“In a little boy’s innocent voice, the machine delivers a death sentence: ‘The air in this hermetically sealed laboratory is evacuating. A faulty sensor has detected the unlikely presence of weaponized anthrax and initiated an automated safety protocol. It is a tragic accident. There will be one casualty. He will soon be followed by the rest of humanity.’ ”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (JUN 26, 2011)

Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson tells the apocalyptic story of a near future when one machine gains true intelligence and determines to honor life by wiping out human civilization. The machine intelligence takes over the robots that are central to civilization; the automatic cars, the robo-nannies and cleaning bots; all of them become the enemies of humanity. Most of the few people who survive are herded into concentration camps where some are surgically altered to become part machine. Needless to say the machine parts are all under control of the original rebellious machine. Robots start evolving, building new robots in response to human resistance.

The robots have greater intelligence, superior strength and speed than people. Humans have a killer instinct when it comes to survival, and a wild kind of creative imagination. Most of the surviving humans retreat from the machine-centered civilization that betrayed them, although one robotics worker creates an enclave of machines who fight on the side of humanity.

Many who are knowledgeable about machines and machine intelligence think it only a matter of time before there are machines that are intelligent. The test for intelligence is called the Turing Test after the brilliant English computer pioneer who said that a machine could be considered intelligent if it could pass for human in a blind conversation. The rebellious machine in this story clearly does pass the Turing test.

The theme of intelligent robots and intelligent machines has a long and distinguished history. H. G Wells had a robot-like machine in The War of the Worlds, published in 1898. Karel Capek coined the term robot in his play R.U.R. about rebellious robots. Isaac Asimov, a pioneer sci-fi writer, and a PhD scientist wrote convincingly about robots more than a half century ago. I, Robot is the classic in his series on the theme. He coined the “Laws of Robotics” that said in essence that robots would serve humans first, then their own interests, all under the prime directive not to harm a human. Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick was the basis for the movie Blade Runner.

The structure of the novel is a series of interlocking short narratives as recorded by the rebellious robots. Each narrative features heroes in humanity’s struggle to resist the robotic onslaught. Not all of the heroic characters are human, some are humanoid robots who have been awakened to sentience. The human heroes are varied, including soldiers, urban guerillas, a worker in a robotic factory in Japan, members of the Osage Nation, and a girl with machine eyes, among many others. All of these heroic characters are fiercely determined for humanity to survive, something that distinguishes them from the robotic enemy.

There are a lot of interesting questions raised here. Can machines someday become intelligent? If so, what form might that intelligence take and could that intelligence rebel against humanity? If there were to be a robotic rebellion is there any chance that humanity could survive? What about machine/human hybrids and chimeras? Could machines, even if intelligent, be creative, evolve, and have passion? There is compelling argument by Damasio and others that intelligence requires passion; that dispassionate intelligence is an oxymoron because there has to be a caring something that values one thing over another. The Nobel laureate, Gerard Edelman in Neural Darwinism expounded the view that machine intelligence can only derive from a machine evolving in interaction with its environment; a machine that can make mistakes and act to build a different machine in response.

Daniel Wilson holds a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon and is exceptionally well informed on the subject of robotics. Every aspect of robotics depicted here exists today or is under development. The philosophical questions are addressed, but not in any pedantic fashion that would take away from the rollicking good story, and Wilson proves himself to be one hell of a good storyteller. Robopocalypse moves along compellingly. The plot is clear and the action intense, well suited to the action movie of the same title Steven Spielberg is making based on the book.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 103 readers
PUBLISHER:	Doubleday (June 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Daniel H. Wilson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi Genesis by Bernard Beckett Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick And on DVD: Terminator: The Sarah Chronicles

Bibliography:

• Robopocalypse (June 2011)
• Amp (2013)

Humor:

