Land of the Headless (SF) - Adam Roberts ****

It's important that I explain why I've given this book four stars, despite the fact that I didn't enjoy reading it. I've rated it highly because it's a brilliant exercise in a certain kind of writing. Like Gulliver's Travels, for example, the idea is not to make a great story where the reader can really engage with the main character - the narrator here, Jon, is a strangely formal, wordy individual who is difficult to like. Instead, what Adam Roberts has done so impressively here is both come up with a concept that is so horrible it burns itself into your memory and also to use that concept, and the society that brought it into existence, as a vehicle for examining our own beliefs and attitudes. Just as the weird experiences of Gulliver were not intended to be a fun fantasy (forget the film versions) but a reflection of the unpleasant extremes of society, so Jon's experiences are a mirror to the nastier aspects of religion and modern social attitudes.

The main premise is simple, and doesn't get any less shocking from exposure to it. On a planet which has adopted a fundamentalist religion that appears to be a merger of the most unpleasant aspects of Islam and Christianity, three offences - murder, blasphemy and voluntary sex outside marriage - are punishable by beheading. But this is a modern, 'civilised' space-faring society - so judicial killing is frowned on. They have developed the technology to keep people alive after their heads are cut off, with their mental function transferred to an onboard computer.

Roberts does not hold back on the grisly detail of life without a head, but also sends his main character on a journey that involves shunning by 'good people', an encounter with a sadistic policeman and a life-changing period of time in the army, fighting a war on another planet. All along, that central character is driven by love for a woman he hardly knew.

It's not an easy read, as you might imagine - but it's insightful and it's hard not to admire Roberts' chutzpah in devising this concept and in getting it past a publisher. I wasn't entirely surprised that the paperback has gone out of print - but if you're up to it, it's a science fiction book that you ought to have read.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Luna: Moon Rising (SF) - Ian McDonald ****

I'm not the natural audience for this book. Game of Thrones l eaves me cold - and it's hard not to feel the influence of GoT (and a whole lot of Dune ) underneath a veneer of science fiction and the trappings of a South American drug cartel in the cod-medieval family power battles and chivalric details. There are even dragons (of a sort). I'd be really sad if the future did involve this sort of throwback feudalism. However, remarkably, despite this I found Luna: Moon Rising kept me engaged. The fact is that Ian McDonald can put together a good plot with intricate machinations, which is enough to carry the reader through what can be a bewildering collection of characters. The two page scene-setter saying who did what to whom at the start was useful, but I could have done with family trees for the main family as I was constantly forgetting who was who - especially easy as McDonald endows many families with characters with the same first initial (e.g. Ariel and Al...

Adventures of a Computational Explorer - Stephen Wolfram ***

Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the scientist's mathematical tool of choice, Mathematica, plus a whole host of other software products, including the uncanny Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, is undoubtedly a genius of the first order. In this book, we get an uncensored excursion into the mind of genius - which is, without doubt, a fascinating prospect. The book consists of a collection of essays and speeches that Wolfram has produced over the last ten to fifteen years, covering an eclectic range of topics. Like all such collections, the result is something that lacks the coherence of a book with a narrative that runs through it, inevitably introducing a degree of repetition and a mix of interesting and not-so-interesting topics - but there's likely to be something to catch the attention anyone who is into computing or mathematics. One of the most interesting pieces is the opening one, where Wolfram describes being a consultant on the SF movie Arrival. He seems to hav...

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here. We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...

Search This Blog