Customer Reviews

Brain Plague (Elysium Cycle, Bk. 4)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

When I read about this book I wanted to pick it up, just to see how the author incorporated the idea of an intelligent microbe race living in the minds of other intellgient beings. The microbes live in the brains of intelligent beings (as hosts) helping them to become better artists, smarter, etc. I found it a fascinating concept! The main character in the book is called the God of Mercy by her microbes because she tries to treat them fairly. It is a good book, with many new ideas. It is like having an entire civilization living in your brain... and you can imagine what that might mean. The microbe "Characters" have personalities and drives just as we do which makes each new generation (the mircobes have a much shorter lifespan than we do)different. The blink of an eye for us may be a month for them. I recommend this book for its ideas and mystery... some people do not do well with the microbes.. there is an underground.. certain people have addictions. A good book all the way around... and different. I believe Joan (the author who is also a biologist) is a good writer and has incorporated some great ideas in the very interesting novel.

What if there were intelligent microbes? What if they could communicate with us? What if they could inhabit the human brain and offer to enhance our mental capacity? Would you accept the offer? Once accepted, what could keep the microbes from doing with you as they please?

These are the complex and puzzling issues raised in Joan Slonczewski's latest novel Brain Plague. In the far future, humanity has spread throughout the galaxy. In addition to normal humans, there are "elves" (genetically engineered near-immortals), simians (human/ape hybrids), sentients (artificial intelligences), and a variety of other creatures (including organic, self-aware buildings who negotiate rental agreements with their tenants).

Despite the advances of technology, all is not well in the universe. Humans still suffer addictions and homelessness. Violence still occurs all too often. And in the background, a terrible plague has been raging through space - a "brain plague" in which intelligent "micros" invade human hosts and turn them into slaves. But just like human beings, there are good micros and bad ones. The good ones are part of a carefully monitored program in which human hosts are matched with colonies of microbes. The resulting symbiotic relationship provides the microbes with an ideal living environment (and a "god" to worship); it provides the host with the equivalent of a million microscopic parallel processors to apply to any task he or she might imagine.

Chrys, a young and talented (but starving) artist volunteers for the "brain enhancer" program, accepting a colony of microbes. They communicate with her via nanotechnology implanted in her optic nerves. Thus begins Chrys's journey, learning to live with her new partners, suffering through the prejudice and hatred of others, reaching self-actualization in her art, and risking her life to discover the truth about the Brain Plague.

Joan Slonczewski (author of six previous novels) has drawn upon her background as a molecular biologist to bring us something very different from the usual science fiction tale. While many SF novels find ways to bend the rules of physics, Brain Plague finds ways to bend the rules of the mind, and tinkers with our concept of individuality.

If any complaint can made against this novel, it's that so much is thrown at the reader in the first chapter it can be overwhelming. This is partly due to the fact that this novel, while not technically a sequel, is based in the same universe as her previous novels (thus some prior knowledge of these would doubtless be helpful); and partly due to Dr. Slonczewski's extremely active imagination. Nonetheless, the tale is well-told, drawing the reader in despite its complexity. All in all, it's an engrossing novel.

In "The Children Star", the preceding novel of this series, intelligent microbes were the solution to a mystery. Here they are the point of departure for an "alien relations" story like no other. We've met all kinds of aliens in science fiction: implacable aliens that wanted only to eat us up, benevolent aliens welcoming us to an advanced galactic civilization, and all manner of dispositions in between. There have been parasites that snatched human bodies, and occasional symbiotes that provided free medical coverage. Joan Slonczewski, with her longtime concern for social and bioethical problems, and her heartfelt championship of universal rights, has cooked up a breed of aliens that maximally perplex both conscience and prudence.

These microbes, you see, are not just intelligent. They are also social, in the way that humans are social (not bees). Individuals retain enough individuality to have clashing wishes and clashing ideologies. So microbial societies develop distinct cultures -- as variegated as human societies. Add to this that they live and die radically faster than humans. For good measure, on their home planet they evolved to colonize non-sentient animals of approximately human scale. So on invading human hosts, their initial impulse is to control these hosts as they would control mindless beasts. In "The Children Star", humans almost decided to wipe them out, but relented because the colonies in some humans developed more symbiotic cultures, with dazzling services to offer.

