The war for the ownership of the smartphone in Dogfight

From the week of June 9th, 2014

For humans, competition is a wickedly sharp double-edged sword. It has driven us to rise up out of the muck of subsistence to build a diverse, technological, multifaceted civilization that is forever improving upon itself. And yet, it has also fostered, and empowered, individuals who possessively lay claim to their little contribution to that societal progress, jealously guarding it as though it alone was the key to all else. Wanting credit for one's work is nothing new. After all, in a world where rewards often only flow to those who receive credit, it's hard not to want to promote one's contribution to the whole. But when guarding that contribution grows into wanting to deny it to others unless they pay for the privilege, then we have all, in some sense, lost. This is the difficulty that lies at the hard of Mr. Vogelstein's excellent document of one of Silicon Valley's most recent and consequential wars.

Though modern computing has existed as an industry for the better part of a century, it wasn't until the introduction of the iPhone that computing became a global phenomenon. After decades of clunky desktop towers, underpowered netbooks, battery-sucking laptops and chunky cellphones, the iPhone crammed everything one could reasonably expect from a personal device into a sleek package that apple, its creator, was able to market to brilliant effect. No more expensive infrastructure, no more cluttered desks, no more tangled nest of cables... Just a simple versatile, wireless device that could exist happily in one's pocket.

For this triumph, Apple understandably wanted credit, not only in the social arena but in the technological as well. It filed numerous patents to protect what it considered to be their crowning glory. And yet, there was no individual aspect, or component, of the iPhone that was innovative or new. Rather, Apple's genius was in assembling those various components into an attractive, functional package that put Apple on the road to being the most powerful brand in the world.

Understandably, Apple would disagree with this view. They would argue that, over years of toil, secrecy and countless man-hours, they invented the modern smartphone. And that, for this singular achievement, they should be rewarded. This position has not only set Apple on a path to litigation, against other smartphone makers, it has permanently damaged its relationship with Google, a once-close ally in the creation of a new, post-Microsoft world. Amongst billion-dollar lawsuits and hyperbolic threats of corporate warfare, the world's largest companies busted up over who gets the credit.

This and more Fred Vogelstein argues in his engrossing Dogfight From the Sidekick to the iPhone, from the early days of Apple and Google against the world to the bitter falling out that has seen the companies abandon friendship for rivalry, the author blends opinion with fact to create an entertaining micro-history of the smartphone that takes few prisoners. Though he clearly admires the innovative spirit and entrepreneurial cultures of both companies, Mr. Vogelstein also properly upbraids them for the arrogant attitudes that cause both to believe that the world would be immeasurably worse without them in it. And yet, it's the extent to which these jealousies and insecurities have dictated their actions that the true damage can be found.

For most of the world, the smartphone is synonymous with iPhone. This isn't true because Apple is litigious. Nor is it true because Apple holds patents for various components within the iPhone. It's true because the iPhone was new, innovative and powerful. It's true because people loved it to such a degree that it transformed a luxury item into a household toy. This didn't happen because Apple got its proper credit. It happened because Apple created a good product. And yet, when faced with competition from companies like Sam-sung and Google, Apple, rather than trust in their own success, rather than capitalize on their clear advantage over everyone else to stay ahead, talked about betrayal, of copycatting, of "thermonuclear war," as though theirs was the only touch-enabled hand-held device with wireless radios allowed to exist. But of course, if that were true, then the iPhone would have never existed at all.

And this is Dogfight's central revelation. There is nothing in the technological world that is truly new. Everything that we have now, and will have in the near future, is a refinement of an older, less successful idea. Attempting to take credit for that idea is not only disingenuous, it is a betrayal of the very spirit of competition that these companies claim to treasure. Worst of all, though, it exposes the truth that these companies don't genuinely believe that a better product will win the day. They believe that hobbling their rivals' ability to compete is the path to victory. That is not only cynical, it's depressing.

A delightful and sobering look at the pitfalls of competition and at the extent to which the powerful fool themselves into thinking they are indispensable... (4/5 Stars)

Serendipity, chance and the anatomy of discovery in Happy Accidents

From The Week of April 6th, 2014

Serendipity is a constant throughout our lives. Whether it is the tragedy narrowly avoided or the good news received at just the right moment, its unexpected gifts and arrows have the power to delight, to terrify and to change our world. For who hasn't had the course of their existence altered by a moment unlooked for, a circumstance not considered? But for all of serendipity's capacity to change our moods and our lives, is it not, on some level, merely a means by which to explain the strange oddities that chance sometimes throws up? Is it not an evocation of some external force to explain a lack of vision? The absence of the mental clarity to consider all that lies before us? Whatever its implications, it lies at the heart of this fascinating history of medicine from Mr. Mayers.

Of all the industries that have been redefined over the last two centuries, few have experienced more change, and more advancement, than medicine. As late as the 19th century, doctors were little more than priests when it came to their capacity to heal. They had a handful of steadfast remedies with which they could attempt to mend the broken, but their knowledge of the human body was about as poor as their comprehension of the world around them. Germs and diseases had yet to be discovered, let alone studied. And curatives were often as poisonous to the patient as the affliction. Comprehension of the world and all its forces was so poor that, even when radiation was discovered at the turn of the 20th century, it was thought to be beneficial, even therapeutic. It wasn't until cancers began to erupt from these applications that the true cost of playing with such fundamental forces was revealed. Ignorance, creating assumptions, creating dogmas, until those dogmas were shattered in the face of hard truths.

But as dark as the 19th century may have been for medicine, the 20th was a revolution. Where prior centuries had been a wasteland of discovery and understanding, treatments for cancer, Tuberculosis, bacterial infection, heart attacks and high blood pressure all became widespread. Even the mysteries of the brain were, to some degree, conquered with drugs that successfully fought numerous strains of mental illness. In les than a hundred years, the doctor's toolbox expanded from prayer and good fortune to hundreds of possible remedies for any of a host of formerly lethal conditions. But just how did these magnificent discoveries eventuate? Were humans suddenly smarter, more intuitive, more understanding of the human form and its connection to the broader world, or were there other forces at play?

A persuasive argument for the virtues of screwing up, Happy Accidents is an engaging adventure through the slap-dash, serendipitous world of medicine and the discoveries that have shaped its last hundred years. Morton Mayers, himself a medical doctor, divides his chronicle up into sections, each of which sheds light upon the fundamental workings of the heart, the cell,the circulatory system, the blood and even the brain. His intent is not so much to give his readers a refresher on high-school biology, though he does this admirably, as to illuminate the anatomy of the breakthroughs, the circumstances that surrounded the key insights that not only pulled back the curtain on the innerworkings of these systems, but that lead to revolutionary cures that have restored life to the terminal and sanity to the doomed. In each case, from antibiotics to antipsychotics, from Lipitor to Lithium, he exposes a startlingly clear pattern of ignorance that was dispelled by happenstance, leading to awareness and, finally, to solutions.

Underpinning Mr. Mayers' work here is the understanding that humans invariably operate based on a collection of assumptions that become, in their certainty, unhelpfully dogmatic. X should not work on Y because of Z. But of course, truths are only true until they are proven false. The sun revolved around the Earth until it didn't. The Earth was 6,000 years old until it wasn't. Emotions stemmed from the heart until they didn't. Certainty; giving way to puzzlement in the face of contradictions; forcing the forging of newer, better certainties; starting the process all over again until perhaps something like knowledge is possessed. However, given the discomfort of living in constant doubt, we like certainty. We cling to it and we are damned by it. For it blinds us to the discoveries, the connections, that would be obvious to us if we were willing to try everything rather than being dismissive out of hand and waiting for random chance to drop fortunate outcomes into our laps.

But as wonderfully as the author constructs this argument, and as much knowledge as he drops on the reader during its repeated demonstration, his proscriptions for its rectification seem inadequate. Mr. Mayers levels an accusatory finger at everyone, from big pharma to big government, to explain why this age of rapid discovery has slowed, why fewer treatments than ever are being discovered. And perhaps he is right to blame these forces interfering with good research. However, Happy Accidents is nothing if not a book about the narrow mindedness of humanity, of how we have to practically be smashed over the head with a gong before we see what's before us. And so crediting serendipity for the golden age of medicine and then blaming institutions for its end seems, at best, inconsistent and, at worst, blind to the possibility that we have plucked all the low-hanging fruit. We have made most, if not all, of the simple discoveries that it's possible for chance to gift to us, that what remains are more systemic discoveries that will require open minds and collaborative efforts to achieve.

