“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)

“No subject is more touched on than love, in the human life stories as well as in the literary corpus they have left us; . . .no subject, either, is as discussed, as controversial, especially during the final period of human history, when the cyclothymic fluctuations concerning the belief in love became constant and dizzying. In conclusion, no subject seems to have preoccupied man as much; even money, even the satisfaction derived from combat and glory, loses by comparison, its dramatic power in human life stories. Love seems to have been, for humans of the final period, the acme and the impossible, the regret and the grace, the focal point upon which all suffering and joy could be concentrated. The life story of Daniel1, turbulent, painful, as often unreservedly sentimental as frankly cynical, and contradictory from all points of view, is in this regard characteristic.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (JUL 2, 2011)

It’s often said that a critic has no place christening contemporary works as literature; it’s for future generations to decide which books will live on and which will fall the way of obscurity. According to this line of thinking, 19th- century Russians were just as incapable of heralding their literary giants as the ancient Greeks were of immortalizing Homer or the Elizabethans, Shakespeare. But there’s something in this argument I’ve always found hard to believe: great literature lives on not because it’s incidentally suited to future tastes or historically informative; it lives on because it captures some of that elusive essence of what it is to be human, and while that universal quality all literature possesses is hard to pin down, to paraphrase Supreme Court justice, Potter Stewart: I know it when I see it. Tolstoy’s contemporaries knew what they held in their hands with War and Peace just as I knew what I held in mine the first time I picked up a book by Jose Saramago. So let me be clear: Michel Houellebecq is such a writer and The Possibility of an Island is a book that will be read for generations to come.

The book, published in English in 2006, tells of a French comedian’s affairs of the heart. Far from politically correct, Daniel is a raunchy comedian, a social satirist, a “cutting observer of contemporary reality”, profiting from the absurdity of modern life with skits as controversially titled as Let’s Drop Miniskirts on Palestine! and We Prefer the Palestinian Orgy Sluts!. Fame comes easily to Daniel, and with it follows money, so when Daniel falls in love with Isabelle, the beautiful editor of a pre-teen fashion magazine called Lolita, nothing stops them from retiring to a mansion on the Spanish Riviera.

But living together for the first time, Daniel discovers that while “[his]animal side, [his] limitless surrender to pleasure and ecstasy, was what [he] liked best in [himself]”, Isabelle, more coldly rational, dislikes sex, and because of this, they will never be true lovers. Moreover, as her body ages, she begins to despise it, letting herself go physically so that before long, they are no longer intimate, and as “the disappearance of tenderness always closely follows that of eroticism”, they are condemned to an existence of “depthless irritation [that] fills the passing days.” Unable to bear her encroaching decrepitude, and correctly convinced that Daniel is no longer attracted to her, Isabelle leaves Spain for Biarritz, alone.

Isabelle isn’t the only one aging, and although he is rich, it’s getting increasingly difficult to attract the young women he desires– the young avoid anything that even hints at aging – until he meets Esther. Esther, a young, sexually adventurous actress makes Daniel’s life worth living again. However, she’s of a generation for whom love is passé and life is about pleasure-seeking and hooking up. While Daniel can’t live without his living-breathing fountain of youth, Esther does not love him, and soon, his pursuit of Esther devolves from warmly pathetic to mildly disturbing.

However, Daniel just wants true love and communion, and while his marriage to Isabelle was a meeting of the minds, it’s through his love for Esther, that “little animal, who was innocent, amoral, neither good nor evil, who was simply in search of her ration of excitement and pleasure”, that he realizes Esther’s generation is right, that “love had never been anything but a fiction invented by the weak to make the strong feel guilty, to introduce limits to their natural freedom and ferocity” and that he is nothing more than “a prehistoric monster with [his]romantic silliness, [his] attachments, [his] chains.”

