lend themselves to readily logical explanations. As a Councillor on Beszel’s Oversight Committee notes, “ ‘Breach is an and I say it again alien power, and we hand over our sovereignty to it at our peril. We’ve simply washed our hands of any difficult situations and handed them to a — apologies if I offend, but — a shadow over which we have no control. Simply to make our lives easier.’ “

In terms of the exercise of police powers, Breach also summons thoughts of the old Soviet KGB and other totalitarian systems’ secret police. Or of the old South’s KKK. The residents of Besz and Ul Qoma must constantly be on guard that if they slip up, focus on something forbidden too long, or speak to the wrong person, Breach will descend on them without warning, arrest them, and whisk them awayforever.

But Breach, some Besz and Ul Qomans theorize, could be a manifestation of a legendary third city — between the other two –called Orciny. A Besz, Doctor Bowden, wrote abook entitled Between the City and the City during the psychedelic ’70s in which he laid down an “occult thesis” asserting the existence of Orciny. But later he did a Galileo and publicly recanted. Not surprisingly, some thought he protested too much when he denied Orciny. One such, apparently, was a young American archeology post-grad named Mahalia Geary, who traveled first to Beszel but them became a resident of Ul Qoma, to study the early history of the area and Precursor artifacts. She also got caught up in pursuing “the legend” of Orciny.

Which brings us to the opening of The City & The City. Besz Extreme Crime Squad Inspector Tyador Borlú gets called to the murder scene of “ [a] young woman, brown hair pulled into pigtails poking up like plants. She was almost naked, and it was sad to see her skin smooth that cold morning, unbroken by gooseflesh. She wore only laddered stockings, one high heel on.” I’ll leave you to figure out who this is, just as the inspector must, but he starts off with far fewer clues….

Borlú is the first person narrator throughout this novel. It falls to him to describe the twin cities so that the reader can picture their odd dichotomy and symbiosis. He (actually, Miéville, of course) doesn’t always pull it off. I suppose the author wants to reveal the cities’ fantastic existence gradually, but his reticence clouds the concept in places. However, ultimately one does understand, in principle but not in practice, how the cities co-exist.

Anyway, Borlú and his f-bombing female constable, Lizbyet Corwi, investigate the murder, leading them to some archeology students, “nats,” Mahalia Geary’s defiant parents, and onward. Borlú then crosses the border into Ul Qoma where he “partners” up with Senior Detective Qussim Dhatt who, judging by his foul language, is a virtual “twin” to Corwi. Borlú must adjust to reversing his customary focus: Ul Qoma is suddenly “in” and Beszel is “out.” He also needs to get used to being only a consultant in Ul Qoma; his own police powers are suspended there. The questions become: Will Borlú solve the woman’s murder? Will his sense of duty, justice, or moral outrage impede or enhance his chances of avoiding breach behavior while in alien Ul Qoma? Will he discover any bombshells about Orciny or Breach? And will his life be forever changed as a result of any of these?

The fact that Corwi and Dhatt are so similar deserves a little more discussion. Although I would have preferred another means of demonstrating mirror image between citizens of the two city states (because I prefer characters who show off a less limited vocabulary), their interchangeability underlines a symbolic aspect to this novel. Here are two cities held apart with iron determination, yet clearly their citizens are not so different. In this sense (among others), The City & The City serves as effective allegory. It can remind us that we often erect barriers between ourselves and others that are based on “superficial” differences such as dress and architecture.

Truly though, one of the nagging questions that repeatedly popped into my head was: with all the exertion required for citizens to tune out their “opposites,” wouldn’t it be better all around to unify the cities and eliminate that need to “unsee?” Wasn’t it a sad loss of half the potential? As Borlú observes at one point:

“How could one not think of the stories we all grew up on, that surely the Ul Qomans grew up on too? Ul Qoman man and Besz maid, meeting in the middle of Copula Hall, returning to their homes to realize that they live, grosstopically, nextdoor to each other, spending their lives faithful and alone, rising at the sametime, walking crosshatched streets close like a couple, each in their own city, never breaching, never quite touching, never speaking a word across the border?”

But then again, their system had apparently preserved the peace (aside from any Breach violence against breachers). Perhaps they needed that enforced barrier to prevent massive social disintegration or civil war?

That leads to the philosophical and political query of whether “freedom” or “safety” ought to take precedence in the value meters of human beings. Should people accept protection and accompanying constraints over personal choice and its inevitably higher risks?

The City & The City is an ambitious novel sparking in a plurality of genres: fantasy, noir, gritty procedural crime fiction, alternate/speculative history, action,and a dash of cyberpunk, to name a few. This unusual configuration produces mixed results; all the sparks don‘t necessarily burst into flame. In Mieville’s zeal to direct our attention to every scenic clue of the cities’ appearance, Borlú’s criminal investigation sometimes gets left in the dust. And perhaps most significantly, what begins as a seductive metaphysical conundrum shrinks into a rather more “mundane reveal” as the novel, having taken so much time on environmental description throughout the book, suddenly remembers the murder plot again and rushes to clear that deck. A fantasy that devolves into the humanist sphere of influence may ground the novel and impart a further lesson about our natures, but it deflates the imaginative scope as well. If that sounds elliptical, well, I don’t want to give away major plot secrets, do I?