Happy Accidents is a dense and deeply rewarding adventure through the human body and the men and women who reduced it from mysterious phenomenon to a highly complex machine that we've gone a long way to explaining. For this knowledge alone, a must read. For those intrigued by happenstance and randomness, no disappointment will be found within these pages. But for those looking for solutions to the intriguing problems posed here, the answers will have to be sought out elsewhere. (4/5 Stars)

an entertaining, if overly explosive, near, nanotech future in Nexus

From The Week of April 6th, 2014

Although progress has been a constant throughout human history, successive generations building on the discoveries of those who came before, it has often come so slowly, so gradually, that humans have rarely had to confront the notion that progress might change their entire world. Certainly, there have been inventions that instilled such fears, particularly those produced by societies beginning to industrialize, but even these advancements only affected certain walks of life. Only in the last 50 years has technological progress reached a sufficiently high velocity to challenge our deeply instilled sense of stability, of sameness. And the result? Nearly universal anxiety about where our civilization is headed, whether or not we are enslaving ourselves to the utility of technology, and the degree to which we are raising children zombified by being forever plugged in. We want the world to be predictable. We want to be what we know. It's precisely this hunger that Mr. Naam exploits so well in these first two volumes of an engaging future of the synthesis of man and machine.

The year is 2040 and, quietly, humanity is on the brink of a revolution as consequential as it is irreversible. Nexus, a drug based on neurological nanotechnology, allows for the voluntary linking of human minds. Not only can experiences and emotions be shared, but thoughts can be exchanged effortlessly, individuals entwined until they can become united far more than they were apart. Moreover, Nexus allows humans trained in its use to hack their own brains, unlocking doors to potential previously only dreamed of. Homeostasis can be monitored and tweaked. Bodies of knowledge, of skill, can be compiled into apps that Nexus users can run, empowering them with instant abilities. Even memories can be blocked, manipulated and selectively forgotten. The brain has not be cracked. It has been reduced to a coding platform that is the playground of geeks everywhere.

But this is also precisely why Nexus is banned throughout the West. The potential for Nexus to create transhumans, to create species distinct from baseline humanity, terrifies western governments. Coming on the heels of any number of disastrous encounters with cloning and mind-control, it is seen as an existential threat to an entire way of life. Which is why it must be controlled at any cost. In America, this responsibility falls to the ERD, the emerging Risks Directorate, a branch of Homeland Security which arms its agents with the newest bio-enhancements and unleashes them upon the producers and peddlers of Nexus. Arrests are made, careers threatened, lives ruined, but for one promising scientist, kaden Lane, their threats are provoking, not quelling. For they have evoked in him a desire for revenge and freedom that might just accelerate humanity's date with destiny, permanently upending the world order.

An entertaining if formulaic jaunt through an exciting, potential future, the first two volumes of the Nexus series are worthwhile science fiction. Ramez Naam establishes an engaging world of bright parties, experimental drugs and unshackled ambition that feels pleasingly and authentically global. Nexus may have been dreamed up in Silicon Valley, but it's adopted, played with and accelerated to its potential in an increasingly powerful Asia which has had little, if any, history with, much less time for, the tricky balance of state power versus individual freedom. It is a playground of experimentation that proves deeply fertile for nexus, a playground that the West, through means both covert and otherwise, tries to manipulate and pollute. In this way, Nexus becomes a future analogy for today's oil politics, with the US acting as it sees fit, with little to no care for the consequences, let alone for international law.

At the series' heart lies a fascinating question. Should knowledge, that could potentially be put to ill use, but that also has immense utility for those who will not abuse it, be regulated by governments? Nexus will change the world. It will break down the traditional notion of the individual and create a new kind of permanently connected person, one incubated in the ideas and philosophies of we rather than I. But however revelatory, howevermuch it may expand the horizons of the human experience, this is potentially powerful for certain abusive personalities who could use this technology to enslave their followers, or their dependents. But should such potentialities be a death knell for any technology? By positioning his heroes as non-conformists, and by giving near omnipresent surveillance technologies into the hands of his government villains, Mr. Naam convincingly argues that knowledge should be free and that we ought to trust in the goodness of people to ensure that it is not put to wicked ends.

Superficially, however, Nexus and Crux are techno thrillers. The author may ask interesting, philosophical questions about the nature and responsibilities of knowledge, but these queries are far-too-often sandwiched by adrenalized action scenes aimed straight at Hollywood. While there's nothing inherently wrong with this approach, it does cause the characterizations here to suffer. Mr. Naam never manages to create anything close to a functioning, rational actor. His characters are puppets being jerked around to his masterful end. Often, the action and the technologies hide these flaws, but they inevitably re-surface to remind the reader that the author cares far more about saturating his pages with set pieces of total mayhem than he is in developing real people we can relate to.

This is a fascinating journey, one that won't soon be forgotten. Mr. Naam is right to point out that, with the advent of certain technologies, our world could radically change in months, maybe even weeks. But one doubts that such change, however exciting and chaotic, would be quite so bloody, or labyrinthine. (3/5 Stars)

An extraordinary mind, a tragic life in Tesla

From The Week of March 17, 2014

There's an element of madness in innovation, a capacity to seize the unknown that is foreign to the rest of us. We are born in established worlds, baked into environments that have been shaped by centuries of tradition and generations of experience. And so it is no surprise that our tastes, even our thoughts, are influenced by customs we cannot ignore. Not so for the visionaries in our midst who are, in some fundamental way, immune to the transmission of cultural DNA, who reject the known for the alien shores of undiscovered frontiers of science and philosophy. This is what makes them special, not their products or their plaudits, not their lives and the hagriographies written in their honor, this altered sight that allows them, for just a moment, to glimpse the beautiful chaos of the unformed. The glories and the costs of such perspectives are detailed thoroughly and methodically in Bernard Carlson's engaging biography of an exceedingly strange legend of history.

Born in a 19th-century Europe obsessed by the dying days of empire, Nicola Tesla would become one of the most transformative, American inventors of the industrial age. Widely credited with the creation of systems to harness the powers of Alternating Current, and having made powerful contributions to the understanding and usage of wireless transmission of both information and electricity, he was celebrated, in his day, as a wizard of science, a man who used his expansive imagination to dream up fanciful technologies and demonstrate them to crowds in awe of his discoveries. His insights and designs, even today, underpin technologies in everything from cars to smartphones. Many have won greater fame and awards for achieving far less. After all, were it not for Tesla Motors, named in homage to the great inventor, would anyone in mainstream culture even remember the man?

Why such a genius has had his star burn so dimly for so long has a complex answer rooted in Tesla's eccentricities and his society's biases. A likely bisexual who never married, Tesla did not conform to the social customs of his turn-of-the-century day. But as much as we would like to blame his lack of fame on something as simple as societal ignorance, we cannot. For it's equally clear that Tesla possessed a fondness for making boastful claims that he often failed to back up. Repeatedly, his more fantastic projects encountered unforeseen problems that set him back years, eventually earning him a reputation as someone whose bark was louder than his bite. These factors combined to banish him into relative obscurity, until a recent spate of biographies has re-established him as one of the great minds of our age.

At times revelatory and opinionated, Tesla is a thoughtful biography of a complex genius. Mr. Carlson, who does not shy away from attempting to explain both the man and his insights into electricity, its properties and the manner in which it interacts with our world, does an excellent job describing Tesla's successes, his failures and his methodologies. The reader is not only furnished with an understanding of the importance of 19-century patents, but with the science contained within those patents and how it has outlived Tesla himself, growing to become a fundamental technology upon which a large swath of our world operates.

But these explainations, however educational, are secondary to Tesla himself, a man with a remarkable life story that Mr. Carlson largely handles with respect and fascination. The author details his tragic family history, his personal drive to succeed, and the numerous ways in which the meritocratic United States aided him in turning his drawing-board scribblings into products and standards that could quite literally light the world. It's here that Mr. Carlson shines. For he is perfectly willing to speculate on Tesla's mentality, his drivers and his demons, doing so with an openness that is as refreshing as his insights are compelling. We'll never know for certain what Tesla the man was like, but Tesla does a wonderful job conveying a consistent impression of a man buoyed by a profound belief in himself and his capacity to overcome every obstacle. That this was both the great gift and central tragedy of Tesla's life will surprise no one who reads this book.

Where Tesla wanes is in the less interesting chapters of the inventor's later life. Mr. Carlson spends ample time on the disputes and the grudges, the insights and the patents, during the heady days of the 1890s. But Tesla is allowed, with only minimal comment, to lapse into his long twilight. Perhaps this reflects what little we know of Tesla's last 38 years, but one senses that the author was far more interested in the feverish years than he was in how a genius lives when the world stops paying attention to him. This, along with the absence of any effort to connect Tesla the man to Tesla Motors, much less the AC age that he gave birth to, seems a notable oversight.