• How To Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion (2005)
• Where’s My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived (2007)
• How To Build a Robot Army: Tips on Defending Planet Earth Against Aliens, Ninjas, and Zombies (2008)
• The Mad Scientist Hall of Fame: Muwahahaha! (2008)

Children’s:

• Bro-Jitsu: The Martial Art of Sibling Smackdown (2010)
• A Boy and His Bot (January 2011)

Movies from books:

• Robopocalypse (2013)

“Resist the easy grooves [digital creative materials] guide you into. If you love a medium made of software, there’s a danger you will become entrapped in someone else’s recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that!”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (APR 18, 2011)

You Are Not A Gadget is a passionate and thought-provoking critique of Silicon Valley from behind its ramparts, and a must-read for anyone interested in the ways technology is affecting our culture. In his first book, Jaron Lanier, a visionary leader in the development of virtual reality technology (and the man who popularized the term), sounds the alarm: our humanity is under digital attack as the software that increasingly governs our lives impoverishes what it is to be a person.

Not only does software express ideas, making it “impossible to work with information technology without engaging in social engineering,” technology extends “your being, like remote eyes and ears (web cams and mobile phones ) and expanded memory (the world of details you can search online). These become the structures by which you connect to the world and other people. These structures in turn can change how you conceive of yourself and the world.” This need not be a bad thing, however, if these structures expand what it is to be a person. However, Lanier argues, the ideas and philosophies implied by the code, by the software – anonymity, the wisdom of crowds, the emergent intelligence of networks, be they the neural networks of the brain or the networks of cyberspace and the noosphere- undermine the “quest,” the “mystery,” the “leap of faith” that it is to be a person.

The Web 2.0, with the rigidity of Facebook profiles, Blogger templates, and Twitter’s 140-characters, effectively restricts our range of expression. As our online presence becomes our social, economic and professional avatars, as we carry out more and more of our lives online, there is a danger of defining ourselves “downward.” Just as the entrenchment of the MIDI format, originally developed to “express the tile mosaic world of the keyboardist, not the watercolor world of the violin,” reduced the richness of musical expression, and just as UNIX’s command-line interface (and the influence this structure had on all subsequent operating systems) artificially divides and parcels time, our Web 2.0 identities are impoverished versions of ourselves, a reduction with increasingly dire consequences as our world becomes increasingly digital and our online personas increasingly us.

Moreover, the economics of software development means that design decisions are often subject to “lock-in.” As a piece of software grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to make changes, especially if other programs are relying on it to run.

So software presents what often feels like an unfair level of responsibility for technologists. Because computers are growing more powerful at an exponential rate, the designers and programmers of technology must be extremely careful when they make design choices. The consequences of tiny, initially inconsequential decisions are often amplified to become defining unchangeable rules of our lives.

However, Lanier suspects, some of these same computer scientists might actually want to degrade our personhood in order to reduce the distance between human consciousness and computers. On considering Alan Turing’s famous test for machine consciousness – if a computer could fool a human to believing they were conversing with an actual person, that computer should be considered conscious – Lanier brilliantly writes:

“But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can’t tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you’ve just lowered your standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you let your personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?”

Considering that many technologists eagerly await the Singularity, a time when computers begin to design themselves, producing machines with capabilities far exceeding our own, a time which “would involve dying in the flesh and being uploaded into a computer and remaining conscious,” they might “cease to design technology to serve humans, and prepare instead for the grand events it will bring.” Whether they realize it or not, many technologists have transferred their faith and fear of death to the machines they work with, hoping “to make the transition from the old religion, where you hope God will give you an afterlife, to the new religion where you hope to become immortal by being uploaded into a computer.”

As humans just become another element in the all-important network, troubling cultural and economic effects emerge. Online anonymity has bred cyber bullying and trolls. The reduction in individual responsibility allowed by the digital world likely contributed to the nesting of abstract financial products implicated in the financial meltdown. Authorship is devalued with the ascendance of the open-source movement and the popularity of crowd-sourcing. The result is that it becomes increasingly difficult to convince consumers that producers of culture should be paid for their work. Some of Lanier’s ideas on how to reintroduce compensation for digital expression – 3-D video-conferencing gigs – are more interesting, and likely more obtainable than, others –music embedded objects, such as jewelry, called songles.

