"He's dead, Jim"

"He's dead, Jim."  Or so said Leonard McCoy on a number of Star Trek episodes.  It's one of the few examples of "geek" culture that my wife and I share in conversation.  But if McCoy was talking about the citizens (denizens?) of Elysian Fields in Bruce Balfour's The Digital Dead, the phrase would carry with it layers of meaning.

I've said that The Digital Dead is one of those books that I abandoned reading.  I gave it another try, however, and I'm glad I did. Sure, The Digital Dead has more subplots "than Carter has little liver pills."  The focus of the story is on a commercial enterprise, Elysian Fields, that gives digital copies of people a virtual reality afterlife.  Of course, this technological power is misused.  And so we have nefarious politicians, teleportation gates, extremely dangerous manifestations of AI, archaeology, alien culture, and more chase scenes and gunfights and sabotage than many thrillers.  And since this is a sequel to The Forge of Mars, we have Tau Wolfsinger again as the main character, with his Navajo background and religious beliefs.

Yes, I had a bit of trouble keeping all this straight, but I still thought it was a decent book.  The author clearly set things up for a continuation of the story, but I haven't found one that he's written.  (Prometheus Road was not it.)

Author's websites, for reference:
Bruce Balfour
The Forge of Mars

Prometheus Road

Bruce Balfour is the author of science fiction novels The Forge of Mars, The Digital Dead, and Prometheus Road.

The Forge of Mars (rating: 7/10) concerns mysterious artifacts found in caverns on Mars.  I read it in 2004 and noted that while it had a few too many characters to keep track of, I found it interesting that it had so many themes in it, including Navajo culture right alongside virtual reality and AI (artificial intelligence).

Scientist Tau Wolfsinger and archaeologist Kate McCloud, the main characters of The Forge of Mars, also appear in The Digital Dead.  "Virtual versions of the dead control the desires of the ones they've left behind."  I tried to get interested in The Digital Dead but couldn't, and wound up abandoning it in 2006.

But for some reason I thought I'd give Balfour another chance.  I just finished Prometheus Road (rating: 7/10).  Like the previous two books, virtual reality and AI play key roles, but this is not Wolfsinger's and McCloud's world.  This world is a post-apocalyptic landscape governed by gods with control issues.  The lead character, Tom Eliot, must face these "gods" in order to free the land of their control.

Now here's the curious thing.  I'm tempted to give The Digital Dead another chance.  There's some precedent for that with me.  It wouldn't be the first time I've done it.

Awakenings

When I was about 12 years old, my parents enrolled me by mail in the Science Fiction Book Club. After getting the initial set of books that came with membership, every month a flyer would arrive and I would peruse the books that were available. Through SFBC I read Asimov's Fantastic Voyage, J. G. Ballard's eerie novel The Crystal World, Fred Hoyle's October the First is Too Late, and D. F. Jones' Colossus. Colossus was my first exposure to the concept of artificial intelligence. In this story the eponymous computer, responsible for U.S. defense, becomes self-aware and very dangerous to its creators.

Since the time Colossus was published there have been many science fiction stories and novels of self-awareness arising from the collective action of otherwise simple "non-intelligent" components of a system. Recent examples include M. M. Buckner's Watermind and Frank Schatzing's The Swarm, as well as Daniel Suarez's Daemon and its sequel, Freedom. While we have yet to actually see true self-awareness arise in real life, there are many real-life examples of self-organization, a concept of key importance in the work of Ilya Prigogine (see last post). Self-awareness is the ultimate example of self-organization as an emergent property.

So what have I done? You guessed it. Bought another book, Robert J. Sawyer's WWW: Watch. This is the sequel to WWW: Wake, in which a form of consciousness arises across the millions of nodes on the Internet and only a blind girl is witness to it. Enjoying the first book as much as I did, I'm looking forward to the sequel.