The decline of Daniel’s sexual life begins just as he is introduced to the Church of Elohim, a cult that promises its members immortality through technology. Members submit their DNA for storage, hoping to be cloned as the technology becomes available in the future. When canny high-level members of the church turn the murder of their prophet into a publicity stunt – staging his resurrection in the form of the prophet’s living son – the church becomes increasingly popular. With the fall of Christianity and Islam in the West (Houellebecq eerily anticipates the Arab Spring), Elohimism, as a church “imposing no moral restraints, reducing human existence to the categories of interest and of pleasure …not [hesitating], for all that, to make its own the fundamental promise at the core of all monotheistic religions: victory over death” is perfectly positioned to become the religion of a post-religious world.

In fact, the novel is narrated by a succession of clones, each one appending the story of their life to the stories left by their predecessors. As the future Daniels meditate over their ancestor’s life, their existence – as bio-engineered neo-humans – reveals itself to be one of isolation in reinforced compounds in a post-apocalyptic world. While the neo-humans live a rational life, free of human desires, they, like humans, are “formatted by death” and shape their existence by the dictates of a prophet, the Supreme Sister, who prophesies the transcendence of the neo-human state and the arrival of the Future Ones. Neo-humans are exhorted to study and assimilate the longings of their human ancestor to further expand their consciousness and facilitate transcendence and the final evolution. However, at the end of their lives, rather than detached understanding, neo-humans often end up demonstrating human traits, creating art and verse, experiencing a shadowy longing , a desire for desire, prompting some to defect to join the human savages that scrounge around the barriers of the compounds.

After Daniel25’s cyber companion, Marie23, defects to seek out a human colony, Daniel25 is left wondering if perhaps there is more to life than this. Setting out from his compound with his dog, a clone of the original Daniel’s Fox, he opts to keep his dealing with the savages minimal. Although his nutritional needs are little more than mineral salts, sun and water, he travels far enough into the dried sea that he begins to feel physical discomfort akin to hunger and thirst. And as he watches Fox frolic in the woods, or the stars shine overhead, or waves lap against the beach, he understands “how the idea of the infinite had been able to germinate in the brain of these primates; the idea of an infinity that was accessible through slow transitions that had their origins in the finite; . . . and how the first theory of love had been able to form in the brain of Plato.” He also comes to realize that neo-humans, limited to the carbon-based existence of their human ancestors, will always be limited, unable to participate in the transcendence they’ve been working towards, however, doubly condemned, unable to experience the ecstasies or terrors of humans.

Houellebecq is a polarizing writer, and while I have no doubt that some readers will put this book down in (misguided) disgust, I’m equally sure others will finish it impressed by Houellebecq’s courageous intelligence. While most won’t agree with everything Houellebecq writes here, it’s hard not to admire his unflinching exploration of his theme –humans, like other animals, find true meaning in the unfettered satisfaction of bodily drives, especially the drive to reproduce. And if he’s to be believed and, for better or worse, we’re unable to escape our biology; perhaps our lofty myths of mated souls and true love have done human society more harm than good. Of course, I can’t really believe that; but I also can’t dismiss such an important book.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 31 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf; Trade edition (May 23, 2006)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia on Michel Houellebecq
EXTRAS:	Excerpt and another (short) Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Public Enemies

Bibliography (translated only):

• Whatever (1994; 1998 in US)
• The Elementary Particles (1998; 2000 in US)
• Platform (2001; 2002 in US)
• The Possibility of an Island (2005; 2006 in US)
• Map and Territory (2011; January 2012 in US)

With Bernard-Henri Levy:

• Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and The World (2008; January 2011 in US)

“They arrived at the bridge. He didn’t follow his own advice: there were things in the dark water,l ittle bloated islands that not even the seagulls dared touch. The wind had accumulated a small drift of them on the far bank, beached and slick where the rain beat down on them and cleaned the filth of the lake away.