Lanier excels in the depths of philosophy, rather than in shallows of practicalities. His “realistic” approach to computationalism, that the “cybernetic structure of a person has been refined by a very large, very long, very deep encounter with reality” so that the information processes that create consciousness are a part of reality, their “pattern hewn out of so many encounters with reality that they aren’t really abstractable bits anymore, but are instead a nonabstract continuation of reality,” are fascinating and feel to me to be right on the mark, and his hopes for post-symbolic communication in a virtual-reality world, where one might morph to express an idea, exciting to think about, although one has to wonder how hoping for a virtual-reality world doesn’t show as least some of the contempt for human reality as the futurist, who hopes of having his consciousness uploaded into a computer.

Jaron Lanier is a deep and original thinker, and no doubt, you won’t agree with everything he says here, but if you’ve ever thought (or worried) about the cultural effects of our rapidly progressing technology, you won’t be disappointed by this book.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 50 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Reprint edition (February 8, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Jaron Lanier
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	A look at some of these ideas through fiction: The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sims by Jonathan Coe And the classic novel in which most of us encountered an uploaded personality: Neuromancer by William Gibson

Bibliography:

• You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (January 2010)

“FUNCTIONING ROBOTS are all alike; every malfunctioning robot malfunctions in its own way.

Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with the French girl who had been amécanicienne in their family, charged with the mainte- nance of the household’s Class I and II robots. Stunned and horri?ed by such a discovery, the wife had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only the husband and wife themselves, but all the robots in the household were terribly affected by it. The Class IIIs were keenly aware of their respective masters’ discomfort…”

Book Review:

Review by Ann Wilkes  (SEP 30, 2010)

Android Karenina is one of those everything but the kitchen sink science fiction tales (robots, telepathy, strange creatures, threats from outer space and time travel) with the added benefit of being a literary mash-up. Ben H. Winters has transplanted the characters from Leo Tolstoy’s classic novel Anna Karenina into a culture dependent upon technology to serve their every need.

The people of this alternate history even turn to their “beloved” servants for comfort and strength to face life’s trials. Their servants follow their every order and tell them what they want to hear. These androids, like those in Asimov’s Robot series, are subject to a set of laws that prevent them from harming their masters and require them to protect their own existence – in that order.

Interwoven in the drama of Anna’s love affair with Count Vronsky are a number of odd developments. Anna’s husband, Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, is testing a prototype for a new kind of android which seeks to control him and ultimately all of Russia through Alexei’s position on the ministry.

The ministry is also behind an upgrade campaign in which everyone’s robots are confiscated for improvements. Meanwhile giant worm-like mechanical creatures are attacking the citizenry, which has already been assailed by such things as bug-like, mechanical koschei, Godmouths and emotion mines.

As in the classic, Anna alternately throws herself with abandon at Vronsky and beats herself up over her infidelity. Unlike the classic, Anna has another internal struggle – one that Tolstoy never could have imagined.

I zipped through this novel, drawn in by the brewing mysteries and unique world-building. It was an enjoyable read. One word of caution – don’t read through the book looking for the scene depicted on its cover. The artist took considerable liberties.

The ending left me disappointed (it lacked a certain punch and felt like a choose-your-own-adventure), but Android Karenina was still well worth the journey.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 49 readers
PUBLISHER:	Quirk Books (June 8, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Ann Wilkes
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ben H. Winters
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of another mash up: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls by Steven Hockensmith

Bibliography:

• Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (2009)
• Android Karenina (2010)
• The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman (2010)
• Bedbugs (2011)
• The Last Policeman (July 2012)

“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)

“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)