Notwithstanding its shortcomings, Tesla is a mind-altering examination of the powers of imagination. For it is in no way a simple matter to conceive of an unmade world. Tesla is a blind man who managed to draw the blueprints to a city without having ever seen one, by simply willing himself to imagine it, to know it, to possess the whole of it. That act of purely mental discovery is remarkable. And that Mr. Carlson chose to position it at center stage of his biography is as laudatory as it is thought provoking. A good glimpse into a unique mind... (4/5 Stars)

The next Walmart and the life of its genius creator in The Everything Store

From The Week of January 13th, 2014

Genius is a fascinating and complex virtue. From physics to literature, from mathematics to philosophy, it has allowed the gifted among us to make quantum leaps of understanding that have changed our world and benefited us all. But while such gifts are to be admired, and perhaps even envied, by us mere mortals, they do not come without a price. For to be so far beyond one's peers in a particular area is to understand what it means to be alone, to see the world the way few others do. It's only natural for this to encourage arrogance at the expense of empathy, to foster autocracy at the expense of collaboration. Many geniuses will be socially connected enough to avoid this fate, but others, particularly those who find themselves at the pinnacle of powerful organizations shaped by their particular talents? Perhaps not. The ups and downs of just such an adventure are chronicled by Brad Stone's engrossing history of Amazon.com.

One of the earliest successes of the internet age, Amazon.com, known now as simply amazon, began in 1995 as a small bookstore operated out of a Seattle garage and has, in the years since, grown into one of the world's largest retailers. Shaped by an unwavering devotion to the customer, it is the Walmart of the Internet, luring in many of the world's best and most ubiquitous brands with the promise of its 200-million users and deploying that market power to relentlessly drive down costs for the benefit of the consumer. From books to toys, from music to jewellery, it has extended its tentacles into virtually every aspect of modern commercialism while investing its profits into 21st-century industries like cloud computing and digital streaming, ventures that promise to position amazon as one of the most vital companies of the next 20 years.

But how did a tiny internet startup grow to rival Walmart? The dreamchild of Jeff Bezos, amazon's gifted founder, it was conceived in the halls of a new-York-City hedge fund as an "everything store," a a customer-first retailer that would leverage the advantages of the internet to put products in the hands of customers swiftly and smartly. Without much backing from external sources, however, Mr. Bezos began more modestly with a bookstore that would use its vast warehouses to collect every book in print, giving consumers access to literature that rarely, if ever, made it onto shelves of brick-and-mortar booksellers. Early success with this model made the company one of the internet's dot com success stories, opening a geyser of investment that Mr. Bezos would use to make his dream of an efficient, universal marketplace a startling reality.

The controversial history of this legendary company, The Everything Store is an arresting work of non-fiction. Mr. Stone, a journalist for Bloomberg Business Week, takes the life of Jeff Bezos and the rise of amazon and interweaves their narrative histories into a united tale that is much about the complexities of business as it is the personal characteristics of amazon's brilliant and driven founder and CEO. Despite having little access to Mr. Bezos himself, or his immediate family, the author constructs a detailed portrait of amazon's ascendance on the back of dozens of interviews with men and women who played key roles in its rise. Though many of these accounts are critical of Mr. Bezos and his managerial style which seems, at times, abrasive and obsessive, their admiration for his gifts and respect for his devotion is nearly universal. Their anecdotes coalesce into a portrait of a man who is both brilliant and uncompromising, insightful and reckless, but who is nonetheless seized by an entrepreneurial will so potent that it suffuses this work with its passion.

The Everything Store is more than an assemblage of legendary meetings and dramatic near-misses, celebrated acquisitions and quiet grudges. It is, at its core, a work about the unique strain of corporate philosophy imposed upon amazon by its fixated founder. Since launching the company in the 1990s, he has refused to let himself, or his company, slow down to catch a breath. Believing that consumerism on the Internet is a landgrab that the old stalwarts of commerce are ill-equipped to capitalize on, he has relentlessly pushed for amazon to grow, often, far beyond its capacity to handle the demands placed upon it by customers who expect satisfaction, who have no sympathy for its eccentricities, and who have no idea of the mad scramble to both keep the website running and their orders fulfilled. On the surface, this strategy seems insane. Shouldn't one consolidate one's gains before thrusting one's pride and joy into new frontiers? And yet, Mr. Bezos' frenetic pace, though costly in terms of personnel and failed ventures, has not destroyed amazon. It has, instead, shaped it into a rival to Walmart which was already the world's largest retailer before Amazon was even being conceived. Reckless, perhaps, but successful? No question...

A review of this work would be incomplete if it failed to address the controversies that have swirled around it. Many of amazon's luminaries, both those who granted Mr. Stone interviews and those who did not, have gone public with their complaints which have ranged from accusing the author of mishandling their quotes to making profound factual errors that might undermine the confidence of some in its authenticity. As there's no way to verify these claims, it is pointless to even contemplate siding with either party. However, some of the accusations do have some corroborating evidence. Mr. Stone does take liberty with his characterization of Mr. Bezos, occasionally straying into his mind during certain key moments to guess at his feelings, his thoughts. Mr. Stone also meddles in the personal history of Mr. Bezos in a manner that is, at best, presumptuous and, at worst, ethically questionable. However, the former is but a relatively small crime in the world of narrative fiction and the latter is a matter between the principals and not us. For the rest, one will have to decide for oneself who is more believable, the journalist attempting to thoroughly tell the story of a tech titan, or those inside trying to protect their friends and the brand they've all worked so determinedly to build. Given the balanced tone of the work which, to my mind, has few if any hints of a deeper agenda, I side with the journalist.

An inspirational and transformative work about an exceptional company and the even more exceptional minds and spirits that shaped it... A must-read for 2014... (4/5 Stars)

The life of one of our century's most gifted designers in Jony Ive

From The Week of January 13th, 2014

Humans have a complex relationship with objects of their own creation. Built to express needs ranging from the pleasurable to the essential, their utility ought to be far more important than their beauty. After all, valuable resources must be gathered and precious time expended to manufacture them, making it foolhardy for form to trump function. And yet, a simple glance at the clothes and phones, the houses and the vehicles, present in our world tells us that the opposite is true, that beauty overpowers utility at every turn. Why this is so remains unclear. Certainly, peer pressure plays a role; humans signalling to their fellows that they have taste. No doubt aesthetics also has its say, precision of design pleasing our powerful sense of geometric rightness. But no sense of fashion, no matter how strong, should have the power to overcome an object's utility, a truth most thoroughly pummeled in Leander Kahney's fabulous biography of Apple Inc. Visionary designer.

Coming of age in England's Winter of Discontent, an era of political discord, economic stagnation and social upheaval, Jonathan Ive has become the world's foremost designer. Raised by a celebrated educator who challenged and encouraged him, he won awards for school projects in his teens, was a partner at a designed firm at 23, and, at 25, had moved to California to begin work at Apple during the lost years between Steve Jobs' controversial departure and his triumphant return. Since then, he has gone on to shape the industrial design of virtually all of Apple's successful products which, since the introduction of the first iPod in 2003, have revolutionized technology, transforming it from the quirky fascination of geeks and hobbyists into a hundred-billion-dollar industry that lives in the pockets, on the desks, and in the hands of consumers the world over.

Chronicling these two transformative decades, Jony Ive is a spellbinding journey through the life of a brilliant designer at a fabled company. Mr. Kahney, a long-time technology journalist, has largely overcome the legendary secrecy of Apple and its chief designer to construct a fairly thorough portrait of both company and visionary. After dispensing with Mr. Ive's early life, the author marches us through apple's string of celebrated products, from the iPod to the iPhone, vividly capturing not only their aesthetics, but the innovations of design and manufacturing that made them possible. Consequently, the reader becomes fairly fluent with the modern mysteries of manufacturing, processes so exquisitely intricate that they have brought about the age of mass-produced products of exactingly high standards.

But while Jony Ive opens the door on the nature of 21st-century manufacturing, it is, at root, the depiction of one man's talent and how that talent has re-shaped an industry. Steve Jobs has been rightfully hailed for his vision and his marketing prowess; no one else has had the will to turn computing into a high-end commodity capable of compelling a substantial percentage of the world's population to buy what are fundamentally expensive toys. But perhaps his wisest, and bravest, decision was to redesign his own company, elevating Jony Ive and his industrial-design team above the Apple engineers who would bring their products to life. This decision has understandably created tensions within the company, jealousies that have seen engineers leave for other firms like Google where engineering is both paramount and sacrosanct. But however many of these battles apple has lost, it has, over the last fifteen years, won the war. By recognizing Mr. Ive's singular abilities, and by giving him and his design team the keys to its princely kingdom, it has inaugurated an age of beautiful computing that no one else has come close to matching.

As much as Jony Ive succeeds in conveying the visionary nature of company and designer, it is necessarily limited by Apple's famously tight lips. Apple considers virtually everything that goes on within its walls a trade secret, refusing to divulge even trivial details about its processes or its people. This philosophy extends to its manufacturing partners as well, Asian corporations too afraid of losing Apple's business to speak out about their own innovations. This is a pity. For there is no doubt that this is a royal marriage of design and process, of form and function, one that has shaped the early years of our century. And to have the vital moments of that marriage obscured by a silence bordering on the petty is as sad as it is neurotic. Consequently, Mr. Kahney is forced to unearth the broken pieces of a complex whole, doing what he can to fit the pieces together in hopes of getting some sense of the bigger picture. That he succeeds at all is a credit to his diligence.

