Customer Reviews

Genesis

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

 

 

This book follows the future human interaction with artificial intelligence. The two main characters, Christian Brannock and Laurinda Ashcroft, go as far as to have their personalities "up-loaded" into this expanding intelligent computer network. As the artificial intelligence grows and spreads, humanity finds it convenient to leave more and more control in the hands of the computers. Finally, once the _computers_ have conquered the stars, Earth is remembered. However, the intelligence in charge of the Sol system has grown more and more evasive and secretive, so Christian Brannock is called upon to investigate and find out what secret the computer of Earth is hiding.

This is a story of the near and far future. It is a dystopia, where humanity, in search of comfort and ease, surrenders its future to technology. But, with the disappearance of striving and overcoming, the flame of humanity is snuffed out. Do the computers care about the love of one couple? No. But do the computers care about the striving and advancement of life? Perhaps...

This book will challenge you to think about the future, and our direction. I found this book highly thought provoking, and more than a little disturbing. Well-written, and reasonably short, you should consider reading it.

Although I enjoyed the book, I did get the strong impression that the plot was very much secondary to the ideas that Poul Anderson is interested in: human nature and evolution, artificial intelligence and its evolution, free will, destiny, etc. The fate of carbon-based intelligence vs. silicon-based intelligence is a theme in many books, fiction and nonfiction, and Mr. Anderson's contribution is very readable. You might try Hans Moravec's nonfiction speculations, or Dan Simmons' Endymion Series, or Robert Jastrow's now classic "The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe" to name a few.

I think Author pushed his own brain to the limit to create these human-like avatars of quantum chaotic celestial gods. Author says most of life processes proceed on a quantum level beyond human comprehension.. The story reminds me of Herman Hesse's GLASS BEAD GAME with the change that Galactic Brain Nodes are the players and poor human consciousness gets to be the glass beads. Poul Anderson realizes this when he says some games are beyond human words and some works beyond music. To make the incomprehensible less so the Author resorts to myth and metaphor. This doesn't work for me but Author had no other option given the outer space he was shooting for. Few writers attempt or succeed so well in finding patterns of comprehension in the swirling chaos of modern day linguistic strange attractors.

The bright human characters in this story have become too dissipated for the normal reader to relate to. The characters are all humming "is that all there is?" Who can sit shadow watching, star gazing and waiting to be uploaded or assimilated into a galactic brain? It seems a stretch that God Gaia, God Wayfarer or Alpha would get teary eyed about a human love couple but then viewers still do choke up at these Hollywood endings. Still the conflicts are excellent and the mythical metaphors exceptional. I especially appreciated that an uploaded human mind is likened to a gene in the chromosome of a galactic god. If you really enjoy far out Sci-fi, like "modulated neutrino beams" and Star Trek holodeck drama played out on the mental screens of galactic gods, don't miss GENESIS.

The good: This book puts forth some very interesting ideas. Ideas that you are hard-pressed to find in any other sci-fi works, but that are too basic to ignore. Such as, if you were to look ahead in time millions of years, what will become of the human race? Is artificial intelligence the same, less than, or greater than real intelligence? This book will certainly spark your imagination in these areas.

The bad: Some of the plot is too thin, or too unexplained. There are points that should be shoved in your face but aren't. Some moments are anticlimactic.

Overall: It this book all that it could have been? No. Am I sorry I read it? Not at all. It is more thought-provoking than entertainment, and it's ideas will probably haunt me for a long, long time.

In the classic short story "Day Million," Frederik Pohl tried to envision what life would be like millenia from now. Poul Anderson tries to do the same here a few galactic revolutions (and hundreds of millions of years) on.

It's no longer possible to separate humans from computers. Formerly biological intelligences get uploaded into immortality, then downloaded when they want to experience existence as living beings again. Minds join and separate at will. The universe (or the galaxy, at least-it's not entirely clear) is well-explored.
Against this surrealistic backdrop, one of the main minds of the universe (call it Alpha) wishes to check up on the mind that's still on earth (Gaia). The latter is refusing assistance in helping to save earth from collision with a massive interstellar dust cloud a few thousand years hence (an eyeblink in this era). Why? Well, Alpha downloads an emissary and sends him along to find out.

Saying much else would start giving things away, but let's just say Gaia is doing some interesting experiments. And let's say, too, that there's still room for love in what may seem a sterile universe.

It's not always an easy read and ends in an unsatisfying way to me. But there appears to be room left for a sequel, so perhaps satisfaction is still to come. A solid though not to my mind classic work by one of the masters of the genre.

Even when I first read this book, I was underwhelmed. The characters aren't particularly complicated or interesting, and the different sections of the book (more like sutured-together novellas) are so different that there is little coherent conflict or plot. The technology described in the book (human-mind uploads, god-like computers) was interesting then, but ten years later, it's old news. I wouldn't recommend it.

Poul Anderson's The Boat of a Million Years was a brilliant exploration of human history - past, present, and future - as told through the lives of a small group of immortal humans.

Genesis is NOT The Boat of a Million Years. It is a fairly tame and disjointed love story (what was it with Poul Anderson and love stories in his last works?) that spans billions of years of human history (and that of the AIs left by humans after they disappear).

As humans expanded into the solar system, Christian Brannock was there with his expert robotic skills necessary for the exploration of inhospitable places (like Mercury).

On Earth, humans create a central AI to take care of the Earth and its inhabitants. Lucinda Ashcroft is its liason with humans. When it is determined that all life will be at risk in 9,000 years, it is the Central AI's job to ensure that Earth survives.

A little while later, it is determined that only AIs will ever be able to explore the galaxy, and they are sent out on millions of years long exploration trips. Bored, Christian Brannock chooses to be absorbed by an AI so he travel to the stars on one of these missions. Lucinda Ashcroft is eventually absorbed by the Central AI.