One can argue a few other flaws in The City & The City. For example, some of the quotes in this review demonstrate awkward syntax on occasion. However, this doesn‘t happen enough to be an irritant, and, besides, it is symptomatic of the cities in which Borlú operates. One can also posit that although the novel is filled with an array of intriguing characters, a few, probably due to space considerations, seem less “alive” than they might.

However, this book delivers a unique world that draws the curiosity…complete with various enticing twists on modern city life, and numerous ways to interpret and analyze the “message” of the entwined but separate cities. Definitely recommended.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 141 readers
PUBLISHER:	Del Rey (May 26, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on China Miéville
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of Perdido Street Station

Bibliography:

New Crobuzon Series:

• Perdido Street Station (2000)
• The Scar (2002)
• Iron Council (2004)

Other Novels:

• King Rat (1998)
• Looking for Jake: Stories ( 2005)
• The City and the City ( 2009)
• Kraken (2010)
• Embassytown (2011)
• Railsea (May 2012)

Teen Readers:

• Un Lun Dun (2007)

Nonfiction:

• Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law (2004)

“An unconscious yet conscious time of nothingness.
Being aware without being aware of anything.
And yet—
And yet awareness means…
Awareness means thinking.And thinking implies a…
But no, the thought will not finish; the notion is too complex, too strange. “

Book Review:

Reviewed by Ann Wilkes (MAY 29, 2009)

In this first book of Robert J. Sawyer‘s WWW series, Caitlan Decter is a teenage math whiz who’s getting used to her family’s new digs in Canada. They moved from Texas where she attended a school for the blind. Now she’s entering a public school as a sophomore. But she’s not worried, because she’s “made of awesome.”

With the help of cutting-edge technology, Caitlan spends a lot of time on the internet where her disability is unnoticed—until she gets an email from a Japanese researcher offering a new advancement that could restore her sight. Caitlan and her family fly to Japan where the scientist implants a device in her head that reorders the scrambled signals from one of her blind eyes. Through a monitoring and software update function of the external part of the device she calls her “eyepod,” Caitlan sees the World Wide Web.  

And now the web sees our realm, through her.

Sawyer’s treatment of the awakening of a consciousness from a man-made construct (in this case the web) coupled with the awe and wonder of a blind person’s journey to sight is brilliant. Caitlan became blind at such an early age that she doesn’t know what anything looks like. Everything is new. She sees colors in the web, but without any frame of reference, doesn’t know which are which. As she regains her sight, her journey is paralleled by an emerging intelligence in cyberspace. And to delight readers further, Sawyer introduces Hobo, the chimp who paints portraits from memory. Another kind of emergence.

Sawyer captures the complex personality of a confident, ambitious teenage girl who craves acceptance. Teenagers say what they feel, making her a great choice of protagonist. Even if she’s only “saying” it on Live Journal.

The web intelligence has all the information in the world, yet cannot comprehend it.  Because the entity is like a newborn, not understanding what it is and how it fits into the world, how can it have words for anything? It gradually grasps simple concepts and learns, but it’s not clear where it is getting its insight. The process is, nonetheless, fascinating.

Without revealing the ending, I have to say it had one. So many authors of multi-volume works don’t bother tying up enough of the loose ends to keep the reader satisfied at the end of any but the last volume. When we have to wait at least a year for the next installment, I think the author owes us one. Sawyer came through with a most satisfying ending—not even rushed. Wake also ends with a perfect last line. But no peeking!

Sawyer has won numerous awards for his science fiction both here and abroad. ABC just bought the TV series based on his novel, Flashforward. It will air in 2010 in the spot LOST now occupies. A film adaptation of his short story, “Identity Theft” is also in the works. The sequel, www : Watch is in his publisher’s hands. He’s currently working on www : Wonder.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 54 readers
PUBLISHER:	Ace Hardcover; 1 edition (April 7, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Ann Wilkes
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Robert J. Sawyer
EXTRAS:	Ann’s interview with Robert J. Sawyer and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: WWW :  WATCH Also check out: GENESIS by Bernard Beckett RAINBOW’S END by Vernor Vinge

Bibliography:

• Golden Fleece (1990)
• End of an Era (1994)
• Terminal Experiment (1995)
• Starplex (1996)
• Frameshift (1997)
• Illegal Alien (1997)
• Factoring Humanity (1998)
• Flashforward (1999)
• Calculating God (2000)
• Mindscan (2005)
• Rollback (2007)

Quintaglio Trilogy:

• Far-Seer (1992)
• Fossil Hunter (1993)
• Foreigner (1994)

Neaderthal Series:

• Hominids (2002)
• Humans (2003)
• Hybrids (2003)

WWW Series

• WWW : Wake (April 2009)
• WWW: Watch (April 2010)
• WWW : Wonder