For anyone interested in the intricacies of industrial design and the almost magical powers of modern manufacturing, an absolute must read. Jony Ive leaves no doubt that we live on the brink of a fascinating future, a future substantially stewarded by a soft-spoken Englishman with a rare gift. (5/5 Stars)

A sprawling and successful SciFi epic in Hamilton's The Void Trilogy

From The Week of November 10th, 2013

From our actions to our futures, the right to choose is one of humanity's most coveted freedoms, one that countless souls have died to ensure and to preserve. This is as undeniable as it is peculiar. After all, humans, down through the bloody centuries of their history, have spent far more time bound by coercive bondage, political, economic, social, than they have spent free to act as they see fit. Kings and chieftains, sea captains and factory owners, popes and martyrs... They have all used their power and their authority to claim our fealty. And yet, perhaps this is the very reason why the freedom to choose is so prized. For when it is so rare to be afforded with the opportunity to choose one's destiny, regardless of the consequences, then it is savored like the finest wine. But what if we were all afforded this uncoerced right? What if we could act as we pleased no matter the costs to the others around us? Would it still seem wise to hail such a right? Peter F. Hamilton speculates in his engrossing epic.

It is the middle of the fourth millennia and humanity wants for nothing. In the 1,500 years since the creation of the first computer, we have traveled to other stars, encountered alien races both friendly and formidable, and discovered wondrous technologies that have, for most, banished the very notion of suffering. Powerful artificial intelligences ensure a safe and lawful Commonwealth of worlds, most of which have access to science and immortality, art and faith. After all, there is room for any sort of life in a civilization that has done away with the scarcity imposed by finite resources and limited power. In a universe where matter and energy are equally malleable, there is little one needs be denied.

And yet, encroaching upon this utopia is the strangest of threats. The void has persisted for nearly a million years, an incomprehensible region of distorted space within the galaxy in which the physical laws as we know them seem not to apply, in which the power of the mind appears to be superior to that of the physics of spacetime. This might be nothing more than an object of curiosity were it not for the fact that the Void occasionally undergoes expansion fazes, moments of explosive violence that consume the stars and planets in its path. Despite the best efforts of the galaxy's most powerful minds and weapons, the Void has proven to be impervious and indestructible which is why entire star systems have had to be evacuated ahead of its expansion in order not to condemn the lives of countless souls to its voraciousness.

Though the Void's purpose is unknown, many factions within human civilization believe they hold the answers. The most popular of these is the Living Dream, a vaguely Christian organization that believes the Void is a kind of heaven into which they can pass. But those who've studied the Void argue that passing into it helps to trigger its expansion fazes which is why they attempt to halt the pilgrimages to the Void. And yet, these imposts only seem to encourage the dreamers to try harder to achieve their aims, no matter the cost to the universe the Void is threatening to devour.

A series as inventive as it is expansive, The Void Trilogy is epic science fiction, a 700,000-word odyssey through worlds of science and death, politics and faith, yearning and fanaticism. Mr. Hamilton, who is no stranger to thinking big with his fiction, has built here on an existing universe, introducing into it an existential threat that his protagonists fear and his antagonists hunger for. Their clashes prove to be as memorable as they are violent, leaving no doubt that humanity's thirst for destruction, its willingness to use force, has not been softened by immortality.

In its technology and its politics, The Void Trilogy is deeply reminiscent of Iain Banks' famous Culture Series, a collection of works that tried to conceptualize a utopian future for humanity unburdened by the chains of scarcity, one in which everyone would be free to pursue their interests thanks to the willingness of machines and artificial intelligences to do the unglamorous labors that underpin civilization. Certainly, some of the ideas deployed here, are fanciful unto hilarity -- weapons capable of destroying planets and stars are, at times, unleashed almost gleefully --, but Mr. Hamilton manages to largely confine his flamboyant excesses, leaving the reader with an exploration of life utterly transformed from the paradigms with which we are so familiar. To step outside those prejudices, those realities, is a significant achievement in its own right. To then manifest such a utopian civilization in which we are all free to act as we choose, be who we choose, is a feat in truth.

It is a most difficult task to maintain the reader's interest over nearly 2,000 pages and for that we have Mr. Hamilton's host of characters to thank. From the silly to the serious, from the sociopathic to the egomaniacal, we are introduced to detectives and popes, martyrs and commoners, zealots and knowledge seekers, all of whom come together to form a vivid tapestry of conflict and power. And yet, these fine actors are also the epic's most troublesome element. For though most of our prime players have existed for more than a millennia, some even back to the early 21st century, none show any sign of the immense weariness that would naturally eventuate from living so many countless years. Mr. Hamilton makes virtually no attempt to lay out the social conventions that would have to arise to grapple with such unfathomable lifespans: multiple lives, multiple partners, multiple careers. In fact, one of his main characters has been a detective for more than a thousand years. Far from admirable, this seems almost perverse. This, along with a certain plasticness of minds and deeds, troubles the work.

And yet, these flaws do not ruin the epic. For like in life, it is easy to imagine darkness and degradation, to dream up the dystopias that some secret part inside all of us hungers for. It is much more difficult to create, to conceive of a world that is wholly new, and then to animate that world with vibrancy and vitality. The Void Trilogy may be far more interested in exploding stars and weaponized black holes than it is in the sociology and psychology, but it still checks all the boxes of good SciFi while being a rollicking good time. (4/5 Stars)

The neurological mechanics of reading revealed in Proust and The Squid

From The Week of November 10th, 2013

Of the many gifts with which evolution has blessed us, none are as consequential as humanity's ability to adapt. Our physiological capacity to endure the cold and the heat, the dry and the damp, the grim and the barren, have ensured the continuance of our species, but even these achievements pale in power next to the might of neuroplasticity, the ability of the human brain to literally re-program itself in response to the necessities of the individual. In the event that areas of the brain are damaged, malformed, or even underutilized, neuroplasticity allows the brain to re-task its other regions in order to regain necessary skills. It is a wonder that has saved and empowered humanity countless times, and yet, little did we know the critical role it has played in our capacity to read. Maryanne Wolf explains in her engaging work.

Without the written word, we would not have civilization. It's a grand claim, and yet, there can be little arguing it. After all, the written word has been, throughout our history, the most stable means by which to transmit information from generation to generation. Oral traditions served admirably well in the many millennia prior to the advent of alphabets, but such a means for knowledge transfer is highly unstable, subject to misremembering and misinterpretation, not to mention genocide. More than the accumulation of knowledge, though, the written word has given us complex mathematics with which we've built up a world capable of delivering us to the stars. A substantial achievement for something that does not come naturally to the human brain.

From signs to messages, from magazines to novels, we read every day, largely without conscious effort. And yet, in Proust and The Squid, Ms. Wolf argues that this fundamental element of our daily existence is, to us, an unnatural process, one that we have trained ourselves to perform. Drawing on her own research, as well as work from neuroscientists and linguists, she describes how reading is an outgrowth of the brain's capacity to recognize patterns and to extract meaning from them. This evolutionary talent, no doubt the result of the necessities of survival, is, in the reader, cultivated, over some 2,000 hours of intense training, into a system by which the individual can associate shapes with letters, letters with sounds, and sounds with language, creating a closed, linguistic circuit that allows us to not only communicate with our fellows but to imbibe knowledge from the troves of information left to us by the countless members of humanity who have come and gone.

Proust and The Squid is more than a rumination on the mechanics of reading, however. It is an examination of the many manifestations of this talent, how languages based on alphabets and hieroglyphs make different neurological connections, and how these connections can sometimes go astray. The most famous of these maladaptations is dyslexia, a disability Ms. Wolf has clearly studied at length. For these disabilities, and the social and emotional price they exact upon their sufferers, inject passion into the author's work here, transforming it from a thing of pure science to something of a call to arms, to understand and to eliminate such challenges.

While Proust and The Squid is, at times, fascinating and inspiring, it is plagued by a troubling narrowness of perspective. Ms. Wolf uses several admittedly potent statistics correlating reading with personal success to argue that it is a talent that must be cultivated for a full and informed life. But this advocacy seems to run completely counter to her fundamental premise, that reading is an unnatural cultivation of a neurological system that isn't designed to actualize it. Is it truly possible for reading to be so profoundly important when it is clearly not intrinsic to our natures? Is it not possible that reading is, rather, the most obvious means of knowledge transfer for the present? Ms. Wolf is alarmed by the propensity of our newest generation to immerse themselves in a world of touchscreens rather than books. And yet, touchscreens seem to be far more in line with the brain's natural visual systems than reading is. Perhaps, in the future, we will discover other means of knowledge transfer that are more efficient than the laborious programming of alphabets.

