Skip to main content

Bete (SF) - Adam Roberts ****

For a long time, my taste in science fiction writers was limited to the favourites from my youth. The likes of Asimov, Blish, Brunner, Clarke, Heinlein, Kornbluth and Pohl. About as trendy as I got was Zelazny. But lately I've discovered two who have re-invigorated my love of SF - Iain M. Banks and Adam Roberts, both combining style and entertainment with superb ideas that really make you think.

The opening of Roberts' novel Bête had me spellbound. The cow that a farmer is about to kill is pleading for its life - and the scene is handled brilliantly. So too are conversations exploring the borderline between AI and consciousness. If an animal is made apparently intelligent by an implanted chip, is it the chip that is intelligent or the animal... or neither?

Some of the rest of the book worked well for me as well. The surreal conversations, packed with popular culture quotes (some of which I got) were fascinating. However, I'm not a great fan of disaster novels - I loved Wyndham as a teenager, but rather grew out of the callousness of the whole concept; the action that takes place throughout Bête is a disaster novel scenario, even if, this being Roberts, it is given all sorts of unexpected twists. So it's my fault, rather than the book's that I was fascinated by that opening scenario and the main character (especially as a friend is an ex-organic dairy farmer), but for me, it would have made a brilliant short story or novella, rather than requiring the rest of the book.

So Bête is not one of my favourite Roberts novels, even though the bits that really got to me comprised some of the best SF writing I've ever seen. Let's be clear, every Roberts novel is worth far more than most post 60s SF - and I strongly encourage anyone who likes science fiction, or the philosophy of AI to read this book. It simply wasn't in my top five.


Paperback:  

Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Philip Ball - How Life Works Interview

Philip Ball is one of the most versatile science writers operating today, covering topics from colour and music to modern myths and the new biology. He is also a broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Modern Myths. He lives in London. His latest title is How Life Works . Your book is about the ’new biology’ - how new is ’new’? Great question – because there might be some dispute about that! Many

The Naked Sun (SF) - Isaac Asimov ****

In my read through of all six of Isaac Asimov's robot books, I'm on the fourth, from 1956 - the second novel featuring New York detective Elijah Baley. Again I'm struck by how much better his book writing is than that in the early robot stories. Here, Baley, who has spent his life in the confines of the walled-in city is sent to the Spacer planet of Solaria to deal with a murder, on a mission with political overtones. Asimov gives us a really interesting alternative future society where a whole planet is divided between just 20,000 people, living in vast palace-like structures, supported by hundreds of robots each.  The only in-person contact between them is with a spouse (and only to get the distasteful matter of children out of the way) or a doctor. Otherwise all contact is by remote viewing. This society is nicely thought through - while in practice it's hard to imagine humans getting to the stage of finding personal contact with others disgusting, it's an intere

The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson ****

This is a curate's egg - sections are gripping, others rather dull. Overall the writing could be better... but the central message is fascinating and the book gets four stars despite everything because of this. That central message is that, as the subtitle says, science can't ignore human experience. This is not a cry for 'my truth'. The concept comes from scientists and philosophers of science. Instead it refers to the way that it is very easy to make a handful of mistakes about what we are doing with science, as a result of which most people (including many scientists) totally misunderstand the process and the implications. At the heart of this is confusing mathematical models with reality. It's all too easy when a mathematical model matches observation well to think of that model and its related concepts as factual. What the authors describe as 'the blind spot' is a combination of a number of such errors. These include what the authors call 'the bifur