When the Neva thawed in spring, there were always bodies washing under the Saint Petersburg bridges along the grey lumps of ice. But there was an effort to collect them, identify them, cut holes in the frozen ground and bury them.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  MAR 29, 2011)

Equations of Life by Simon Morden is a profoundly dystopian romp that takes place approximately twenty years in the future and it is great fun to read. Unlike much of contemporary science fiction, the science is pretty much correct as befits an author with a Ph.D. in planetary geophysics. It is the first in a trilogy, to be followed by Theories of Flight and Degrees of Freedom, all featuring Samuil Petrovitch, scientific genius, physical wreck, reluctant hero, and academic fraud.

Nuclear armageddon occurred twenty-some years ago. Japan sank beneath the ocean; much of the world has been ravaged. Greater London, the Metrozone, is impossibly crowded and horribly crammed with refugees. Hyde Park is a cesspool of diseased, dying and dead derelicts. There is barely room to breathe.

Petrovitch doesn’t want to be involved with anything beyond his work in physics. He is an academic fraud with no formal education. He stole from Russian criminals and is on the run from them. He most certainly does not want to attract attention.

A botched kidnapping of Sonja, a beautiful girl on the subway, triggers a spark of reluctant heroism. Petrovitch grabs Sonja and runs from the kidnappers. While fleeing the kidnappers his life is saved by Madeleine, a giantess of a nun with awesome fighting prowess. Sonja is the beautiful and much-loved daughter of London’s Japanese crime-lord, Oshicora. His passion is to create a virtual Japan, perfect to the last blade of grass, to replace what sunk beneath the ocean as part of the global disaster. Madeleine is described as ”…a nun, fully robed, white veil framing her broad, serious face. A silver crucifix dangled around her neck, and a rosary and a holster hung at her waist. She had the biggest automatic pistol Petrovitch had ever seen clasped in her righteous right hand.”

Petrovitch is a physical wreck. He is dying. His heart has failed and his pacemaker is failing. The Metrozone has been under attack by the New Machine Jihad. This has completely disrupted the Metrozone’s infrastructure. Hearts for transplantation, for example, have rotted since the refrigeration units are all stopped. Bad heart and all, Petrovitch is running around frantically, being shot, beaten and harassed on all sides as he tries to stop the Jihad and save Sonja from her kidnappers.

Between having his heart flat-line periodically and being chased by some of the nastier heavies in the city, he, along with his colleague, Pif, solve the grand unification problem that has eluded theoretical physicists since Einstein, who spent the last twenty years of his life on one futile attempt at a solution after another. We don’t find out much about this theoretical solution beyond the idea that it connects gravity with electromagnetism. We don’t even know if our hero will get a new heart before he dies for good. Madeleine is looking for a replacement heart for Petrovitch while Sonja is on guard in his hospital room, sword across her knees. The novel ends. We catch our breath.

This is a plot seemingly propelled by paranoia and amphetamines. Will artificial intelligence be Frankenstein the monster or will it be benign? Will Petrovitch and Pif’s grand unification theory really solve the fundamental questions of the universe? Will Petrovitch live? Will Petrovitch find true love with Madeleine, the nun? Will Sonja be a complication? Who is Petrovitch, anyway? Will his past catch up with him? I am really looking forward to the rest of the trilogy.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Orbit (March 29, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Simon Morden
EXTRAS:	Excerpt  The book covers for this series
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another dim view of the future:  The Passage by Just in Cronin

Bibliography:

• The Lost Art (2008)

Samuil Petrovitch series:

• Equations of Life (March 2011)
• Theories of Flight (April 2011)
• Degrees of Freedom (May 2011)

“I am not a machine. For what can a machine know of the smell of wet grass in the morning, or the sound of a crying baby? I am the feeling of the warm sun against my skin; I am the sensation of the cool wave breaking over me. I am the place I have never seen, yet imagine when my eyes are closed. I am the taste of another’s breath, the color of her hair.