Now they've been around a while, and human society is caught in a maelstrom. Virulent microbial societies have become a "brain plague", controlling their environments -- their hosts -- in short-sighted, destructive ways. A secret community of carriers, however, has learned to pass around microbes with friendlier or more submissive cultures. Living as fast as they do, the microbes also think faster, and confer great benefits as brain enhancers. Besides which, they're company to the lonely human soul, and some worship their hosts as "gods". It's a dangerous game, however. Generations of microbes parade by in what for humans is a short while. New generations bring new fashions and ideas. A human carrier can wake in the morning to find that overnight there has been a revolution. Now the microbes are bad.

That's all I'll say about plot, though there's plenty more. What about plausibility? The one and only attempt to make "micropeople" plausible occurs early on, when the protagonist of the story objects, "It's absurd. Nothing that small can have enough ... connections to be self-aware." The doctor answers, "Self-awareness occurs in sentients with about a trillion logic gates. A micro cell contains about ten times that number of molecular gates." Gating what, though, and how? Electrical signals? Connections in humans take place at synapses, where electrical signals are transmitted by chemical packets that take about 15 milliseconds to cross the gap. What sorts of pathways are available inside a microbe, and what timings are possible at the connections? Where signals have to be summed, what would be the thresholds and rise times? These timings could set a limit to the speed of thinking. The story has to attribute fast thinking to the micropeople, because microbial lives would otherwise be too short to learn much.

Assuming no questions of this sort pose a "showstopper", I think that the micropeople of "The Children Star" and "Brain Plague" raise a new science fiction topic as fundamental as space travel. After all, there could be "macropeople" as well. James Lovelock, when he first put forth the "Gaia" hypothesis, was careful to disavow any implication that "Gaia" was conscious; his speculation was only about an autonomic control system. (Later he wavered and personalized it a little.) Similarly, Richard Dawkins has been careful to declare that "The Selfish Gene" is only a metaphor. But why shouldn't there be sentient entities at more than one scale, operating at more than one pace? How would we ever discover if there were? How to communicate? And what would be the consequences for the discussion of evolution, if microbial entities were found to be conscious players? This could be big.

While the premise, that of intelligent microbes colonizing human brains, sounds far-fetched, Joan Slonczewski's biology background helps her to make it quite believable. Unlike most science fiction writers that gets so caught up in scientific ideas that they forget to add plot or characterization, Mz. Slonczewski's characterization is excellent and detailed, while her plot is lively and interesting.

While the micobial sub-plots exhibit great depth, the young woman's over-story exhibits "princess syndrome" to some degree, where a young, powerless girl overcomes everything to end up with everything she ever wished for and more. If not for this defect, I would say Slonczeweski was on her way to being an Ursula K. LeGuinn. I'd highly recommend it, especially to young women.

Joan Slonczewski is one the latest good science fiction authors to hit the scene. I count three other novels in this series, A Door Into Ocean, Daughter of Elysium, and The Children Star, making this the fourth. All these novels revolve around one universe, but in each one she explores deeper into the notion of otherness and alien intelligence. Her first novel, A Door Into Ocean, tells the story of a race of humans who live in harmony with nature on rafts in the ocean and humans who live very extended lives in technologically advanced floating cities on the same world. Daughter of Elysium tells of the awakening of artifical intelligence within those cities. The Children Star recounts the discovery of a microscopic intelligence. Brain Plague goes further into the exploration of micro-intelligence and how they can live with humans. It is a good novel and keeps you off balance. However, I felt as though something was lacking in this last novel. Maybe it was just the lack of connection I felt with the main character, an artist.