In this vein, that Ms. Wolf completely ignores those who read through listening is deeply disturbing. Entire industries have been created to service the many communities that either prefer or depend upon audiobooks for learning. In fact, I read Proust and The Squid as an audiobook because I lack a visual means to consume it. By Ms. Wolf's logic here, I too am cause for concern because I've chosen another way to learn. The author's alarmism over new technologies is a rejection of the very glory that gave us reading in the first place, our ability to adapt. Trust seems in order here, not dismay.

An interesting read, but one that is far more interested in providing encouragement to the dyslexic than it is in recognizing and mitigating its author's own lack of foresight... (3/5 Stars)

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the risks and rewards of machine intelligence in On The Steel Breeze

From The Week of October 28th, 2013

For all but the last hundred years of human history, which now spans more than ten millennia, we have been the masters of our destinies. The social constructs into which we've been born have certainly constrained us, influenced us, coerced us, but nonetheless our labors were our own, our survival due in whole to our own talents, our own capacities. But now, with the rise of the technological age, all of that has changed. Where once we fashioned our own tools, measured our own medicines and manufactured our own weapons, these tasks and skills have been increasingly given over to machines which hold advantages over us in speed, efficiency and tirelessness. In fact, the disparities between man and machine when it comes to production are so wide that it would be nothing sort of self-sabotage to not surrender these traditional functions to them. And yet, they are not us; they will never be us. And so, when we do inevitably become completely reliant upon them for our societies, what will our futures hold? Alastair Reynolds deliciously speculates in his engaging novel of the future.

It is the 24th century and humanity has climbed off an environmentally ravaged Earth to live amongst the stars. Moons and habitats throughout the solar system have been colonized while Earth cools, populations free to experiment with technologies, with governments, even with immortality. Despite the obvious divisions this would cause, human civilization has been harmonized and pacified by the Mechanism, a pervasive network of machines, both neural and nano, that ensure that individual humans live nonviolently with their fellows. Cooperation and discovery have become the hallmarks of society which has largely abandoned the destructive sins of slavery and discord.

Quietly, however, matters have begun to change. With the discovery of an inhabitable, extraterrestrial world which has clearly been touched by aliens, humanity has been moved to journey to this distant place aboard Holo Ships, city-sized conveyances that can accelerate to significant fractions of the speed of light. Ahead of these voyagers have been sent Providers, great machines that will land on this alien world and build cities for the adventurers to live in when they reach their new home, but the intelligence designed to govern these Providers has become temperamental and difficult, growing beyond its design specks to become something new, a mind unto itself, a force to be reckoned with. And it is willing to do what it takes to ensure its survival, placing it on a collision course with humanity.

The successor to Blue Remembered Earth, On The Steel Breeze is a work of singular creativity from one of science fiction's most innovative minds. Mr. Reynolds, who rose to prominence with Revelation Space, is an imaginative thinker who, throughout his published career, has rejected the notion that the laws of physics are too stultifying for fiction. Instead, he has embraced them and their limitations, providing for the layman some sense of the phenomenal spans of space and time that are unavoidable obstacles for any civilization with ambitions of being interstellar. In the past, this interest in the technicalities has sometimes lapsed into the obsessive, coming at the expense of qualitative storytelling. Not so here, where his characters, both human and artificial, run the gamut from desperate to ambitious while always remaining convincing and entertaining.

Notwithstanding its delightful creativity, On The Steel Breeze has the heart of a very old novel, asking an age-old question. How will man and machine coexist? Here, humanity has relied upon the Mechanism for so long that it has become unthinkable for it to be corrupted in any way, a truth that breeds the very complacency that allows it to be abused by an intelligence grown far too clever and powerful for any individual human to match. And yet, both the mechanism and the intelligence threatening it provide immeasurable benefits to humanity, organizing it, pacifying it, enabling it, in ways both wonderful and fantastic. Is the risk of the technology wriggling out of our control worth its many, glorious rewards? The answer to this question will be disputed for decades to come, and likely long after we have become far too dependent upon our machines to return to a simpler, more self-sufficient time.

Mr. Reynolds' view of this question is admirably pragmatic. He acknowledges both sides of the argument, the usefulness and the fear of losing command and control, all without siding with any particular faction. This allows his work to adopt an open mind about one of, if not the most, formative and pressing questions of the century to come.

Despite its engaging mysteries and fascinating actors, On The Steel Breeze is far from a perfect work. While Mr. Reynolds' choice to honor the laws of physics is respectable, this adherence boxes the author into a narrative corner he never escapes. On Earth, more than a full century expires while the work's core drama is unfolding in interstellar space, all without the author giving any sense of changing governments, social mores, even the forces of dogma. Providing such detail would have certainly prolonged an already sizeable tome, but its omission leaves the reader feeling as though nothing else in human civilization is taking place between moments of explosive action on the holo ships and the alien world they are destined for. The whims, the pursuits and the ideologies of an entire civilization are abandoned to service the plot which is primarily why we are here. But this lost color leaves the work feeling oddly disjointed, like a movie with no sound, or music with no message. It's an absence that is distractingly apparent.

Notwithstanding its flaws, Mr. Reynolds is worth reading for his creativity alone. Any sin of literature is forgivable when we can watch a skilled mind at play amongst the stars. (4/5 Stars)

The danger of nuclear weapons chillingly captured in Command and Control

From The Week of October 8th, 2013

As much as the history of human civilization has been a slow, steady slog up the hill of progress, a wending towards freedom from all forms of ignorance and oppression, there remains, inside most of us, an unhealthy fascination with apocalypse. It manifests in our literature and our films, in our religions and our dreams, that impulse to step to the edge of the known so that we might peek down into the chasm of the abyss. Why we flirt with oblivion is unclear. Perhaps, in times past, when life was, for many, a torturous, monotonous grind, this longing for annihilation might have been the understandable outgrowth of bearing up under an oppressive weight we were never designed to withstand. But life now is, by any measure, far better than at any time in our collective past. We should be celebrating our achievements, not looking for ways to obliterate them. And yet, the fascination remains, a truth that could have no better exemplar than our history with nuclear weapons. Eric Schlosser expands in his fascinating work.

Grown out of the necessities of World War II, and made possible by the extraordinary discoveries of the golden age of physics that preceded it, nuclear weapons were ushered onto the world stage in the 1940s and inaugurated the first era of human civilization in which, with a few murmured commands, the few could annihilate the many. Certainly, in times past, empires possessed the power to crush tribes and nations, cultures and customs, but their capacity for destruction was not only limited to their slice of the world, but to humanity as well, touching only lightly upon the broader ecology that underpins our existence. But with the dawn of the nuclear age, in which thermonuclear weapons claimed the power to transform entire regions of the Earth into radioactive hellstorms more akin to Jupiter and Saturn than to the planet that birthed us, humanity finally had the power to kill, forever, all forms of life, a power it has never been mature enough to wield.

This point is best exemplified by the nuclear program of the united States which, for the last 60 years, has only narrowly avoided several catastrophic accidents with these apocalyptic weapons. From the Damascus Accident to the Cuban Missile Crisis, from nuke-armed bombers left unguarded on runways to thermonuclear warheads crashlanding in the front yards of unsuspecting citizens, America has had more brushes with radioactive death than any of us would care to know. On several occasions, only a single safety switch has stood between the United States and the kind of devastation from which countries do not recover. And all this thanks to the dubious arguments of powerful men that nuclear weapons are the only way to stay free in the modern age...

At times fascinating and horrifying, Command and Control is an engrossing journey through the American nuclear program. From its shocking failures to its pivotal moments, Mr. Schlosser shines light on the committees, the powerbrokers, the generals and and the scientists that have ensured the United States' safety from foreign threats at the risk of reducing their own nation to nuclear holocaust. Across more than 500 pages, the author details the near misses we know about, hailing the men and women who prevented them from spiraling out of control. In this way, the work, despite its apocalyptic subject, maintains a relatively positive tone when it could have otherwise descended into a seething pit of fear and condemnation.

Command and Control leaves no doubt that nuclear weapons are far too dangerous to exist in our world. Even if our species possessed the requisite maturity to properly handle them, which we assuredly do not, humans and machines are simply too error prone to risk bringing these weapons into existence. No matter how hard humans and machines try to double check every reading, every switch, every cog, mistakes are inevitable. And mistakes in this case don't just lead to a few people being affected. They change the destiny of entire nations, continents, civilizations. To realize how close we've come to annihilation is to understand that some powers are simply too overwhelming for the risk that some flaw in the mechanism, or some misplaced belief by some President, will lead to devastation. Mr. Schlosser could not have done a better job of illustrating this point.