“You mock me for the shortness of my life span, but it is this very fear of dying that breathes life into me.  I am the thinker who thinks of thought. I am curiosity, I am reason, I am love, and I am hatred. I am indifference. I am the son of a father, who in turn was a father’s son. I am the reason my mother laughed and the reason my mother cried. I am wonder and I am wondrous….”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Kirstin Merrihew (MAY 28, 2009)

Anaximander was a Greek philosopher (611-546 B.C.) who contributed to many avenues of learning, among them astronomy and metaphysics. He thought everything issued from and returned to “the Boundless.” In his inquiries into biology, he advocated a rudimentary form of evolution too, claiming that human beings had generated from fishes. He was, in short, one who thought one kind of substance might beget another.

Another Anaximander (Anax), this time a young female historian, is the main character and narrator of Bernard Beckett’s novella, Genesis. She has been called before a panel of Examiners at The Academy. She expects to defend her interpretation of the life of Adam Forde, 2058-2077, as a precursor to being asked to join this prestigious group that governs her civilization.

Adam was a nonconformist in the twenty-first century Plato Republic, modeled after the Greek Plato’s ideal city-state in which citizens are divided into Soldiers, Laborers, Technicians, and Philosophers. The Republic cut itself off from the rest of the world as a pandemic swept the planet, and the Philosophers continued to impose absolute isolation over time to preserve their Republic. Adam, assigned as a Soldier guarding the Great Sea Fence, committed a treasonous act and instead of drawing the normal death penalty was imprisoned to serve as a “companion” to an android named Art. Adam was supposed to benefit science by talking to the machine. Philosopher William, who had designed and built this artificial intelligence, thought Art could “learn” from Adam. As part of Anax’s examination, she must recreate, in the form of holograms, her interpretation of the debates that were recorded between this man and machine about the nature of being “alive” and whether a mechanical entity could ever be sentient like a human being.

Alan Turing, the real twentieth-century professor, proposed a test that could theoretically determine whether a machine could “think.” Soon after, John R. Searle countered with his Chinese Room which asked the question in a slightly different way: Is the human brain a type of computer, the mind software, and can its computing capabilities be duplicated by a digital computer? In the Chinese Room someone sits alone among many pulleys and levers. Notes are passed from the outside in a language, say Chinese, not understood by this isolated individual. But the person inside has an instruction book which, if followed precisely, will permit him to use the mechanics at his disposal to answer the note. The person has no idea what he has said, but the one outside getting the answer does understand it, and it makes sense to him. However, the outsider, in turn, cannot tell whether the note was answered consciously or unconsciously by the person inside.

Art and Adam fenced with each other on these issues, using the Chinese Room test as their basis for argument. Art claimed that if he could give the same answers to questions as Adam then he was as alive as Adam. The man rejected this hypothesis, insisting that Art himself was a Chinese room (without the person) . Adam considered Art to be the pulleys and levers and insisted the android could not have a conscious conversation even if he said all the right words.

The Examiners Socratically try to elicit from Anax perspective on Adam and Art. They grill her about the emotion she has attributed to Adam during his jousts with Art. They are especially focused on her view of what ultimately takes place between Adam and Art when Adam wants to escape. They interrogate her about  whether androids could not only be conscious but also capable of overcoming programming with cognitive imprinting. Could conversation with Adam really influence Art? Could Adam and Art be similar in a way she hadn’t  considered? Could biological intelligence “beget” true intelligence in an “artificial” medium? Could “evolution” not be limited to change on organic levels? Art rebuked Adam, “You take pride in your Ideas, as if they are products, but they are parasites. Why imagine evolution could only be applied to the physical? Evolution has no respect for the medium. Which came first: the mind, or the Idea of the mind? Have you never wondered that before? They arrived together. The mind is an Idea. That is the lesson to be learned, but I fear it is beyond you. It is your weakness as a person to see yourself as the center. Let me give you the view from the outside.”