I loved the idea, and I loved the libertine Eleutherian community and their nightclubs. Now the microbes experience an entire lifetime in the equivalent of human weeks. Hence my nits. Chrys, God of Mercy, experiences conversation with her various people in her 'real time', yet, so apparantly do the Eleutherians. Shouldn't a conversation be taking place over a span of Eleutherian days? Or weeks? She closes her eyes for 2 minutes to punish people with an eclipse lasting months(?). Yet she sleeps, waking every 2 hours so her people won't start misbehaving - Is that not the equivalent of decades 'without the sun'?

Brilliant, powerful, beautiful -- at times terrifying, at times humourous -- with finely developed characters from the human protagonist to the generations of microbial creatures developing in her brain. The story is deep without being pretentious, fast-paced and thrilling but with an attention to detail. I picked this up, of all places, in a supermarket, because the cover caught my eye. I have not read any of this author's previous work, but I'm looking forward to reading anything else available. It's been a long time since a story captured my imagination so completely that I would give up a night's sleep to read it through to the end. Dawn is nearly here, I've turned the last page, and my very first thought was to write a review.

The protagonist, Chrysoberyl, is an artist who creates moving sculptures of light, and the author paints each creation in vivid description. The story deftly moves the reader from the infinitesimal world in Chrys' mind, through the various environments of the "outside" world, through art galleries and slums and mansions and soup kitchens and nightclubs. Chrys' story plays out in a relatively short space of time, while that of the microbes she interacts with spans hundreds of their generations. In contrast, in the outside world there are humans, unlike Chrys, whose lifespans are centuries long. All the varying cultures maintain a faltering balance, threatened by the "brain plague" of uncontrolled nano-infestation, the victims of which are scorned as "vampires." When Chrys volunteers to become host to a presumable benign colony, she finds herself at the thin line between "carrier" and "vampire."

Cybertech is not my usual reading choice, because it often feels impersonal to me, more about ideas than humanity, but this story is as human as it gets, examining the impulses that make us creative, loving, hate-filled, loyal, worshipful, petty, just.The integration of human brain with this sort of nanotechnology is rushing toward us ever more quickly -- with its advantages and disadvantages, its benefits and threat of brain plagues. It may be a long time before every facet of our livesisare ruled by nanotechnology, but this book gives us a glimpse of what we might hope or fear to become, and a solid story, as well.

This is an adventure on a grand scale but in a very small space.

The great talent that the author has is that you definitely get a feel for the character and you understand the motivations of the different people in the story. Both the good and the bad guys were believable and the technology was both visionary and plausible.

I liked the central idea alot and would be more than happy to volunteer to house a colony of intelligent beings and have them plan grand scale architecture and artwork that would take the viewer far beyond what they could accomplish themselves.

I anxiously await the next turn in the universe/worlds of the Author. Her characters were true to themselves and very well written (down to the smallest microbe)

The main character of the book is a young female artist--a creative and ambitious girl (not woman) who seeks a shortcut to making her art better. She agrees to allow a colony of microsized "people" to live on the outskirts of her brain, in exchange for their willingness to help her with her art projects. She gets far more than she bargained for, and finds herself embroiled in the lives of her "people" and their sister colonies who live inside other carriers. Although the carriers are a diverse group who mostly seem to consider her an upstart who can't properly "control" her colony, they slowly learn to respect her differences as she in turn matures and learns. In the long run, the "people" learn a great deal from her as well, and they end up helping her in ways having nothing to do with her art. Altogether, a fascinating and diverse group of characters interacting in plausible ways. I look forward to another book set in this world.

IMHO, Joan is one of the best fiction writers ever. I've read all of her books, including this one. I have not read a mediocre one yet; the characters and landscapes are interesting, believeable and engaging. Her scientifically-based plots are supurbly conceived and flawlessly executed (yeah I know that sounds cheezy).

I keep checking Amazon periodically in hopes she publishes something else. Someday maybe I'll luck out and find she has given up 'real science' in the 'real world' to focus on her incredible gift. In case you are ego-surfing Joan my message to you is-you gotta retire sometime and you gotta do something interesting when you retire-so how about some creative writing, please?