Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #125268 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Vector
'An exceptional first novel. A new British star has arrived to join the likes of Hamilton, Reynolds and Banks.'

Synopsis
Herb returns to the remote planet he has been furtively trying to build a city on, to find it a swarming nightmare of self-replicating machinery. Eva has taken desperate steps to escape the tedium of her pointless life...only to end up in the super-intelligent clutches of a yellow mechanical digger. Constantine arrives at the remote part-idyllic, part-nightmare settlement of Stonebreak and - unsettlingly - begins to confront the truth of his own unreality. Meanwhile in the farthest reaches of outer space, the Enemy is plotting the final overthrow of the human race which created it.

Customer Reviews

Uneven but interesting
I think I'm always prepared to be a little easy-going on a first book (or at least, a first one in print, we don't know how many Mr Ballantyne wrote before Recursion...) I'm not literary trained enough to explain precisely but some passage, especially near the beginning, seemed to lumber about, the writing was not elegant. The ideas behind the book seemed very interesting, though so it was sufficiently engrossing for me to continue. Near the end there is a long passage of explanation which really doesn't seem to fit - as if the author couldn't figure out how (or didn't have the time) to write narrative to cover these events, so we're left with a synopsis before a return to narrative for the final few pages. For me, this is the book's weakest point, almost like a documentary occurring 4/5 of the way through an adventure film. I might consider some of the later books... eventually.

Unconvincing
This first novel is an ambitious exploration of the future development of AI through three viewpoint characters separated by decades (2051, 2119, and 2210) but sharing the problems of an intrusive nanny state and also a consistent uncertainty--extending to the characters' perception of themselves--as to who is human and who is an AI.

However, I was left unconvinced by the external world building--on the very first page, one of his central characters accidentally destroys an entire planet, which for me raises important questions, never answered, of how planets are in such plentiful supply that they can be so casually destroyed.

In addition, I felt that the leaden prose (to pick one crucial example, the very first sentence: "Herb looked at the viewing field and felt his stomach tighten in horror") simply did not rise to the level needed for such an ambitious plot.

Philosophically Interesting Plot
I found this book fascinating, with its sequel "Capacity" and I will be certainly reading "Divergence".

The book explores extreme questions that anyone who really thinks about mind, continuity and personal identity will sooner or later ask, but it manages to do this without the plot (or rather, multiple plots) getting stuck in these issues.

In one of the book's plot threads a chillingly plausible vision of a "nice" surveillance society in a future Britain is presented - not nasty, evil surveillance, just a society where everyone is going to be looked after 24/7 - whether you want it or not. 20 years ago such an idea may have seemed extreme. Now it looks like ideal government policy in a few years.