Beckett’s slim volume  (160 pages) delves into many crevices of the debate about identifying the constitutive elements of consciousness and then authenticating them in individuals. Just because something walks, talks, and acts like a being with a “soul” doesn’t necessarily mean it is one. The ability to imitate may always leave doubt and an inability to reliably verify. However, Beckettt’s novel leans toward claiming “proof” of artificial intelligence’s sentience: Art says that even if the “man” in the Chinese room doesn’t know what the pulleys and levers are doing, they (the pulleys and levers) know! Quite a declaration and one that can’t (thus far anyway) be proved, only asserted.

Drawing farther out and perusing Genesis plot again, symbolism and references to numerous historical, literary, and cinematic sources can be traced. Biblical allusions, including to the Creation story are prominent. Some science fiction such as the Terminator saga and a few pointed episodes from the classic television show, The Twilight Zone also readily come to mind when reading this book. From the obvious futuristic Platonic societal organization to echoes of Spartans, Nazis, and Orwellian totalitarianism, Genesis is a study in what can happen when a society chooses control and conformity to ensure continuity. Anax has adopted thoughts about the history of the new Plato Republic. She tells the Examiners at one point: “The founders of The Republic sought to deny the individual, and in doing so they ignored a simple truth.” She continues, “The only thing binding individuals together is ideas. Ideas mutate, and spread: they change their hosts as much as their hosts change them.”

Where did those ideas originate? Art also lectured Adam about Ideas: ” You people pride yourselves on creating the world of Ideas, but nothing could be further from the truth. The Idea enters the brain from the outside….The successful Idea travels from mind to mind, claiming new territory, mutating as it goes. It’s a jungle out there, Adam. Many Ideas are lost. Only the strongest survive.”

The Republic’s dominant Idea was that the fear of death — the fear of being “[b]ookended by oblivion” — had to be combated at its root. Its leaders decided: “To bury the individual beneath the weight of the state, is to bury too the individual’s fears.” Until, that is, the time of the Great War and the aftermath of “a great and lasting peace.” Anax, a citizen and historian in that aftermath discovers she may not have as much information about Adam Forde and the Great War as she thought, and that forces her to reevaluate her own conclusions and herself. She questions the conventional interpretation of “The Final Dilemma” (the official last conversation between Adam and Art) leading to unanticipated revelations that topple her carefully constructed view of the “truth.”

In this astute, if certainly incomplete, study of the duties of the State and the composition of individuals and their “beingness,” Beckett accomplishes much. He has created a framework on which to ponder many critical issues of philosophical, political, and scientific import. Adam flatly vowed to Art at one point, “We are different. And difference is all that matters.” He was referring to cellular life and artificial life and an unbridgeability between them. He pressed his point with the moving Walt Whitman-like soliloquy about human experience quoted at the top of this review. Anaximander will also face that question of whether Adam was right about difference making all the difference. It was a question governing life and death for Adam. What will it be for Anax?

Julia Hartwig, in a poem entitled “It Is Also This,” opined,

“Art casts a spell summoning life….
It is also an intelligence reconciling
discordant elements and similarities
It is brave
because it seeks immortality
by being — just like everything else — mortal.”

Does Beckett’s Art (the walking, talking ‘bot…and art — the expression of creativity) really do this? Do Art, Adam, Anax and the others have this commonality to bind them or not? The Greek Anaximander posited that everything created must return to the Boundless, but while in its temporary created state, how much difference is there really (or could there be) between neurobiological cognition and artificial intelligence? In Genesis — a parable which, with consummate suspense, withholds critical information until the last pages — those are the haunting questions deftly explored

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 147 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (April 20, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Bernard Beckett
EXTRAS:	Excerpt; another review and one more review
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	These books come to mind as possible books of interest: The Cave by Jose Saramago Turing’s Delirium by Edmundo Paz Soldan Sum: Forty Tales of Afterlife by David Eagleman

Bibliography:

• Lester (1999)
• Red Cliff (2000)
• Jolt (2002)
• No Alarms (2002)
• Home Boys (2003)
• Malcom and Juliet(2004)
• Deep Fried (2006) (with Clare Knighton)]
• Genesis (2006; April 2009 in US)

Nonfiction:

• Falling for Science (2007)