Quantum Night by Robert J. Sawyer

This one had some really interesting things to say about the nature of consciousness, and how it is dependent on a quantum state in the microtubules within our neurons. A college professor realizes late in life that the psychological testing he submitted to as a student has had some serious repercussions in his life, including turning him into a psychopath for a time, and causing him to lose six months of his memories.

The "thriller" portion of the book relates how he digs up all of the secrets about his past, the experiments, and other dangerous ideas.

It turns out, according to Sawyer, that approximately 1 in 7 people in the world are actually really conscious, think about their lives, reflect on the consequences of their actions, while 2 in 7 are psychopaths, with varying degrees of evil intent, ranging from the ruthless business man to the brutal dictator (not surprisingly, most of the politicians of the world fall into this category), and the final 4 in 7 - four billion of them, are what he calls "p-zeds" - basically thoughtless, herd-following automatons.

This theory explains a lot, eh?

Anyway, once we get to this point, and find out due to the results of another experiment performed by our protagonist and his girlfriend, a physicist, which brings her brother out of a coma and shifts his mental state from one category to another, it is inevitable that they are going to use the technology to bring peace and justice to the world, especially when the psychopaths in power in the U.S. and Russia bring the world to the brink of nuclear catastrophe.

Sawyer, as always, tells a tale guaranteed to amuse for a few hours.

Red Planet Blues by Robert J. Sawyer

 I'm not sure exactly how to describe this story by Sawyer. It has its shady origins in a hard-boiled detective novel, but veers off into some uncharted territory towards the middle, and turns into a near French farce by the end. Private investigator on Mars, Alex Lomax, is hired to find a missing husband, and stumbles into something a bit more sinister - a murder dressed up as a suicide. That is, if you can call terminating an artificial brain and body onto which you have imprinted the consciousness of a formerly live human being murder.

It seems to me that the murder takes place when the original human body is terminated, and the transfer takes over its life. Being a transfer is very handy on Mars, where the climate is extremely inhospitable for normal biological humans, and where, for a decade or two, there has been a "gold rush" on Martian fossils. Just finding one can make you rich, finding a whole trove of them can make you wealthy beyond your wildest dreams. The whole issue of determining whether a transfer is legally the same person as the body they left behind has already been settled by case precedent at the time of Sawyer's story, but Lomax has his doubts upon occasion, as should we. When is a human being not a human being?

There's a little bit of a Mad Mad Mad Mad World flavor to this thing, when it seems as if everyone and his brother, from the topless waitress Alex has a thing with to the second in command at the local PD, as well as geologists, poets and heiresses, is trying to find the mother lode of all fossils, which has eluded prospectors for so long. There's really no honor among thieves, and Lomax has a devil of a time sorting it all out.

The novel was built around an earlier novella, and I think, honestly, that it was better in the short form. The keystone antics of the full length plot weren't really all that entertaining. He should have left well enough alone, but perhaps he felt he had more to say on the subject.

Triggers by Robert J. Sawyer

So, there was an idea which began, perhaps, with Greg Bear (at least for me, it may have been written about before his novel, Blood Music), which became a popular theme or gimmick in science fiction, called the Singularity. It generally refers to an event which totally changes the human race, most often for the better, or greater good. There are several endings used by authors which irritate me: the deus ex machina, the "then I woke up", and the Singularity Event. I just feel it's a lazy way to end a novel for which you have come up with no reasonable ending, or of which you've grown tired writing. Unfortunately, Sawyer picks a Singularity to end what up to that point had been an interesting novel, exploring a cool pseudo scientific premise.  Maybe if I was one of the cool kids, the "in" crowd, I'd have been able to read the title and know that Triggers somehow refers to triggering a singularity event...I dunno.

The scenario is in the near future U.S., where terrorist strikes continue to devastate our cities. The latest threat is a type of bomb which vaporizes a relatively small area, and also emits an EMP which temporarily takes down all electrical and electronic systems in the area. It has been used on several cities, and the President and his military advisors have put together a counterstrike which will wipe a certain terror-supporting nation entirely off the map, to let the terrorists know that we are finally getting serious. While the President is making a speech, a rogue element within the Secret Service puts together an assassination attempt, combined with a bomb strike.

The President is rushed immediately to a DC area hospital and goes into surgery to repair bleeding in his pericardium. Coincidentally, at the same time one floor away, a researcher is applying a new type of memory triggering device to a patient of his who has experienced PSTD flashbacks so severe that they are destroying his life. When a the EMP pulse from a bomb which destroys the White House surges through the hospital, a very strange thing happens - people within a fifteen yard radius of the operating room are suddenly given access to the memories of one other person - in a sort of daisy chain - who is also in that area.

The primary Secret Service agent on site is concerned with the national security implications of some unknown person having access to all the President's memories, so a fair amount of time is spent trying to figure out who has whose memories, sorting all that out. Then, the really interesting things, in my opinion, take place, as Sawyer explores some of the possibilities inherent in being able to share another person's memories.

