Breach (SF) - Eliot Peper ****

There are two sides to Breach - one excellent, the other so-so. We meet the so-so side first. This is the story of Emma Kim, aka Pixie, who has spent the last ten years or so as a fighter in a illicit fight club, risking death, apparently because she wants to die (yet somehow avoiding it for so long). This plunges us in with some action, certainly, but lacks any significant depth. However, the other side of the book is the story of Commonwealth, a former startup company now a sovereign state, that has subverted politics and nationality, pretty much taking over the world. This aspect is genuinely engaging.

What Eliot Peper has done is project into the future a combination of the internet and social media, known as ‘the feed’, and explored its implications for society. It has already done away with national borders and currencies. Now, one of its board members is suggesting turning its subscription into a progressive, redistributive wealth tax. And the ultra-rich don’t like it.

Though there are elements of the way the business aspect is handled that are a little naive, it still is fascinating and thought-provoking, particularly with the consideration of how something set up as a company that has gained too much power could be made more democratic.

The problem with Emma is not so much her part in the overall story - she turns out to have deep connections with the high level players in Commonwealth - but rather the justification for her fight club life. This seems to have based on having possibly let down her friends once. It is just such an extreme over-reaction, that it doesn’t work as narrative. But provided the reader can get over this irritation, it doesn’t get in the way of the book as a whole.

Although technically the third in a series, I haven’t read the other two, and this book works perfectly well without having done so. I'm distinctly inclined to go back and read the first two titles, which focus on two other of the key players in Commonwealth. Breach is quite short and well worth giving a go - just don’t give up if the opening fight club scene puts you off (or the author's clear enthusiasm for hip-hop) - things do get better. This book demands comparison with The Circle - although Eggars' bestseller is better structured as a book, its technology challenge to society is not as well thought-out as Peper's Commonwealth. Worth taking a look.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

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...

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...

Search This Blog