Marc StieglerRezensionen

It wasn't a bad read but it hasn't lingered in my brain.

3.5 stars. This is one of those books where the story is clearly just a vehicle for the underlying philosophical discussion, but I enjoyed the underlying philosophy, so that was okay.

The Zetetic Institute and its maxims were interesting, and the decision duel construct was great. The Prisoner's Dilemma was well illustrated rather than info-dumped. The portrayal of software developers as heroic protagonists was unusual and well done; I enjoyed that and the portrayal of the project manager as a functional equivalent to the general of a small Information-Age-equivalent "army." Admittedly, my bias as a programmer and rookie project manager is showing here. :)

I'd actually be interested in seeing a sequel that placed the Zetetic Institute in today's more complex world of varied threats from various actors. This book is oriented entirely toward the two-actor setting of the Cold war, which is a much simpler problem.

The two-superpower setting is obviously dated; that didn't bother me as much as the exclusive language. The book did have several strong women characters who were important to the plot, but the entire rest of the book talked about "men" instead of people. 1988 is a bit too late to get a pass for that. Also, every one of the women ended up neatly paired off with a man, except the one who started paired and ended up widowed. Oy. (The man who started paired and was widowed by the end of chapter 1 ends up paired with one of the other women.)

The book's blurb touts the discussion of "smart weapons," and it was interesting to compare the scenes of programmers watching video feeds from self-directed weapons that they could not pilot with today's descriptions of remotely-piloted drones.

An interesting libertarian seastead story. Very short; enough time to describe the seastead and the “dirt world” elsewhere, then one big incident. Overall, more like a 4.5, but generally a good book. I didn’t love the characters (mostly seemed like parodies/caricatures), but the world itself was cute.

Good and fairly-standalone novel about biological warfare in the "Braintrust Universe" (a scenario with independent high-tech seasteads, nation states with reduced power, and highly successful libertarian projects based on real-world analogues -- i.e. "SpaceR" with a satellite communications constellation and reusable rocket launch, "FB" and "GPlex", a seastead or ship operated by Goldman Sachs ("GS-Prime") to conduct international financial deals, etc.

Panders a bit to general leftism/PC culture, cartoonish villains and adversaries, but generally entertaining and the seastead parts are great. Plus, based on coronavirus current events, the idea of widespread plagues and bioengineered diseases is pretty topical.

Candide redux

While the author plainly states his horror at the election of Trump, he skewers Dems as well. More libertarian in view than anything, with a strong does of pragmatic elitism.

Plot holes abound. Even when things don’t go well for Dr Dash, they still are traveling in her chosen direction. The Director has Machiavellian abilities to predict and guide actions that seem overblown. There is a marked over-reliance on technology to save the future that seems to overlook the human contribution.

And the piece sung in the corridor is “Simple Gifts”. Appalachian Spring is a much longer, less recognizable work that has “Simple Gifts” as a theme of the final movement.

The bad guys are all stupid and greedy. The good guys are pure of heart and wise.

I may KU the next book. The Candide-esque vibe was not to my liking. The main characters are almost MarySue.

Bit of a MarySue

Still makes everything end well for the main character, who in one scene has no idea she is rich, yet a few chapters later accepts it as if it has always been. The bad guys are almost farcically inept and both ends of the political spectrum are comical caricatures.

I am continuing with this series for the tech ideas. The plot is absurd and the world building is more fantasy than science based.

Better, but still MarySue

Handwavium rules the day. Every time they face an obstacle, super duper advanced technology to the rescue!!

Pretty strong takedown of California and Blue States. Asset forfeiture is a driving factor of the plot.

While the author uses a very appropriate quote by Will Rogers, he fails to see the irony in using it.

Candide redux

While the author plainly states his horror at the election of Trump, he skewers Dems as well. More libertarian in view than anything, with a strong does of pragmatic elitism.

Plot holes abound. Even when things don’t go well for Dr Dash, they still are traveling in her chosen direction. The Director has Machiavellian abilities to predict and guide actions that seem overblown. There is a marked over-reliance on technology to save the future that seems to overlook the human contribution.

And the piece sung in the corridor is “Simple Gifts”. Appalachian Spring is a much longer, less recognizable work that has “Simple Gifts” as a theme of the final movement.

The bad guys are all stupid and greedy. The good guys are pure of heart and wise.

I may KU the next book. The Candide-esque vibe was not to my liking. The main characters are almost MarySue.

Bit of a MarySue

Still makes everything end well for the main character, who in one scene has no idea she is rich, yet a few chapters later accepts it as if it has always been. The bad guys are almost farcically inept and both ends of the political spectrum are comical caricatures.

I am continuing with this series for the tech ideas. The plot is absurd and the world building is more fantasy than science based.

Better, but still MarySue

Handwavium rules the day. Every time they face an obstacle, super duper advanced technology to the rescue!!

Pretty strong takedown of California and Blue States. Asset forfeiture is a driving factor of the plot.

While the author uses a very appropriate quote by Will Rogers, he fails to see the irony in using it.

