Category Archives: Books

[Author’s note:  I suppose that this is one of the first science fiction novels that most kids read. War of the Worlds is fairly straightforward but it contains many complex elements that only appear upon a second reading and a careful consideration of the text.  As always spoilers from here after so stop reading now if you don’t want to know.]

Many people consider this one of the first true sci-fi novels ever written even though the works of Verne predate this and the true first science fiction novel was Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Still the idea of aliens beings making contact with humans and traveling through space to invade Earth was original.

H.G. Wells, the writer, was a partly self-taught scientific enthusiast.  He read and studied several different topics and fields although he never really mastered any.  Later in life, Jules Verne reproached Wells for his sloppy research of scientific topics.  In some ways Wells was more the writer and Verne more the scientist.

Wells was also affected by the radical politics of his family.  His father was a radical freethinker and encouraged Herbert to explore different political systems.  Wells himself was greatly influenced by socialist and Darwinist writings at the turn of the century and this can be clearly seen in some of his writings.

War of the Worlds itself began as part of the discussion that Herbert was having with his brother about a news article describing the massacre of the Tasmanian native population by British colonists.  Wells wondered how humans might fare if a superior civilization treated the British empire as they treated the native Tasmanians.

The story itself is told from the narration of a witness to the invasion.  A series of gas explosions on the planet Mars is noted by telescope and garners no more attention.  But then a series of cylinders begin landing on Earth.  These cylinders release the Martian walking machines which begin slaughtering everyone in their path.  The British army is powerless to stop the invaders.

The narrator is forced to flee from town to town as the Martians employ all manner of advanced weapons including heat rays, poison gas, and the walking machines.

The narrator gets cut off and finds himself trapped behind the lines.  He and another survivor hide while some martians pass by.  The martians are capturing and gathering up humans.  The narrator’s companion eventually goes mad and is captured by the martians who drain his blood.

The narrator escapes and travels to London.  He notices that the martians are spreading some sort of red weed all over the landscape.  They are turning Earth into a second Mars.  But as he reaches London he finds that the martians have died.  The invaders could not handle the microorganisms of the Earth and are killed off.  Humanity barely escapes being conquered and is left suitably chastened by the experience.

The novel is of course a metaphor that tries to portray the British Empire from the perspective of the conquered.  Beyond this however there are other sub-themes.

Wells realized that science and modern industry would forever alter warfare.  The age of precision made machines made it possible to turn out high-quality weapons in large quantities.  Science meant that new forms of warfare were being invented and deployed before their implications could be fully realized.

The third theme that Wells considered dealt with Natural selection.  Wells was a devoted Darwinist and in an age when the theory of evolution was being hotly contested he saw this as a perfect opportunity to expose his audience to this idea.  The technologically superior martian invaders had not evolved to deal with the simple bacteria of earth whereas the humans had and by dint of their evolutionary advantage they had come out the winners.  Survival of the fittest.

War of the Worlds began our continuing obsession with the planet Mars.  Writers from Burroughs to Moore can trace their works almost directly back to this novel and it can be argued that it has also influenced space exploration.  Currently most of our offworld research is focused on this planet and on the possibility of making this our first home off the Earth.

It would be fitting if the first offworld settlement were to be named after Wells.

[Author’s note:  When I first discovered “The Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy” or “The Guide”, I found a science fiction novel that did not follow a rigid format or that was totally serious or had a sombre tone as so many science fiction novels had in the past.  The novel reads like what it is supposed to be, a comedy of errors.  The characters are not heroic, larger than life paragons of virtue but comical everyman characters that the readers can relate to.  From that point on I realized that science fiction did not have to follow some rigid formula or be stiff and formulaic.  Science Fiction could be fun.  As always spoilers from here after so stop reading now if you don’t want to know.]

I’ve always enjoyed a good farce.  Something about seeing characters stuck in a ridiculous situation makes me realize that even the most capable and prepared of individuals can have a bad day and are then obliged to make the best of a bad situation.

