Sea of Rust (SF) - Robert Cargill ****

Although the Pixar movie Wall-E has demonstrated it's possible to tell a story effectively with robots as the protagonists, this was achieved using dollops of gooey anthropomorphism. What Robert Cargill achieves is far harder - to give us an engaging novel where all of humanity is dead and the only intelligence is artificial without playing the 'they're just like people, really' card too heavily.

I say 'too heavily' because I think it's fair to say that there is still an unlikely level of human-like behaviour here. Robots speak to each other in English when they could achieve vastly richer high bandwidth audio communication. And most robots appear to have gender. (Even Cargill occasionally slips up on this, at least once calling the same machine 'he' and 'it'.) We're told the use of gender is because when AIs first broke free it was decided that no robot would have to be called 'It' anymore - but there seems no logical reason why the AIs would want to identify with the old human genders - and there is nothing about the characters we meet that is in any way related to gender.

So, it would have been more realistic if the characters here - who develop nicely - had been a little less human-like and more had been made of their AI natures and abilities. The only real distinction from humans seems to be in their physical prowess - in everything mental they were far too human. However, given that, it's a great story. There's plenty of drama, battles and a surprising amount of (welcome) philosophising too. Although there's a slightly derivative Mad Max feel to some of the settings, it never becomes pure fighting adventure with no thought.

The storyline follows the central character Brittle, a scavenger of parts from failing robots, both in Brittle's attempt to survive as an individual and as part of a group trying to avoid a wider fate where robots are being drawn into massive mainframe collectives. However, what we get is not a purely linear narrative - there are regular jumps back to understand how human beings came to be wiped out and some of Brittle's backstory.

I'm likely that I'm asking the impossible from Cargill, in that I suspect it would be much harder to keep an interest in characters that were less human-like, but it would have been interesting to see the nature of truly independent AIs that didn't have to hark back to human behaviour and thinking pushed further. Even so, Sea of Rust works excellently both as a straightforward story of survival and as an exploration of the nature of conscious intelligence.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein, but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...

Search This Blog