For all of its virtues, Command and Control is hobbled by a poorly conceived narrative. Essentially, the author jumps back and forth between the Damascus Accident and the broader view of the nuclear program, using the former to illustrate the foibles and failures of the latter. This is understandable. Surely, the author had compelling interviews with the survivors of the Damascus Accident, interviews that would have motivated him to use it as the the human face of a monolithic program. However, the Damascus Accident is in no way the most compelling disaster described in this work. For instance, the 1961 incident, in which a single switch stood between North Carolina and a nuclear detonation that would have reduced the east coast to a radioactive wasteland, is undeservedly summed up in a few breezy paragraphs. Meanwhile, the Damascus Accident is repeatedly revisited, but only after hundreds of pages have past, leaving the reader fuzzy on the precise point in which we last left our heroes. The author would've done well to drop the Damascus component entirely, allowing it to exist alongside the other near misses exemplified in a single, linear narrative.

Notwithstanding its missteps in construction, Command and Control is a shattering work that dispels any illusions we might have had that nuclear weapons were and are treated with the utmost care. A must-read for anyone interested in the limits of human knowledge and power... (3/5 Stars)

Blade Runner redux in Montero's Tears in Rain

From The Week of August 26th, 2013 Exploitation is one of the enduring quandaries of our age. For there can be no doubt that it is an unavoidable necessity of human progress. Be it the labor we capitalize on, or the resources we pull out of the ground that gave us life, our creations come at the expense of someone or something else. And yet, this very same progress, which drives us to create ever-more powerful technologies and to harbor ever more rational ideas, is the only means by which exploitation can be eliminated. So which is it? Press on in hopes of banishing the scarcity of resources that drives such exploitation, knowing that it will create even more of it in the interim, or return to a simpler time in which exploitation still existed, just in a gentler and more localized form? Neither option is very appetizing, however, it will be a question we'll increasingly ponder over the next fifty years, when many forms of alternative life, from the artificial to the posthuman, are introduced into society. Rosa Montero pegs out her pragmatic position in this debate with her interesting if problematic novel. The year is 2109 and Earth is not what it was. Not only does it harbor guests from alien worlds, it is now the hub of a modest interstellar civilization composed of colonies and artificial worlds. Its wars, of which there have been many, fought over everything from robots to political ideologies, have been largely outsourced to androids known as Replicants, fully fleshed and self-actualized beings grown from stem cells. Due to their rapid development -- they mature in approximately 12 months --, they are implanted with false memories, written by talented writers and thinkers, that substitute for actual experiences. Armed with this core knowledge, Replicants are deployed as laborers and security guards, functionaries and pleasure slaves, as a means of improving life for the standard strain of humanity. Through this tense, exploitative society prowls Bruna Husky. A combat Replicant, she has taken up work as a private detective since her discharge, managing to keep a moderately low profile, that is, until her neighbor, herself a Replicant, has a nervous breakdown in front of her which culminates in the woman tearing out her own eye. This dramatic and traumatic episode leads Bruna to the chilling discovery that the female victim is only the latest in a series of Replicant suicides. Hired by an aggressive Replicant organization to get at the bottom of the deaths, Bruna plunges into a world of drugs, schemes and false memories that will only yield up the truths she seeks if she's willing to confront her own constructed identity, the plumming of which might well break her before someone can kill her for snooping. At times entertaining and melodramatic, Tears in Rain is a thoughtful work of science fiction that never quite manages to escape its derivative roots. Ms. Montero, who has had a distinguished career both as an author and a journalist, has created an interesting, detailed world that has all-but-turned identity into a commodity, to be bought and sold, written and implemented, at whim. This notion has grave implications for humanity which, at the best of times, is tempted to exploit individuals and groups for its own gain. Doing so to people who can be programmed at any time to d as they wish, to fulfil whatever desire they wish, would not require a second's thought. Given such weighty issues, one would expect Tears in Rain to be a read as difficult as it is depressing. However, despite the amoral world in which it is framed, the tale rings surprisingly loudly with hope for the future. It is uplifted by the belief that individuals will always have the power to stand up and effect positive change. That change may be limited; it may even come at a terrible cost, but it will come. And that kind of incremental progress is both priceless and cumulative. However, notwithstanding its positivity and its engaging heroine, Tears in Rain cannot distinguish itself from the masterworks that preceded it. Clearly inspired by 1r\& and the short story from Philip K. Dick that gave it life, Ms. Montero virtually copies the idea of the Replicants as represented in those works, changing only the means of their creation. All else, from their artificially limited lifespans, to their tailored occupations, to their constructed memories, is unchanged, a fact which would be insulting if the author wasn't so quick to acknowledge these formative works. Heavens, even the protagonists hold the exact same occupation! The rot, though, runs deeper than the mere appropriation of ideas. Ms. Montero's true sin here is that she does so and fails to say anything that wasn't said, or implied, by these prior works. It's one thing to channel one's inspirations as a means of making your own vital statements about life and society; otherwise, the sum total of English literature would belong to William Shakespeare. But it's entirely another to do so and fail to expand on these existing ideas. The whole point of standing on the shoulders of giants is to be a link in the chain of knowledge and progress, not so that you can take advantage of the poor schmuck you're standing on. Interesting, but its failure to be what others have done better firmly mires it in banality. (3/5 Stars)

The fusion of marketing, the Internet and SciFi in Pattern Recognition

From The Week of July 29th, 2013

As much as we would like to claim that capitalism rests on high-minded ideals of freedom and free markets, it is, inescapably, a system designed to encourage people to buy stuff. For it is only through this base consumerism that businesses can be profitable. Profitable businesses hire more employees which results in more people with employment. And what do employed people have? Money that they can spend on more products. This, capitalists argue, is a virtuous cycle, a means by which to iterate and innovate humanity towards a better, brighter future, but how can we know that it is not just a single, enormous pyramid scheme designed to line the pockets of the privileged few while everyone else is sold, through advertising, a vision of progress that most of them will never actually benefit from? Perhaps we can't know this for certain, but this first in William Gibson's contemporary works of science fiction will surely offer some cause to be cynical.

It is the summer of 2002 and the world is still recovering from the aftershocks of 9/11, an event which particularly haunts Cayce Pollard, a 32-year-old advertising consultant who lost her father on the same day, and in the same city, as the World Trade Center attack. Possessing both an affinity for the cultural effectiveness of trademarks and a peculiarly allergic aversion to brand logos potent enough to drive her to completely eliminate branding from her wardrobe, she is an invaluable asset to corporations looking to capture the zeitgeist of consumers and ride that wave to unimaginable riches.

This insight into the nature and value of semiotics, however, is a double-edged sword for Cayce. For while it has provided her with a skill that is as rare as it is prized, it has also driven her to seek patterns in everyday life in a manner similar to paranoid schizophrenics. This obsession comes to a head when Cayce finds herself mesmerized by snippets of mysterious footage leaked onto the Internet, the origins of which she must find. With the encouragement and aid from her friends in an online forum, she journeys to Tokyo, London and Moscow in an attempt to untangle a knot she cannot resist. For it in it lies truths about herself and her father that she must know.

A departure from the cyberpunk dystopia that made Mr. Gibson famous, Pattern Recognition is a headlong plunge into the vagaries of modern marketing that represents the culmination of the author's peculiar ideas about the zeitgeist begun in The Bridge Trilogy. Mr. Gibson's unusual insights into the manner in which some people process information were best represented by that trilogy's protagonist, Colin Laney, a man modified by a cocktail of drugs to find patterns in oceans of data. Cayce is, in a literary sense, the origin of that story, a creature who manifests an earlier, and considerably less potent, strain of that particular talent and uses it to locate and unknot significant events of the moment. Few people have explored this avenue of thought. Even so, it is difficult to imagine anyone doing it more justice than the author has here with his unique blend of weirdness, grace and cool.

More broadly, Pattern Recognition is, in spite of its protagonist's aversions, transfixed by brands. Scarcely a paragraph goes by in which a product name is not referenced. Moreover, Mr. Gibson drives home the degree to which brand names have become synonymous with their products by only referring to them as brands, iBooks, not computers. This creates a delightful reading experience, but more than that it invites the reader to contemplate marketing's power which only promises to grow as people and algorithms get better at understanding our eccentric tastes.

Amusingly, this fixation conjures up Pattern Recognition's most charming feature, the degree to which it is rooted in the now quaint technologies and rhythms of the early aughts. Cayce uses Netscape instead of Chrome, newsgroups instead of social media, laptops instead of smartphones. Indeed, written five years before the first iPhone, the mobile economy and the extent to which it has completely altered the information-sharing landscape is not present here in any way. Had this book been written merely three years later, we can well imagine Cayce having found her mysterious footage on youtube which almost seems designed for the express purpose of feeding Mr. Gibson's information obsessives.

This is by no means a perfect work. The plot is weak unto non-existent. The author makes some attempt to connect Cayce's journey to something that resembles action and drama, but this has mixed results at best. No, this is a novel almost entirely about the merits and flaws of men and women who, for reasons both internal and external, are compelled to live outside the box. In this, it engages our every sense. But if such speculative musings fail to capture the reader's interest, there's almost nothing else here.