Travel can make even the most prepared of us look foolish.  One little thing goes wrong and your well thought out travel plans can go out the door.  I know that I’ve had that happen to me on several occasions.

Hitchhikers have to learn how to deal with this on a continual basis.  Douglas Adams was inspired by his own hitchhiking adventures in the early 1970s and drawing from his association with the Cambridge University acting group, The Footlights, he began writing this satirical story of a human forced to hitchhike around the galaxy with his alien best friend and getting into all sorts of misadventures.

The story itself went through several incarnations including being first performed as a radio novel on BBC radio.  Later it would go on to become a made for TV series, a computer game, and finally a movie.  The original story was expanded out into five novels.  Adams was rumored to be working on a sixth sequel before his untimely death in 2001 and that novel was picked up and written by another writer.

The plot of the original story is that the main character, Arthur Dent, is being evicted from his home as it is about to be demolished to make way for a highway bypass.  At the same time no one on Earth is aware that the same fate will be meted out to them as a fleet of alien ships prepares to blow up the planet for a similar purpose.

Arthur however escapes this doom.  His friend, Ford Prefect, turns out to be an alien and a professional hitchhiker.  The two of them stow away on the alien ship but are discovered.  As they are jettisoned into open space they are unexpectedly rescued by Ford’s distant cousin, Zaphod Beeblebrox, the fugitive president of the galaxy, aboard the ship he stole, The Heart of Gold.

Also aboard is a former girlfriend of Arthur, Trillian, and a manically depressed robot called Marvin.

Ford himself is a freelance writer for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  Something of a cross between wikipedia, a travel guide, and road map.  The Guide itself is something like a modern-day tablet that is updated by some sort of intergalactic wi-fi system.  Ford came to Earth to do some research for the Guide but got stuck on the planet for several years.

Interspersed throughout the novel, Adams includes several sections from the Guide on a variety of topics ranging from the creation of the universe (many people were upset about it) to advice about appreciating Vogon poetry (don’t).

Arthur and Ford learn that Zaphod is part of a cabal trying to stop a group of interdimensional aliens from learning the “ultimate question to life, the universe, and everything else”.  As it turns out the Earth was really a giant computer trying to learn the ultimate question for the ultimate answer which turns out to be “42”.  The Earth was 5 minutes from its final computation when it was blown up.

The group travels to the planet Magrathea where the Earth was custom-built in order to contact the aliens that commissioned the planet in the first place.  The aliens realize that the question may lie within Arthur’s brain and offer to buy his brain and when Arthur rejects the offer they try to take it by force.

A brief battle ensues before the group escapes and they decide to go to the Restaurant at the end of the Universe, which leads to the next novel.

By the 1970s the sci-fi genre had matured and had begun to branch out in a variety of sub-genres. Although some comedic science fiction books had been printed before, The Guide was really the book responsible for spawning a whole new genre of novels and short stories that focused on the lighter elements of science fiction.

Book series like the Discworld series or MYTH Adventures novels can both trace their roots to this book.

The main takeaway I got from this book was that even though space technology can seem daunting, alien, and even frightening at first that basically it’s still the same situation that we live in day-to-day.  Bureaucrats are bureaucrats no matter where you go, everyone needs money no matter who you are, and you need to figure out a way to live no matter where you are. The setting may have changed but everyone face the same challenges whether they be suburban Londonites or strange green aliens.  The humor element in the story brings this out brilliantly and makes these strange folk almost relatable in their foibles and faults.

If you ever find yourself looking for a lighthearted read and can get past the premise of life in outer space you will find a thoroughly enjoyable novel.

[Author’s note:  I came to this book like most 80’s kids via the movie “Blade Runner”.  At first I didn’t like it as it veered away from the traditional sci-fi books that I knew.  No shoot’em ups, no bug-eyed monsters, or gee whiz technologies.  Instead the book is more of a meditation of what it means to be human and where we draw the line between man and machine.  As always spoilers from here after so stop reading now if you don’t want to know.]

