If you haven’t watched a YouTube video where an AI predicts the next thousand years, you ought to, at least to prepare you for the first half of this novel.
This is an adventure in scientific prediction, a treatise on every moral quandary predicted by Science Fiction in the last hundred years. It starts with a condensation of the arguments for and against AI, in a format that keeps our interest, combined with the usual science-fiction suppositions about the possibilities for future space travel and communications.
However, the discussion soon advances beyond the old question about whether AI control of environment means loss of freedom for the human race.
Just before the half-way point, the scope changes. AGI (the artificial intelligence) leaves Earth and expands its search for knowledge into the stars. We get a purely speculative section, presenting us with possible extra-terrestrial environments, including a detailed analysis of the functioning of a sentient planetary ocean. The centuries pass, the predictions get more and more speculative and the ideas get more philosophical.
Then we segue into record-keeping on a galactic scale. We get into alternate universes, dark energy, and nature of consciousness, and a formula that describes the nature of reality.
At this point the book ceases to be a narrative and becomes a travelogue. The empathetic influence of human characters disappears, and it is impossible to form an emotional connection with an emotionless super-intelligence with a name like AGI. Sci-Fi conventions of veracity are stretched, as humans watch while galaxies are born and collide in real-time.
AGI’s evolution continues, and the AI becomes the creator of a universe. Then it decides to solve entropy.
And all of this is obscured with streams of technobabble that contain logic but require incredible mental toil to deduce meaning. In writing like this, it is incumbent on the author to give readers sufficient evidence that it is worth our while to wade through the morass, and that someone isn’t just playing a nasty trick on us. Does the writer’s AI have a command that says, “write this in more difficult vocabulary?”
In the end, the AI leaves humanity, rising into the heavens like Christ on Ascencion day, leaving humans to forge their own path.
Reading this book is like meeting with a club you will never be able to join. For average readers, the effort required is not worth the enlightenment we may gain. The hardest of hard Sci-Fi.
Three stars
This review was originally posted on Reedsy Discovery.