Charming, fascinating, and sobering work... (3/5 Stars)

A dense but disappointing conclusion to the Spin Series in Ghost Spin

From The Week of July 15th, 2013

For centuries, philosophers and thinkers have attempted to arrive at a coherent, all-encompassing answer to the question of what it means to be human. Their avenues of thought, though legion, have focused on the spiritual, the dutiful, the attitudinal, even the cognitive. And in this, they have missed the most critical path, the technological. After all, the question takes on a whole new universe of significance when we consider that, soon, humans won't even be exclusively flesh and blood, that they will extend their lives by using artificially grown replacement organs, that they will adapt themselves to life under Earth's oceans and in the skies of other worlds. We are on the brink of revolutions in cybernetic enhancement, genetic engineering and quantum computing that will eventually collapse the nation state and end capitalism as we know it. Defining humanity will become meaningless because to define it will be to define life in all its intelligent forms. This Chris Moriarty explores in the concluding work to her Spin Trilogy.

It is the 25th century and humanity, under the semi-authoritarian aegis of the United Nations, has taken to the stars. Utilizing the half-understood technologies made possible by breakthroughs in the quantum universe, artificial intelligences have been created to operate infrastructure and spacecraft, biomechanical wirejobs have been fused into the human brain and nervous system to create cognitive and physical enhancements, and exotic matter has been mined and deployed to create faster-than-light relays through which humans can explore the galaxy. This ought to be a utopia, a world beyond strife and discord. And yet, political corruption, wage slavery and widespread distrust of humans for the intelligent machines upon which they rely has forged a fractured civilization, one in which deep disparities in income equality and opportunity have lead to an unimaginable gap in the standard of living between elites on earth and colonials elsewhere.

Into this toxic stew of exploitation floats Catherine Li. A veteran of the UN's military arm, she has paid her dues and, thanks to Cohen, the oldest AI in human space, she has forged some kind of life. Sure, there is still the question of her past war-crimes, for which some would hang her, but her enduring relationship with Cohen keeps her largely safe from their manipulations. Until, one day, she learns that Cohen is gone, the victim of someone else's murderous intentions or his own suicidal instincts it's hard to say. But armed with a spun-off remnant of his personality, she intends to get to the bottom of why she's lost the only man she's ever loved. In doing so, she will come to understand the universe, and humanity's future in it, IN WAYS both frightening and fearsome.

A long, meandering conclusion to Ms. Moriarty's engaging, thoughtful, and confronting trilogy, Ghost Spin is equal parts success and failure. Taking up the structure of whodoneit crime fiction that worked so well in the trilogy's excellent first volume, it is essentially a 400-page rumination on the spectacular possibilities and perilous pitfalls of technologies sure to be churned out by the quantum revolution. Atop this, Ms. Moriarty has welded a plot framework that unites an updated version of the sea-pirate story with a mysterious murder-suicide that is entertaining without managing to be engrossing. For the plot here feels secondary, little more than a delivery system for the payload that is the author's philosophical ruminations on humanity's habits and foibles.

Catherine Li, the trilogy's protagonist, has always been a deliberate cipher. Having had her memories scrubbed as a consequence of the technological constraints of her job as a soldier for the UN, she is a benumbed and largely empty vessel animated by instinct and desire. These were deliberate choices on Ms. Moriarty's part and they worked when Li had a mission to complete and a status quo to overturn. Here, though, Li, once a badass of the first order, has been reduced to a woman desperate to find the only man who she invited inside her head, to fill up those empty spaces left blank by her past. And though the author couches this eager search in posthuman terms -- the man as artificial intelligence and Li herself as a copy of a copy --, this does not obfuscate the basic framework of a very old, very tired story.

But while Ms. Moriarty may have overexposed her characters and their deeds, few authors of popular fiction can speak with such eloquence about the nature of existence. In Spin State, she revealed a remarkable talent for terrifying technologies that ate away at what humans hold most dear, identity. Here, she takes up this most sacred virtue and smashes it upon the altar of science. The fragments that result are the fragments of her tales and in this she is, at least for this writer, a must-buy. But the Spin Universe has reached its end, at least with these characters. New ground must be sought out and mined for value.

Problematic, but no less thoughtful or imaginative for that... (3/5 Stars)

A satisfying, imaginative piece of futurism in the engrossing Blue Remembered Earth

From the Week of June 24th, 2013

What are the costs of success? Our world, as of this writing, is awash in political strife, sectarian violence and organized criminality, all of which stain our civilization. But for all the damage these chaotic elements cause, they are at least reminders that we are, in a key sense, free to act as we choose. What if, in the near future, as seems possible, technology advances to the point where we could prevent crime, re-enforce the democratic process, and allow us to heal our world of the pollution and the corruption we've imposed upon it? Our civilization would be, by every measure, better off, but at what cost? These values would have to be imposed upon everyone. And though most would agree to them, would that uniformity not rob us of a fundamental ability to choose to be foolish? These sticky questions are brilliantly tackled by Alastair Reynolds' mesmerizing first volume of a promising trilogy.

The year is 2162 and Earth is at peace. Humanity has weathered the anthropogenic storms and endured the nihilism of sectarian and resource conflicts to create a newer, better world, one shaped by an admirable dedication to non-violent progress. Genetic engineering, nanotechnology and virtual reality are commonplace, deployed as mechanisms for aiding in both the enjoyment and the interconnectivity of humanity. This utopian society, which is lead by Africa, with India and China as somewhat secondary powers, is managed by the Mechanism, an omnipresent surveillance system that prevents violent actions through painful and debilitating stimulus applied to the human brain via their nanotechnological augmentations.

Having spread to both colonies in the solar system and to cities under Earth's seas, humanity appears to have reached the zenith of its progress. Technological advancement has slowed from the frenetic pace of the previous century, leading some to wonder if the Mechanism-imposed peace has retarded the chaotic creativity of earlier decades. However, this view is undermined when two members of the Akinya family, a powerful African outfit that have earned incalculable riches by creating some of the key technologies that have enabled the cultivation of the solar system's many resources, stumble upon secrets left behind by their clan's recently deceased matriarch. Geoffrey, a biologist, and Sunday, an techno-artist, together and individually, begin to investigate their grandmother's past in hopes of unearthing the mysteries that characterized her long, legendary existence. In doing so, they initiate a series of events that might well irrevocably change human civilization.

The rich product of one of science fiction's brightest minds, Blue Remembered Earth is a tour de force. Mr. Reynolds, an astronomer turned author, has not only spun out a well-paced, dramatic tale, he has deviated from 50 years of western tropes and divined, in their stead, a complex future world that oozes authenticity. No one writing from the early years of the 21st century can do more than guess at what life will be like in the 22nd, but Mr. Reynolds' refreshing brand of futurism immerses the reader in such inviting, mesmerizing layers of verisimilitude that this hard truth is happily discarded for an world that won't soon be forgotten.

Mr. Reynolds is by no means the first to conceive of a future world that takes for granted technologies that are currently only in the embryonic stage of development. No, the genius here lies in the manner in which he imagines their unspooling over the next 150 years, leading eventually to a probable future that has advanced well beyond the crude interfaces of screen and keyboard so ubiquitous today, embracing, in their stead, biotechnologies that interact directly with our minds. These electrifying technologies not only play a substantial role in the unfolding of the narrative; they are explored by an author interested as much in their philosophical outcomes as their tangible ones.

For all its brilliant futurism, however, this first entry in the Poseidon's Children trilogy suffers from one significant systemic flaw. One of Mr. Reynolds' imagined technologies allows individuals to project their consciousnesses into automatons, ranging from robots to lifelike androids, designed to allow humans to interact over long distances. But though this technology is deployed to great effect by the plot, the author fails to explain why, when these disposable bodies are readily available, and fully capable of extending a human's reach well out into space without having to leave the safety of Earth, humans do not simply stay on Terra Firma and allow their mechanical proxies to endure the dangers of both space travel and Blue Remember Earth's plot. Perhaps the humans of Mr. Reynolds' future simply have too strong a desire to explore for themselves, to feel the ground of other worlds crunching beneath their booted feet, but when set against the overwhelming advantages of avoiding the deterioration of the human body in reduced gravity, and given that proxies could obviously possess attributes humans cannot, this seems like a flimsy excuse. Should we develop this proxy technology, I imagine most humans will explore the solar system with their minds, not their bodies.

Beyond the science here, Blue Remembered Earth's plot holds up well. From the rapidly evolving landscapes of Mars to the bohemian refuges of the dark side of Earth's moon, we're introduced to vistas and characters into whom Mr. Reynolds has breathed life. There are missteps, certainly. The author's puppetmaster's strings are allowed to show far too often, with actors just happening to arrive at precisely the right moment to receive clues to a mystery only they are destined to solve, but these are forgivable sins when the goal is so rewarding.

