Recursion (Mass Market Paperback)

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Key Phrases: social care, stealth ship, viewing field, Enemy Domain, Robert Johnston, Berliner Sibelius (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

After seeding a desolate world with the latest in twenty-third-century terraforming technology, entrepreneur Herb Kirkham returns to find his self-replicating machinery running riot over the planet, and an agent from the all-seeing Environmental Agency waiting to dole out punishment. Fortunately, Herb's skills are attractive enough to trade ignominious exile for participation in a deadly mission to thwart a swarming brigade of apparently alien spacecraft that threatens to envelop Earth. A trio of interwoven story lines follows Herb's misadventures in alien space while teamed with an agent who may not be human himself, the efforts of another entrepreneur a hundred years earlier to oversee human development of artificial intelligence (AI), and the fate of a mental patient in 2051 who hears mysterious voices. All three plotlines concern the rise of an AI-based life-form that may or may not have humanity's best interests at heart. Overflowing with provocative ideas, Ballantyne's debut displays enviable mastery of both suspenseful storytelling and technological extrapolation. Mark him as a writer of considerable promise. Carl Hays
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Description

It is the twenty-third century. Herb, a young entrepreneur, returns to the isolated planet on which he has illegally been trying to build a city–and finds it destroyed by a swarming nightmare of self-replicating machinery. Worse, the all-seeing Environment Agency has been watching him the entire time. His punishment? A nearly hopeless battle in the farthest reaches of the universe against enemy machines twice as fast, and twice as deadly, as his own–in the company of a disarmingly confident AI who may not be exactly what he claims…

Little does Herb know that this war of machines was set in motion nearly two hundred years ago–by mankind itself. For it was then that a not-quite-chance encounter brought a confused young girl and a nearly omnipotent AI together in one fateful moment that may have changed the course of humanity forever.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Spectra; First Thus edition (August 29, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553589288
• ISBN-13: 978-0553589283
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #403,687 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Intertwining Stories, June 26, 2007

By	H. Grove "owling6683" (Maryland, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Against the backdrop of today's world, in which governments become ever more intrusive into our daily lives and computer-based observation of our actions runs rampant, Ballantyne's vision of the future definitely hits home. Yet "Recursion" is hardly a ham-handed allegory; it has relevance to today's issues yet tells its own story. Nor do its characters face easy choices; it's often hard to tell what the "right" path to take is, and Eva, Constantine and Herb, much like real people, often have to cross their fingers and pray they've made the right choices.

The plot is intricate and delicately woven across three time periods. Setting a story in multiple time periods is extremely tricky, and risks causing those stories set in older times to feel irrelevant or unnecessary. Neither is the case here; Ballantyne does an extraordinary job of making each story important, revelatory, and fascinating, as well as necessary to understanding the other characters and events in the book.

The writing is lean and precise; most of the characters (particularly Eva, Constantine, and the Watcher) are fascinating and their stories amazing. I loved unraveling the events of this book. It walked a good line between explaining enough that the reader could keep up, yet not so much that it felt dumbed-down.

My only problem with this book is the third story. The story itself is quite interesting, but the characters of Herb and Robert (Herb's government-provided companion) are both a bit flat, particularly early on. Herb is one of the least-developed of the book's major characters, which is a bit odd since he's billed as its main character. Constantine and Eva were interesting enough to largely make up for that, but it is an unfortunate flaw in an otherwise amazing book. Still, as I said, it's Ballantyne's first novel, and that this is the only real flaw in it is quite impressive. I can see why he did it this way---Herb does change and grow over the course of the book, after all---but he still needed to start off with more of a hook to make him compelling. At first I found myself looking forward to getting back to Eva and Constantine's stories as I read Herb's.

This is a fascinating book that mixes technological science fiction with interesting philosophical questions and quite a few unusual characters, and I definitely believe it's worth a read if that's what you're looking for.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Entertaining, November 20, 2006

By	S. Cook (Albuquerque, NM USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I picked up this paperback knowing nothing about the book (or author for that matter). The synopsis looked interesting.

I wasn't expecting too much, but was happily surprised to find the book very engaging and well thought-out. It was an excellent read that delves into AI (in a sci-fi kind of way) and implications of self-replicating machinery. I've recommended it to several friends and they've enjoyed it as well.

I'm looking forward to more sci-fi from Mr. Ballantyne.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Stale, tired, boring, unrefined... list goes on, March 15, 2009

By	M-I-K-E 2theD "2theD" (Ban Chang, Rayong, Thailand) - See all my reviews

The freshman novel of Tony Ballantyne is a cheesy mixture of bland dialogue, unrefined plot points and boring characters. Where do I begin? Let's start with his writing style before we tear the book apart. First, the book needs a serious editor because there were so many points of annoyance I nearly threw the book at the wall. How many times can the cast SHIVER in 406 pages? Oh, more than 15 times, along with shivering water once. Word repetition doesn't stop there. For some reason, the author finds is necessary to repeat Herb's name (one of the three main characters) over and over again instead of using the 2nd person pronoun `he.' It seems as if every paragraph has Herb's name at least four times. Herb is a terribly lame character anyway; he's so lame he shouldn't even have been GIVEN a name! On page 6 I laughed out loud at the cheesiness on the page: "Herb was different. He had known it since he was a child." In another paragraph, Herb narrates how rich his father is, and mentions so three times in only a few lines... then says it again with the first sentence of the very next paragraph. Herb's social status played no part in the plot, so why even mention it? Either sometime is wrong with the character or just the author himself?

Secondly, I should have known the book was going to be a failure when I read the words at the top of the back cover: "In a world of manipulated reality, what does it truly mean to be human?" The plot of "what does it mean to be human" has been run into the ground so many different ways and hardly any of them live up to the task of tackling that question! Bingo! Recursion fails miserably at the attempt to answer this ultimate question.

Eva is the third character in the limelight cast and whose introductory chapter is actually quite enticing. It's a fun mixture of daily life, paranoia and secret service. It would have made a nice short story, or on an even grander scheme, a good novel in itself. Somehow it interweaves itself with the other two storylines. It's seems a rather hasty mix, at that. Though the rest of her independent storyline is worthy of the readers attention.

Constantine is the third and last main character in Recursion. His independent storyline starts off oddly and maintains the idiosyncratic oddity throughout the entire book. The answer to why Constantine has four personalities in his heads is never answered and leaves a huge, unfulfilled gapping void- who are Red, Blue, White and Grey?

The last 15% manages to pull enough inertia together to make itself pull its three storylines together to form a semi-logic pre-conclusion. However, none of it seems satisfactory. Then comes the ending, which is a desperate grasp for a familiar conclusion. The banality, lack of forethought and the author's Attention Deficit Disorder to plot details would lead me to steer clear of his novels. He (and his editors) ought to first read the classics, pay attention to THOSE details and then find the finesse to incorporate that into his novels.