Customer Reviews

The Shapes of Their Hearts

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This book is a curious mix. Melissa Scott has created an interesting world of Eden. She's very good at creating suspense, mystery, and keeping you wanting to turn the next page to find out the next wrinkle or revelation in the story. The themes she raises are significant, although they appear to overwhelm her as an author -- she's bitten off a bit more than she can chew. For centuries man has tried to put God in a box, contain Him within theologies and doctrines which are later outgrown. From the old testament God of wrath to the new testament God of love, we have seen how mankind's perspective of God has grown. To accept this novel, one must have a decidedly old testament view of Deity, because the God of Love is not evident. Much like the fundamentalist view of God today who believe any non-Christian or gay are condemned to the fires of hell, the "Children" of this science fiction world believe that clones have no souls and genetically mutated beings called "Scatterlings" are pollution rather than simply different people. This could have been the framework of a tremendously interesting allegory about intolerance, and perhaps this is an angle a potential screenwriter could latch onto. Just like men of the past have tried to put God in a box, the people of this future have put the mind of God in a computer program. To buy the story, you must accept this premise. This is the inherent weakness of the book because rather than a clash of views of faith, we are reduced to a spy-like intrigue of the persecutors and the pursued. Even the spy chase seems to get drowned in the character Anton Tso's mind battle within the computer program with about a quarter of the book being his battle to find the right computer icon to let his mind out of the program and back into his body. Thus, rather than calling this book "The Shapes of Their Hearts," it would be much more appropriate a title "The Shapes of Their Computers." The conclusion of the book happened all too quickly with the events set up in the first several chapters being dismissed with a page's worth of outcomes. All in all, I was glad to have read it. It is a page turner. There are a number of characters who had they been fleshed out a bit more could have been even more interesting. If you're more into computers than into God, this book could be Eden for you!

I was surfing to see what's new from Scott when I saw how few stars this book got, and felt I should drop in an alternate viewpoint... I have to admit, I didn't take a stand on theology or sci-fi genres before delving into it, I took it instead as a good fast read-- and really liked it for that! I thought it moved well, I got involved with the characters, & found the plot idea intriguing. Good entertainment value for the money...

My least favorite Melissa Scott effort, it was not holding my attention much at all.

This wasn't a book! It was a template for a book! There was some plot, consisting of "guy goes to another planet, gets kidnapped, and gets rescued." But there's no ideas here. The cover said that this was about god, cloning and free will. But it's not. The computer-god is a character, but a rather bland one. God brings up some sort of a philosophical point, discusses it for a paragraph, and drops it. That's it. The lesson I got from this book? Don't run windows or your system might get infected with something *really* dumb. Try another Melissa Scott book - Shadow Man, for example, actually is good.

This book is hard to even call a novel because, frankly, it isn't novel. The idea that enough computer instructions can be whipped up by a programmer to make a piece of code come to self-awareness is, frankly, long discredited, just like the idea that one can make a corpse come to life by pumping electricity into it. No, AI requires a new device that is intelligent, not a new program that pumps intelligence into a dumb device. Her book reads like she's mastered novel-writing-by-the-numbers, and took a novel skeleton for a crime genre, then filled in "computer program becomes AI" in the appropriate numbers. Who frankly cares if a couple of virus programs invade some net? ... The characters are not interesting, the plot not compelling, and this is not a page-turner - it's a yawner. The one thing she's good at is word pictures of imaginary virtual reality scapes, but we have to wait until the end for that. ... She raises far more interesting issues, such as whether clones have a soul, and what a soul is, than the AI-in-a-program issue, but she leaves these dangling, totally unthunk. Alas for that...