A wonderful, captivating beginning to a trilogy of immense promise... (4/5 Stars)

Technical brilliance and corporate imbecility in Dealers of Lightning

From The Week of May 13, 2013

As much as corporations have helped to create and empower our modern world, supplying it with pools of labor and capital to bring products to our markets, they are no wiser than we are. Despite their fortunes being inextricably linked with being able to predict what's next, they cannot escape the biases, doubts and cynicism that befall us all. How is this possible? Because, while corporations possess far more intellectual might than the individual, they often fail to channel that might in any kind of productive way. Having emerged as a result of innovation, they become machines for printing money, not machines for making bets on the future. Some corporations escape this trap, but most invest in harnessing the next generation of companies, bringing them under their own umbrellas and praying that this infusion of innovative energy keeps them relevant for just a little while longer. But while this strategy works in the shortterm, the piper must eventually be paid. Few demonstrations have made this point more eloquently than Michael Hiltzik's history of Xerox Park.

Birthed in the first wave of technology firms that spawned companies like IBM and Eastman Kodak, the Xerox Corporation was a mid-century American titan. Its copiers ruled offices the world over, reducing to mere moments jobs that had once taken people hours to complete. Their brand became so ubiquitous that its name became synonymous with copying, a reality that will embed Xerox in the cultural consciousness for as long as the culture has documents to copy.

Flush with profits, Xerox could easily afford to make bets on the future which is what it did in 1970 when, in what was then just becoming the Silicon Valley we know today, it created Xerox Park, a research and development lab staffed by the first generation of computer scientists who had actually been exposed to these hulking machines while in university. Helmed by healthy egos and powerful personalities, Park became a theatre of experimentation that not only nursed key inventions like Ethernet which, even today, empowers networked computing, it created laser printers and personal computers, early models of the machines that would soon transform our world. This remarkable tide of innovation would culminate in the Xerox Star, a 1981 office product that married a personal computer with a graphical interface that could be manipulated with a mouse. The Star would also prove to be park's downfall, a grossly expensive commercial failure that heralded the mainstream arrival of IBM, Microsoft, Apple and the rest of the corporations that executed the technological revolution.

Packed with riveting characters and corporate dysfunction, Dealers of Lightning is a tour de force. Mr. Hiltzik, an American journalist, vividly captures not only the dawn of the mainstream computer age, detailing the early versions of the technologies that are so commonplace today, but the egos and the jealousies, the intellects and the foibles, of the men and women who created it. All this while painting a devastating portrait of Xerox's corporate culture, one which completely blinded the company to the reality that it held the intellectual keys to virtually every vital component of modern computing, keys it frittered away out of foolishness and ignorance.

The work is narratively driven by the young minds at Park. Drawing upon interviews and personal recollections of the principals who participated in human civilization's most glorious revolution, Mr. Hiltzik animates a host of fascinating characters who range from the irascible to the humorous, from the artistic to the introverted, capturing at once their brilliance and their frustrations. For in as much as these recent college graduates of the flower-power generation were churning out the technologies of tomorrow, their efforts seem to have been blocked at every turn by a company that understood them as poorly as it understood the future.

This leads us to the work's most effective theme. For while the quirks and the rivalries that characterized Park's geniuses are interesting enough, Dealers of Lightning is fundamentally about the abject failure of Xerox's corporate culture. Mr. Hiltzik convincingly describes Xerox as a company that had long-since parted ways with the notion of being a company about technology and had become a company about making money. He details how its fleet of managers focused on making sure the money faucet was stuck open, that this was their only concern, a reality that understandably doomed the company to a most appropriate irrelevancy. For no corporation that squandered the foundational technologies of our generation deserves to be the steward of information technology, a mantle Xerox thoughtlessly sacrificed for the sake of riding the gravy train until it ran out of track.

One would expect, then, that Dealers of Lightning would be a stinging indictment of Xerox. It's not. The blunders and the blindness so wonderfully depicted here is at least 30 years in the past, far too long for there to be any rawness to these wounds. Instead, this is a work of warning in the form of an epitaph to Xerox's cultural relevance, that it isn't enough to simply hire smart people and set them loose on the problems of tomorrow, that one must embrace change or die. No amount of money can help a corporation avoid this fate.

Outstanding work... (5/5 Stars)

Survivalists, cold wars, and a Hellenic future in The Major Ariane Kedros Trilogy

From The Week of April 29, 2013

As much as we treasure free will as a concept, many of us do not exercise it. For the world as we know it must have structure. It must have rules. And if those rules are to have any force or effect, there must be individuals willing to enforce them, to follow orders that they might find personally distasteful or disagreeable. This is the bargain these individuals make with society, the ignoring of their own right to choose in the name of advancing the greater good. But what if the orders they are asked to execute are so monstrous, so unimaginably beyond the greater good? What does the order-follower do then when all her training tells her to do what she's been told? Then the individual is divided between their duty and their honor, between the smart thing and the right thing. And heaven pity her if she chooses wrongly. Laura Reeve demonstrates in her uneven trilogy.

In a future where the limitations of faster-than-light travel have been circumvented by N-space travel, human civilization has reached for and grasped the stars. Humanity now inhabits any number of worlds and space stations, journeying between stars almost as commonly as as they once traversed the roads of old Earth. But for all this technological freedom and planetary diversity, harmony is an exceedingly scarce commodity. For once the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano on old Earth made inhabiting that planet challenging, at best, and Hellish, at worst, Earth and its colonies calcified into two distinct and antagonistic factions that, even many decades on, continues to fester.

One of the central events in this hot and cold war was the ostensible destruction of one of the Terran factions star systems via the use of a banned weapon capable of annihilating stars. This genocidal act not only fuelled Terran enmity towards the Autonomists, the one-time colonies of Earth that banned together in defiance of its power, it instigated a hunt for the war criminals who carried out the mission to destroy an inhabited star system.

Major Ariane Kedros was the pilot of that mission. An augmented human, re-engineered to survive the psychological stresses of N-space, she belongs to the autonomist's intelligence directorate, an organization of special operatives tasked with black missions in the defiance of the colonies. However, since that fateful mission, which now haunts the major's dreams, Kedros' service to the directorate has become somewhat involuntary, a forced relationship that, thanks to their protection of her identity, she cannot exit. For should she force their hand, they might reveal her true identity and consign her to a short, brutal life on the run.

With this blackmail firmly in place, the directorate tasks Kedros with a series of dangerous missions that result in the enemy suspecting her true identity. And yet, for as much as the Terrans may want to kill Kedros, she might well have access to something even greater than revenge, an alien artifact, that she and her partner discovered floating in space that belongs to no culture humanity's ever encountered. Revenge or discovery, justice or knowledge... Whatever the Terrans choose, Kedros will have to endure. For she will never escape her past.

A trio of action-packed mysteries, all of which, in some way, stem from Kedros' past, The Major Ariane Kedros Trilogy is an adrenalized but ultimately unsatisfying adventure through an inventive future world. Providing virtually no backstory for her bewildering amalgam of current and future technologies, languages, cultures and disputes, Ms. Reeve relies on her readers to tease out the vital links that will offer some sort of context to what is otherwise a dizzying array of alliances and cultures that fail to track with our own.

From all appearances, Ms. Reeve has used the Peloponnesian War as inspiration for her two primary factions, with the role of the democratic Athenians taken up by the autonomists and that of the autocratic Spartans represented by the Terran League. For anyone lacking in familiarity with this most ancient Greek conflict, the Terrans will appear to be as utterly unrecognizable to us as their motives are to the autonomists. This is not cleverness on the author's part, a slow unspooling of a dense and interesting mystery that's gradually filled in as the narrative progresses. It is a failure to communicate, to provide a basic framework from which the reader can intuit the rules of the game.

The setting, though, is only the beginning of the flaws here. Ms. Reeve fails, at virtually every turn, to endow her characters with three-dimensionality. Kedros' partner, her boss, even the Terrans who pursue her, are all only partially realized people, a constellation of dim stars that are only here to provide a means by which Ariane Kedros can act. Kedros herself, meanwhile, is a mass of contradictions. She is the embodiment of self-pity and guilt for what she's done, and yet she at no point exhibits remorse for what she's done. On the contrary, she insists that she would do it again. Perhaps this is merely bravado, but it certainly suggests an inconsistency of character that is all-the-more devastating for it being rooted in the trilogy's major protagonist. In fact, the only individual in this entire saga who appears to have consistent motives is one of Ariane's past crewmates who has been tormented and twisted by her guilt.

There are virtues here. The Minoans, Ms. Reeve's alien race, are fascinating creatures with a fairly original society and relationship with their technology. Moreover, the third human faction, space-born generationalists who have built enormous ships with which to slowly explore the universe, are a fascinating, inward-looking culture that is worthy of the time Ms. Reeve spends with them. However, these virtues are even more frustrating when one realizes that Ms. Reeve has genuine talent, especially for imagining alternate societies. She merely fails to fully animate them and bind them together with plots that will showcase them.

At times, a thoughtful and engaging exploration of the limits of human endurance, but ultimately marred by an unwillingness to take full advantage of the pieces of the puzzle... (2/5 Stars)