Over a billion or more years, the AIs sent out to explore the galaxy become a great Galactic Brain communicating on a galactic time scale as a collective one. The Central AI on Earth, now known as Gaia, is one of the collective Galactic Brain.

Another Billion years or so with the Earth near the end of its life as the sun begins to expand, another member of the Galactic Brain, Alpha (the AI that absorbed Christain Brannock) decides that Gaia is not being completely forthcoming about the goings on on Earth and decides to send an emmisary and it instills the essense of Brannock in its core.

Thus begins the love story of Christian and Lucinda as they are downloaded into simulacrums to interact during the investigation.

While The Boat of a Million Years examined human history, Genesis seems to ignore it. When all is said and done, billions of years pass and the reader learns nothing of what is to come for human history.

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A Guide to my Rating System:

1 star = The wood pulp would have been better utilized as toilet paper.
2 stars = Don't bother, clean your bathroom instead.
3 stars = Wasn't a waste of time, but it was time wasted.
4 stars = Good book, but not life altering.
5 stars = This book changed my world in at least some small way.

This book follows the future human interaction with artificial intelligence. The two main characters, Christian Brannock and Laurinda Ashcroft, go as far as to have their personalities "up-loaded" into this expanding intelligent computer network. As the artificial intelligence grows and spreads, humanity finds it convenient to leave more and more control in the hands of the computers. Finally, once the _computers_ have conquered the stars, Earth is remembered. However, the intelligence in charge of the Sol system has grown more and more evasive and secretive, so Christian Brannock is called upon to investigate and find out what secret the computer of Earth is hiding.

This is a story of the near and far future. It is a dystopia, where humanity, in search of comfort and ease, surrenders its future to technology. But, with the disappearance of striving and overcoming, the flame of humanity is snuffed out. Do the computers care about the love of one couple? No. But do the computers care about the striving and advancement of life? Perhaps...

This book will challenge you to think about the future, and our direction. I found this book highly thought provoking, and more than a little disturbing. Well-written, and reasonably short, you should consider reading it.

In a genre noted for epic scope and lengthy timelines _Genesis_ by Poul Anderson really stands out. A billion years passes in the course of the novel though as one might imagine the reader does not follow along all or even most of what transpires in this setting's history.

Reminding me in some ways of another excellent novel of his, _Starfarers_, Anderson handles the huge sweep of time in the book in several ways. For many of the individuals involved, they are traveling near the speed of light and relativistic effects mean that a few years for them translates into tens of thousands of years for the outside universe.

A second way the author deals with such vast timelines is a plot device he used also in _Starfarers_; vignettes. In both books, Anderson would illustrate how human culture and history has progressed over huge amounts of time with what were basically short stories, portraits of humanity at a given place and time along the novel's continuum and as in _Starfarers_ tied in with the one of the novel's main themes.

There was a third way the billion-year time frame was handled. Unlike in _Starfarers_ most of the main characters aren't human, they were either originally human and had their memory and personality uploaded into a machine consciousness or were artificial intelligences to start with. In this setting, actual physical human beings are too fragile and too expensive to travel the stars themselves, and instead uploaded humans and artificial intelligences make the journey instead (a similar concept used in the excellent trilogy by Sean Williams and Shane Dix that began with the novel _Echoes of Earth_).

Though the novel begins in the relative near future, the main character being the astronaut Christian Brannock, busy with exploring the planet Mercury and an early pioneer of working in close partnership with a robotic artificial intelligence, the majority of the novel takes place in the far future, the results of such pioneers as Brannock and others. After a series of vignettes that show the progression of human history on Earth with the rise of increasingly powerful (and dominant) artificial intelligences, most of the novel is set in the far, far future. The artificial intelligence that controls Earth, named Gaia, has been strangely silent in the vast community of artificial intelligences that spans the entire galaxy and one of these artificial intelligences dispatches an emissary along with a downloaded human consciousness - the original Christian Brannock, one of the first people ever uploaded - to explore what is going in the birthplace of all galactic civilization. Additionally, it would seem that the Earth's biosphere is failing and the galactic network of intelligences wants to know what Gaia proposes to do about that, though again, Gaia is nearly silent on the matter. What will the emissary (named Wayfarer) and Brannock find? What was Gaia hiding? Does Gaia have some sort of sinister plan or is it just something the galactic community cannot understand unless one of its own sees for itself?

A major theme explored in the novel is the nature of free will. As the machine intelligences through the course of a billion years become more powerful, intelligent, capable, and responsible for more and more details of life on Earth, is that a good thing for all concerned? Is the prevention of suffering, chaos, and evil always in the best interest of humanity? To get the good in humanity - friendship, charity, artistry, courage, leadership, love - does one have to allow for the bad - suffering, selfishness, greed, cowardice, and tyranny? The machine intelligences have achieved a great deal, a truly impressive body of knowledge and a civilization that is already spreading to nearby galaxies, but what have they lost in this pursuit?

As is it hard to have a novel where the protagonists have knowledge far above and beyond any human is capable of, usefully the novel is presented largely through the eyes of the various human characters. In the far future setting the main characters are the intelligence and personality of Christian Brannock and a downloaded intelligence that Gaia provides to interact with him, a woman by the name of Laurinda Ashcroft.

Poul Anderson, one of our great science fiction writers, takes us on a journey of a billion years with this yarn. It begins with astronaut Christian Brannock in the near term future and ends about a billion years later, with humanity scattered across the galaxy and for the most part uploaded into the computers that span the galaxy and control everything. A few humans have been re-instated on earth for an experiment run by a perhaps slightly deranged computer called Gaia.

This novel did keep my interest, although it may be too far 'off the wall' for some tastes.