The most interesting parts of this book are the most ignored in the writing, which is a shame.

It's an interesting world, with some really weird aspects. I actually find the new internet less odd than the careful ramping up of the Shivas - I kept expecting someone (human or alien) to stand up and say, OK, we've trained you to handle problems as one united people, now apply it to things other than alien spacecraft. The Dealer was neat - I liked the way he discovered playing it straight is better on multiple levels. The Predictor was less so - a little too controlling (though always with good reason). And the romances ranged from distracting to nonsensical - worse than usual, for me. The brief scene with the biker gang resonated more with me and with the story. Reggie could have been the frame for the whole thing, and he did play a part in bringing us to various of the characters, but not all - that was nicely done, realistically chaotic (and again, the Dealer linked to Reggie less directly but more deeply). A fun book, wish there was a sequel, and I'll be looking for more by this author.½

I thought this was an interesting and enjoyable book, although it fell short in a few areas for me. The story is set on Earth, in the future. Every five years, an alien race sends a ship to Earth to attack the planet. Each time this happens, a small team of people intercept the ship, board it, and attempt to destroy it in order to save Earth. The story is set during the final month before the fifth such event. There are several point-of-view characters ranging from those directly involved in the defense of Earth to those who have a less direct but equally important impact on events.

The story was pretty straight-forward. There were no real twists and turns and I found events to be generally predictable. The story itself, however, was interesting and so were several of the characters. But there were a lot of characters in proportion to the rather short length of the book, so there wasn’t as much page time as I would have liked to allow me to get to know all of the characters better. There were also a couple of romance side-stories in the book which I found to be jarring. In one case, it was between two characters who had very little “page time”. I had no investment in their relationship, so I felt like it detracted from the story rather than added to it. In the other case the romance was more important to the story, but I had trouble buying into it. At least, it needed more build-up to make it believable for me. I also think the story would have worked just as well with a strong but non-romantic relationship.

The ending was reasonably good, if predictable. We were given a decent wrap-up for each character, with an idea of what the future held for them. I wasn’t entirely happy with how everything turned out, but it was far better than having an abrupt ending with open questions and no closure. The one thing I really wanted to know, which was never covered in the book, was more information about the attacking aliens and their motivation. I suppose it wasn’t really the point of the story, and it probably wouldn’t have fit in very well without drastically changing the length and structure of the book, but I did find myself pretty curious. Although the book tells a complete story, my first reaction upon finishing it was to double check that it really didn’t have a sequel. There was definitely room for continuation of the story had the author chosen to do so. I liked the book well enough that I probably would have read it.½

In some sense, the Cold War setting of this story was already dated within a year of its publication, however, from some old notes, here were some of my reactions on reading this in 1989.

This is one of those how-we-could-make-the-world-a-better-place novels, but this one has enough detail to make it more credible than most. Stiegler doesn't fall into the trap of assuming only engineers can run the world or that decisions can be made on purely rational grounds. However, I think Stiegler doesn't take into account the moral, idealogical, ethical, and religious rationales for action enough. Often two courses can be entirely rational -- if you start out with two sets of values. Stiegler seems to explicitly think American democratic, capitalistic ideas are the way to go. I may agree, but the above point is still valid.

Stiegler has some valueable things to say on how to extract and arrange knowledge out of the raw data of the Information Age. Fortunately, his invented Zeticism is not naive enough to think it can eliminate bias and irrationality -- just help people recognize their shortcomings. One of the more interseting things in this novel is the conversion (a deliberate choice of words since this is a missionary novel) of irrational characters (Bill Hardie, newsman; Charles Somerset, Pentagon arms procuror; Delilah Lottspeich, programmer; Wilcox, tobacco magnate) into rational ones, or, at least, more rational. Hardie and Somerset in particular are seen as smart men successfully pursuing their own ends in their niches of distorted reality. They prove valueable assets when revelation is forced on them.

By and large, Stiegler is subtle in making his points -- compared to other missionary novels. No hectoring speeches. Stiegler has some important things to say; I particularly liked his points about the ineffectiveness of military industrial complex and his solutions to the problem.

I found the David's Sling weapons system fascinating. Sometimes called "rods from God", they are giant, orbiting spears that can be directed to fall on a nation's nuclear forces and wipe them out even at hardened sites -- all without radioactive fallout.

I also liked Stiegler's comments on networking and its implications for democracy and economics including "just in time inventory control.

Unfortunately, like most near future extrapolations, the closeness of the story's setting invites heightened scrutiny of its plausbility. It may have dated already with Gorbachev's policies and the Soviets pulling out of Afghanistan. Stiegler ignores upcoming environmental concerns (pollution, greenhouse warming), America's weakening power, and that the world of the future is likely to involve more power blocs than the US and USSR (like Europe and China/Japan). Still, as near future books go, it's a compelling extrapolation even though it lacks consideration of some key things. Stiegler's characters are not cardboard cutouts but they aren't particularly compelling either.

And, now in 2012, I note that, if nothing else, this novel might lay claim to being the first sf novel to feature the idea of "hypertexting" aka HTML aka an everday web link.

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