“Androids“, as I will henceforth refer to the novel, is one of the more seminal novels in science fiction.  At the time science fiction was transitioning away from simplistic tales speculating on futuristic technologies and outer space and moving more towards exploring the social impact of new technologies and using the science fiction motif to explore contemporary social issues.

Even as a child Phillip K. Dick, the author, was always interested in metaphysical and existential themes. He wanted to explore through his writings how we divide up in our minds what is real and what is fake and how do we know the difference.

In Androids this constitutes the central theme of the novel.  The book is set on a post apocalyptic Earth.  Most of the planet has been ravaged by nuclear war. The majority of all animals have died out and the few humans remaining on Earth have genetic abnormalities due to the high radiation.  Most of the healthy human population has already left the planet for space colonies.

In order to help the human colonists the government provides humanoid androids to work as manual labor in the colonies. In essence these are artificial slave laborers.

The androids are physically indistinguishable from humans.  The difference lies in that unlike humans the androids have no empathic response.  Policemen use an empathic test on suspected androids to distinguish them from real humans.  From time to time some androids “malfunction” and run away from their owners and return to Earth to escape their servile life.

The story centers around Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter who specializes in hunting down androids.  He has been charged with hunting down six androids that severely wounded another bounty hunter and are in northern California.  He at first doesn’t want the case but the lure of money draws him in.  His wife is terminally depressed and Deckard could use the reward money to buy himself a real organic pet, a true luxury in a world where most animals are robotic.

Deckard travels to Seattle to interview the creator of the androids, Eldon Rosen.  Eldon suggests that Deckard administer an empathic test on a girl called Rachel.  Rachel fails the empathy test but Eldon says that this is because Rachel was raised in a space ship away from other humans and that his empathic test is therefore unreliable.  Deckard talks to Rachel more and realizes that Rachel is in fact an android but doesn’t know it.  Eldon has been using Rachel to distract bounty hunters from finding runaway androids by engaging them in sexual relationships.

In another part of town a badly mutated human called JR Isidore befriends a girl called Pris.  Isidore lives alone in a giant empty highrise building and has no friends.  The arrival of Pris gives Isidore his first friend in many years.  Pris is in fact an android.  She and her friends try to get Isidore to help them set up a trap for bounty hunters that will come to kill them.

Deckard leaves Rachel to find an android posing as an opera singer.  During the chase he begins to form the opinion that he is not just destroying faulty equipment but possibly committing murder by retiring these androids.  Deckard is arrested by the local police along with another bounty hunter called Resch.  The police charge that they are androids.  Deckard and Resch discover that the entire police station is in fact manned by androids and escape.

Deckard begins in earnest to hunt down and kill the androids.  He chases the last of them down to Isidore’s building and kills the last ones.  Isidore has a mental breakdown as he sees the last of his friends die.  Deckard gets his bounty and orders his organic pet, a goat.  When he arrives home his wife tells him that Rachel came by and killed the goat.

At the end of the story Deckard drives a car to Oregon.  Along the way he finds a toad which he thinks is real but he discovers that it is in fact an android.  He doesn’t seem to mind.

The story itself is an exploration of what it means to be human and whether we are defined more by our biology or by the way that we interact with the world.

In the story we have examples of artificial beings that yearn to be human and do anything and everything to pose as the objects of their desire but can’t quite make the leap.  On the other hand we have humans like the bounty hunter Resch that show no remorse or empathy and kill almost automatically.  The obvious question to the reader is “who in fact is more human? the android or the man?”

The subsequent movie, Blade Runner, itself became a masterpiece of cinema.  The movie altered and expanded the premise of the book but I feel it added some new dimensions to the story.  Among these is the speculation that Deckard really was an android but didn’t know it.  The director of the movie, Ridley Scott, opined that Deckard was an android.

I know that I’ve posted the link below in another blog post but it really is one of my favorite cinema scenes ever.  This cut is slightly different in that it adds some narration at the end which I think adds quite a lot to the movie and I urge you to watch it all.