A romantic attachment develops between one couple, and their sex life is made far more intense by one person being able to see and feel what the other is feeling. In another pairing, race reconciliation happens when a black man is able to experience the lifelong soft bigotry of an elderly Southern woman. A physician is able to see in the memories of one of his nurses all the spousal abuse and the substance addiction she's suffering, and offer her a way out. The soldier who is suffering from PTSD is able to force the President to see all of the horrible things he witnessed in Iraq, and for the first time in recent history the leader of the free world really understands the results ordering his forces to war. There are some other interesting examples, but these and the others were making this a really good story.

Then, the Singularity occurs and we have whirled peas and love forever. Ack!

WWW: Wonder by Robert J. Sawyer

Wonder continues Sawyer's saga of Caitlin Decter, who once was blind, but now she sees, and Webmind, the spontaneously generated consciousness (and conscience, perhaps) of the Internet. The U.S. government's first attempt to destroy Webmind failed in the last novel, but Colonel Peyton Hume is still on the case. He's been told to stand down by the President, but he's still pursuing what seems to be a personal vendetta against Webmind, and is running around the DC area hiring black ops hackers to trap and destroy the rogue packets that are responsible for Webmind's existence.

Sawyer shows us a few possibilities inherent in the idea of a consciousness living in the worldwide web. Webmind is able to rapidly gather and synthesise data from multiple sources around the world, and comes up with some very promising cures for cancer, which he then bestows on the human race. Also, based on the success with substituting tech for the optic nerve in Caitlin's case, he devises a gadget to replace spinal cord function in paraplegics - which he presciently uses to gain an ally behind China's Great Firewall - it comes in handy later on in the story.

Both Caitlin's cure and the spinal cord fix, however, appear to be not much more than Sawyer's use of the shaggy dog gimmick. Caitlin's salvation, as you recall, was based on an iPod, and they called it an EyePod. The spinal cord device - the BackBerry. GROAN!

This is a very accessible novel for young adults, with sixteen year old Caitlin as its main human protagonist. Sawyer does his public service announcement best when Caitlin is making the decision whether to lose her virginity to her boyfriend, the geeky but lovable Matt. He has Caitlin's mom show her how to put a condom on, over a banana, and then Caitlin and Matt are very careful about using a condom when they do have sex.

There's some interesting philosophizing when Webmind addresses the UN General Assembly:

"Humanity's origin was in a zero-sum world, one in which if you had something, someone else therefore did not have it: be it food, land, energy or any other desired thing; if you possessed it, another person didn't.
But my crucible was a universe of endless bounty: the realm of data. If I have a document, you and a million others can simultaneously have it, too."

Therefore, it is only natural that Webmind is benign towards humans. In all probability, however, should an intelligence develop spontaneously on the internet, I'd give it even odds, malicious or benevolent, maybe even just lawful neutral.

The book is definitely filled with one-world, United Nations propaganda. Take it for what it's worth, it certainly didn't move the plot along any faster.

Sawyer also has Caitlin's mom propose that "morality improves as time goes by." The idea seems to be that the more experience we have as human beings with non-zero-sum game type of situations, the more we learn as a species to cooperate, tolerate, communicate...

I'm not convinced that's actually the case. Certainly, in some aspects Western Civilization in particular has made some improvements, societally, but a quick look around at the brutality and misery still rampant in our world and you begin to doubt the strength of her hypothesis. Can't help it, I'm a Calvinist at heart.

One thing Caitlin's math teach says late in the book stuck in my craw, as well.

"When I was your age, the first cheap pocket calculators apeared, and my teachers were all arguing about whether we should be allowed to use them in class...They just didn't see that the world had been irretrievably altered - that there'd never again be a time when memorizing multiplication tables would be important. The game had changed."

I grew up as that revolution was occuring. I can still perform calculations in my head faster than my children can type it into their calculators. I also saw, when I was in engineering school, fellow students trusting the results they saw on their programmable calculators, even when the results made no sense, because they'd entered incorrect data. There will always be a use for basic mathematical skills. Those who lack the types of skills that a high school graduate used to acquire are forever doomed to fail at some of life's basic tests.

An amusing read, and a better ending to the tale than its middle was.

WWW: Watch by Robert J. Sawyer

Sawyer has written an awful lot of very interesting science fiction over the years. WWW: Watch is the story of a young woman, Caitlin who makes contact with a consciousness born in the internet. She was born blind due to a rare syndrome, but has been part of an experimental procedure that has given her sight for the first time at age 16. The scientist, Dr. Kuroda, who performed this miracle lives in Japan, and she is in Canada, so the feed from the "eyepod" which gives her sight has been sent across the internet, giving her a unique perspective on the web, and she is the first to become aware of the entity they call "Webmind".

The entire novel is fairly well written, exploring the probable reactions of people to the existence of the first truly artificial and independent intelligence. Most of the governments are fearful of what Webmind might do, with the power of the internet, and the U.S. Government makes the decision to attack Webmind and shut it/him down.

I think this novel is targeted a bit more at young adults than his usual works. Caitlin is struggling with the usual problems that intelligent adolescents face, like peer pressure, popularity, romantic issues. Nothing philosophically challenging or enlightening here, but a pleasant little story of what if. The ending pretty much left me hanging, wondering what really happened, though.