Genesis, by Bernard Beckett [book review]

This weekend, I read Genesis by Bernard Beckett. It was at the library and it caught my eye with its subtitle, "What does it mean to be human?" so I picked it up on a whim. It's a YA novel of 145 pages, and I sped through it in about three hours.

TL;DR version:

Genesis is a tightly-plotted YA novel that explores whether or not a sufficiently subtle machine can be said to "think" as humans understand thinking. Its main characters are likeable and you'll enjoy your time with them. The book suffers from several authorial conceits, however, that weaken its overall impact. ★★★☆☆

If you're looking for a detailed exposition of the state-of-the-art in thinking about manufactured conscious entities, and a way to explain it to a bright, nerdy 13-year-old, Genesis is the perfect book for that task. The setting is in a society of the far future; crime and disease and all the rest have been conquered, we are told, after the fall of The Last Republic. There are very few intellectuals, however, and those that exist are encouraged to try for entrance into The Academy, where the very best are said to work toward the well-being of all.

In a fairly standard story-within-a-story plot, the heroine, Anaximander, goes before a review board for entrance into The Academy, and her duty is to explain why her chosen subject was history, and specifically the history of two beings: Adam, a rebellious youth from the time before the current society, and Art, one of the very first AIs. So we read Anaximander's story while she tells us Adam's story. The structure is fairly hackneyed, although I suppose for a YA novel it will be new to its target audience and so maybe that works.

The dialogue between Art and Adam is the core of the book, with its premises about whether or not consciousness is a quality only meat can possess, and whether or not Art, who seems fully conscious in every dialogue, is in fact a philosophical zombie, or if there's more to Art than just yes/no circuitry.

To say I have mixed feelings about this book is to understate my problem with a review. The book is tightly plotted; there's not a wasted word on any page and it hums along quite well. On the other hand, it's poorly opened, with an initial conflict that, quite frankly, didn't grab me until well into the book. By outlaying in the opening chapter that this would be a story-within-a-story plot, we have to wait not only until the inner story gets moving, 20 pages in, but until Adam commits his crimes and gets sentenced be Art's "tutor" in the ways of humanity, which is about 70 pages in. That's a lot of row to hoe.

The story is also downright humorless: there's one laugh in the entire book. In many ways, that might well be a warning about the Rod Serling ending, although fans of Rod Serling will see that ending coming from about the halfway point. I certainly did, and was disappointed when Beckett rode to his inevitable conclusion.

The book also suffers from several authorial conceits. First, in order play up the Socratic dialogue of Anaximander and the review panel, many of the side-characters in The Last Republic are named after Greek philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, etc. The inner hero is named Adam Forde, and I'm confident that Beckett chose "Forde" as a nod to "Our Ford" from Huxley's Brave New World. This constant use of unrealistic names continuously pulled me out of the book. It was a struggle to stay.

Second, the author withholds from the reader knowledge the main character has from the very first page, in order to create a "jaw-dropping" moment at the end of the book. Unfortunately, experienced readers will be anticipating this alternative ending more or less the moment its introduced, about halfway through the book.

Finally, the author asks us to believe that Anaximander, this relentlessly curious, radiantly intellectual character, who has spent the last three years studying to enter The Academy, would somehow have missed completely one critical, obvious detail about The Academy. That completely blew my suspension of disbelief, and ruined the SensaWunda moment for me. I was only three pages from the ending, so I trudged toward it, knowing what was coming.

A lot of the other reviews I read of Genesis are gushing in their praise. But for someone who's been reading Vinge, Stross, Egan, Rucker, Stephenson, even early Hogan, this book was only an interesting refresher course. It accomplishes what the author set out to accomplish: it has a voice, an opinion, and a story to tell.

Braindump catches up on a week where the center does not hold.

Nerdy:

Roll a Powerful Media HTPC for Less Than $500. I've been planning on doing this as one of my two special-purpose computers for a while. This is a nice intro, although once again the Ars Technica HTPC Guide has a different, more powerful set of recommendations.

Effective Design for Multiple Screen Sizes.

Tutorials for Making Your Website Mobile Friendly

What Are The Top Three Things All Small Business Websites Need?

An Introduction to Backbone: Models and Collections. Backbone is awesome. There a part 2 for Views and Controllers, as well. (I quibble with the Backbone definition of "controller", though; it's more of the application router in the Rails or Django sense, not a controller the way it's used in MVC.)

Food and Exercise:

Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie. Again, the message here is: strength is longevity, 99% of fitness advice is BS, freeweights and form are everything.

Black-Bean and Tomato Quinoa

Puerto Rican Pernil: Pork Shoulder

Stir-Fried Chicken With Ketchup

Sex and Politics:

Sex-Positivity and Asexuality: Bringing Them Together. A fairly good article about how sex-positivity is about understanding and appeciating your sexuality, even if it's one where happiness is defined by a lack of actual sexual content.

Maggie Gallagher wants women to stop enjoying anal sex, saying sodomy is an "anti-feminist act". Maggie has just been thinking too much about anal recently, with her obsession with gays. When she rants about gays being "unnatural" and "unhealthy," it's buttsecks she's thinking about. Even I don't think that much about sodomy!

Canadian bishops want women to stop enjoying anal sex. As usual, the Catholic Church wants humanity to cut itself off from its own nature, saying "Only the chaste man and the chaste woman are capable of true love."

Congress moves to redefine rape. They want rape to require the use of a weapon or restraint in order to qualify as "rape". For all others-- for example, a minor who becomes pregnant from an adult relative-- any abortion procedure would have to be paid from a separate fund from all other health care funds her caretakers have, as almost any traditional fund comes with tax breaks the Right wants to deny in this case.

Yo, Barnes & Noble employee, are ya blind, man?

I stopped by a Barnes & Noble yesterday, and took in my Nook to show the two guys behind the Nook desk a problem I've been having with it.

I'll just say that I like my Nook. I don't love it, not the way I love other pieces of hardware I've owned, but I like it. It's very readable, it stores a metric ton of books, and when using Wget and Calibre lets me rip whole collections of websites. Basically, I can now pack any ASSTR collection into an EPUB in about ten minutes. Project Gutenberg publishes in EPUB, and many of my early Microsoft .lit books, as well as the PDFs from Samhain and Ellora's Cave, converted over nicely. The "find stuff in my library" functionality is weak when you have more than 100 books. I have 137 on there, exactly two of which (both Iain M. Banks books) I've bought from B&N.

The web browser is okay. It doesn't like many Ajax-based apps; it doesn't do Google Calendar very well, for example, and Google Reader is just right out. Given that it's the Android browser, I would have expected better. But the bookmarking facility is nice enough.

But it has a problem. The brightness control has a nice range, but between 25% and 50% brightness, the screen has a really headache-inducing flicker. It's only visible on color backgrounds; in black-and-white it's unnoticeable. But on color backgrounds, especially when web-browsing, it's very annoying.

I asked the guys at the Barnes & Noble desk about it. Both claimed they'd never had that complaint before, and when I showed it to them, both said they couldn't see it. Yeah, right.

Another woman was there, asking about the Nook, and they were going through the spiel with her. I more or less praised it, mentioned that there were lots of other sources of books than Barnes & Noble and was very happy with the way Calibre loaded them onto my Nook, but also pointed out the flicker issue. When I showed it to her, she said "Oh, yes, I see it very clearly."

She still bought one.

I don't know if it's just my Nook, or if it's common to many Nooks or whatever. But I don't know what I can get done about it. It annoys me that I can't read in modestly low light without risking a headache.