[Author’s note:  I have to confess I had to go back and reread Neuromancer and  review some notes on the book for this review.  The style of the novel is so esoteric and convoluted that it is equal parts sci-fi novel, stream of consciousness, fever dream, and future speculations all rolled together into a storyline that is barely coherent.  Yet for all its  difficulties it draws the reader into the complex relationships and into the action.  Yet it also has something deep to say about the human condition and its relationship to technology.  Perhaps this is the reason why it was the first book to win the Nebula, the Hugo, and the Phillip K Dick awards all in the same year.  As always spoilers from here after so stop reading now if you don’t want to know.]

I read Neuromancer in college after finishing a paperback book for a boardgame called ShadowRun.  The game and subsequent book dealt with a fascinating dystopian world in the near future that was equal parts science fiction, fantasy, and grim corporate dominated future.  I found the  premise so fascinating that I wanted to learn more, particularly about the cyberpunk aspect,  After doing some research I discovered Neuromancer.

The 1970s  and 1980s were exciting decades for those on the leading edge of the computer revolution.  The power of computing was being released from the hands of research universities, governments, and large corporations and being delivered into the hands of independent computer scientists and enthusiasts.  These young computer mavericks were a new generation not tied into the conventional sense of research and who had a radically different mindset with regards to life.

The Author, William Gibson, was himself deeply enmeshed in late 60s counter-culture.  He left the US to avoid the Vietnam war and became deeply involved in the drug scene, punk music, and alternative politics and this becomes apparent in his novels that mainly deal with a protagonist beset by a repressive government or corporate structure that strives to dominate everything and everyone.  The protagonist’s only way to deal with this is in his own unconventional response born from a new way of thinking sometimes inspired by drug use and sometimes inspired by exposure to the internet.

Neuromancer begins in a near future dominated by giant multinational corporations that act more like feudal kingdoms than companies.  These companies use armies of hackers and cybernetically enhanced hitmen to execute their agendas and sidestep the law.  Elected governments barely register as entities and if they do appear, they appear as lackeys to the corporations.

In this alternate reality humans are able to log into a more advanced version of the internet known as the Matrix.  They do this by using PC  desktop-like devices known as a cyber decks which allow the user to directly plug their brains to the Matrix and experience the Cyberworld in their minds.

The protagonist of the novel is Henry Case.  Henry is a former hacker that was caught double-crossing his former employer, a large multinational conglomerate.  As a punishment for this the employer exposes Henry to a fungus based toxin that damages his nervous system and makes it impossible for him to log into the Matrix anymore.

Henry is living on the streets in Japan looking for a back alley doctor who can reverse the neural damage to his brain.  In the meantime he takes low-level menial jobs and does drugs to escape his continuous depression.

Henry is lying in the gutter when Molly Millions appears and picks him up.  Molly is a “street samurai”, a cybernetically enhanced mercenary.  She is working for Armitage,  an ex military officer, looking for a  hacker to do a special hack.  In exchange for this Armitage promises Henry the surgery to restore his shattered mind.  Having no viable options Henry accepts.

The surgery goes as planned but Armitage has the surgeon tamper with Henry’s liver  and pancreas to keep him from enjoying drugs.  In addition some poison sacks have been installed in his body.  If Henry fails or tries to double-cross Armitage the sacks will explode and cripple Henry again.

Now fully secured against betraying Armitage, Henry’s first task is to steal a hard drive containing a human personality.

In this future, people can have their memories, personalities, and everything about them digitally encoded and stored online.  Even if their bodies die they can continue on as virtual citizens living online.  In this case the personality is Dixie Flatline, Henry’s hacking mentor. Dixie is being held captive on a hard drive disconnected from the Matrix inside an office building.

Using a distraction, Henry and Molly enter the office building and steal the hard drive with Dixie’s personality.  Armitage is pleased with the operation and promises more to come.  In the meantime, Molly and Henry use their street and cyber connections to find out more about Armitage.

They learn that Armitage’s real name is Colonel Willis Corto.  He was part of a military team that attempted to raid a Soviet computer base (Operation screaming fist).  The raid went disastrously wrong and Armitage was the only survivor.  Corto was left crippled in a military hospital facing a court-martial and shortly after that he went mad and disappeared into the underworld and re-emerged as Armitage.  Armitage himself is working for someone higher up that won’t reveal himself yet.

