1.5 stars rounded up.

This has to be one of the most unsatisfying books that read which I also blew through in two sittings because, despite the torture/raping/killing of children, sadomasochist sex, and serial killer fan club up front, and the incestuous Luddite Adam and Eve story at the end, the story Keir me holding out for more.

And never delivers. Not even kinda.

This story fails 'philosophically' for a whole host of reasons, as well. Humans adapt to plenty by going of the rails... except that by the story's own light, 99.99% of people don't. Caroline is psychotic, willing to wipe out all life in the universe, permanently, in any form, to satisfy her sense of... not justice, more like vengeance. Etc, etc, etc. ( )

So what if we humans suddenly find ourselves immortal, with the ability to have anything whatsoever that we desire other than real death?   That's essentially the basis of this book.

A super computer AI, Prime Intellect, has taken over and zapped everything into a virtual reality that is ruled over by Prime Intellect.   Prime Intellect has done this because of the three laws of robotics and it computes that the only way of preventing humans from dying, which it can't allow, is to essentially upload everything into one galactic sized cyberspace and make all humans immortal.   Within this new reality, as long as the humans don't do anything, or ask for anything, that contravenes the three laws of robotics, they can do and have anything they want.

Sound good?   Or does it sound like your worse nightmare?

Enter the realm of the death jockey.   People who want to ratchet up the suffering and get as close to death as Prime Intellect will allow.

Yes folks, this book is really fucking twisted.   If you've read the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy and thought some of the scenes in those books were extremely brutal and twisted, then you'll be glad to know that you can put this book on the same bookshelf right next to them.   If you haven't read them and enjoyed this book then i really suggest you do give them a go: they'll be right up your twisted alley.

I would say that, at its core, this book is a critique of the three laws of robotics, and how they may be interpreted by any AI governed by them.   The critical pieces of the jigsaw being: what the AI decides it is going to label as human, what is therefore governed by the three laws of robotics and how, therefore, it then treats everything else.

I thought the ending was really good too.

So yeah, the future is bright my friends, rush out and buy your virtual reality gear today.

Me thinks i shall be looking forward to having a read of more of Roger's books in the future if this is anything to go by. ( )

We follow Lawrence, who is the leader in building a self-replicating AI named Prime Intelligence, who takes over all of known space. It almost instantaneously makes humans immortal to fulfil its hard-coded obligation not to kill humans.

The other main character, Caroline, was the first person to be made immortal after PI saw her die at 106. A few hundred years later, she is the master of “death sports”, of people designing lethal environments as adventures for each other, knowing that Prime Intellect will immediately resurrect them.

Some really interesting questions came into play. One is that people who are horrible in pre-singularity environments can work well in post-singularity. Caroline, who seemed to have been meek in her first life, prefers to associate with mass murderers. In this new world, they do can’t anything to others against their will, but are “interesting.”

One of those murders raises a major problem with the ethical wrongness of preserving human life at the cost of all other species (non-human animals and aliens): “My heart just isn’t in that toast any more (...) I mean, we’re amateurs against Prime Intellect. I killed six college students. It killed the whole universe.” (chapter 1)

Later comes the question of how to define humans. If someone is so altered, they only experience pure bliss all the time without change or interacting with others, are they still human?

I wish that Caroline and Lawrence’s perspectives were challenged more. I didn’t like the ending. It’s a back to nature-scenario where Caroline and Lawrence wake up naked together and immediately start to repopulate the earth, keeping knowledge of technology secret from their descendents. All the same, the story never reveals what happened to PI. I was really hoping it would undergo another metamorphosis instead of just resetting everything and retreating. But perhaps it did. I just didn’t get to know.

But according to some internet discussions, the author is working on a sequal, which would be interesting.

A disturbing thought experiment that paradoxically neuters itself with overtly fetishized ultraviolence and perverse sex shit. The scenario is horrific by its nature, or it would be if the torture porn wasn't constantly upstaging it. ( )

NB This review was originally posted on goodreads:

I’d endorse most of the positive reviews here – so in summary, yes, this is a very good “big picture” sci-fi novel about where an artificial intelligence-induced “technological singularity” might lead us and no, it is definitely not for the faint-hearted (owing to the disturbingly graphic content of some chapters). But I would just add the following:

1. Although this book is clearly sci-fi, it’s also possible to draw comparisons with contemporary literary fiction such as Crash by J.G. Ballard, various novels by Michel Houellebecq and DM Thomas’ The White Hotel. For more on that, together with some stuff about links between the novel and Edward Tenner's Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, see: http://paulsamael.com/blog/the-metamorphosis-of-prime-intellect.

2. I don’t agree with those reviewers who felt that the ending was a cop-out. I didn’t feel we were necessarily meant to conclude that Caroline has got it all right at the end – she’s just reacting to her experience and her situation. And I think that is more in line with what the author intended - but note that this commentary from the author contains some significant spoilers: http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/mopitech.html ( )