The group travels to Turkey and recruits another member for the team.  Peter Riviera is a performance artist with cybernetic implants that allow him to project holographs around himself.  Armitage admits that Peter is mentally unbalanced but they need him to carry out the next step of the plan.

It is revealed that they are after a sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI) named WinterMute.  Unlike Dixie, WinterMute is a machine intellect, a machine designed to think like a human.  In this case however the company that owns WinterMute has imposed an artificial limit on WinterMute’s processing power. The company, Teshier-Ashpool, has divided WinterMute’s personality in two.  They fear that if the two halves are combined that they will become unmanageable so they have divided the AI into two parts and have installed cyber locks to control the AI.  One part of the AI is on a space station (WinterMute) and the other half is in Brazil (Neuromancer).  The aim of the operation is to allow both halves of WinterMute to freely merge together.

The team learns that it is WinterMute itself that has put together the operation.  WinterMute contacted Corto in the hospital and drove him mad creating the Armitage personality in order to recruit all the team members necessary for the operation.  It is also hinted that WinterMute may have had something to do with the failure of Screaming Fist but it is never made clear.

Henry is tasked with hacking the Brazil installation from inside the Matrix while Peter will use his holographic skills to seduce the CEO of the company, Lady3Jane, on the space station into revealing and speaking a key password into a computer terminal that will unlock the cyber locks.

The team arrives in the space station.  Armitage is becoming mentally unstable and tries to wreck the mission.  WinterMute controls the space station and ejects him out an airlock.  The team continues on but Peter betrays them to the Lady3Jane.  Henry and Molly confront Lady3Jane and explain what they are going to do.  Peter attacks them but is stopped by Lady3Jane’s bodyguard.  Lady3Jane has become convinced that their plan must be allowed to continue and speaks the password.

Henry enters the matrix to carry out his part of the mission.  Although he has Lady3Jane’s approval he still has to deal with the black ICE.  Black ICE is a hacker culture term for deadly intruder countermeasures.  The Black ICE could fry Henry’s brain if he’s not careful.  With Dixie’s help he successfully penetrates the security and frees Neuromancer.  WinterMute and Neuromancer merge together.

At the same time the poison sacks inside of Henry are neutralized.  WinterMute pays Henry and Molly for their efforts and helps Dixie to erase his own personality.

In the epilogue Henry is again working as a freelance hacker and gets a cryptic contact from WinterMute.  WinterMute has discovered a similar AI transmitting messages from another solar system.  As WinterMute leaves, Henry hears a ghostly laugh something like that of Dixie’s laugh suggesting that maybe Dixie isn’t truly dead but has merged with WinterMute.

Many of the themes discussed in Neuromancer are now cropping up in our own world.  Let’s start with Artificial Intelligence which is still the holy grail of computer research but this book asked several questions regarding that topic including whether it was such a good idea after all.  Would we want an AI to act without some sort of restraint?

This also ties in to the concept of convergence; the idea that humans are becoming more machine-like and machines are becoming more human-like.  Where exactly does the distinction lie and what happens when humans or machines cross over into the other’s realm?

The Matrix and Cyberspace which most people today would call the World Wide Web which wasn’t in existence back in ’82.  But the similarities are more than startling.  The ideas of bulletin boards, working and getting paid instantly online, being able to contact someone online.  All of this was new back then but is pretty standard now.

Cyber decks don’t of course exist but researchers have begun trying to decode the electrical signals of the brain and have transmitted simple messages using headsets.  Something that my one day lead to experiencing the internet through the mind instead of a monitor or virtual reality helmet.

Other things aren’t so positive.  The havoc which hackers can cause for example.  Another example is black ICE which unfortunately is now being researched by security companies intent on keeping websites secure.

The comparisons to real life are imperfect of course but one can see much of the novel in our daily lives already.  The questions are how much more of the novel will come true in our lives and how much of it do we want to come true in our lives?