Machines Like Me is the latest novel by Ian McEwan. Although I wasn’t really a fan of Solar I really got carried away with this book. The world is somewhat different from ours and if I remember it correctly it takes place in 1984. Some technology is more advanced than ours and McEwan ponders quite some interesting questions.
Can a machine think? Can it love? The laws of nature don’t forbid it, yet at the same time we don’t know what makes us tick / conscious. The final chapter also ponders what the rights of (humanoid) robots are, could we just kill them?
The writing of McEwan is great, and quite funny in a somewhat dark way. I got a lot of references to machine intelligence, p vs np-problem, Alan Turing, etc. The politics I was only partially aware of, but that didn’t take center stage.
Ubik by Philip K. Dick is one of his most acclaimed novels. Whilst listening to the book I did understand this in the beginning. But as the story drags on, I lost a bit of interest and wondered if I missed something significant.
“By the year 1992, humanity has colonized the Moon and psychic powers are common. The protagonist, Joe Chip, is a debt-ridden technician working for Runciter Associates, a “prudence organization” employing “inertials“—people with the ability to negate the powers of telepaths and “precogs”—to enforce the privacy of clients. The company is run by Glen Runciter, assisted by his deceased wife Ella who is kept in a state of “half-life”, a form of cryonic suspension that allows the deceased limited consciousness and ability to communicate. While consulting with Ella, Runciter discovers that her consciousness is being invaded by another half-lifer, Jory Miller.” (wiki)
Interpretations of the book say that Ubik might be about God, or Good and Evil. Hmm, not my cuppa.
“Ubik is a science fiction novel written by Philip K. Dick. It follows the story of Joe Chip, a technician at Runciter Associates. When an explosion kills Joe Chip’s boss, Glen Runciter, strange things begin to happen. Soon Joe realizes his boss did not die in the explosion, but he is in a state of half-life. If he wants to stay that way, he has to keep the evil Jory from eating his life energy.“
“Snow Crash is a science fiction novel by American writer Neal Stephenson, published in 1992. Like many of Stephenson’s other novels it covers history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics and philosophy. Stephenson explained the title of the novel in his 1999 essay In the Beginning… was the Command Line as his term for a particular software failure mode on the early Apple Macintosh computer. Stephenson wrote about the Macintosh that “When the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set—a ‘snow crash’ ”. Stephenson also mentioned a book by Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, as one of the main influences for Snow Crash. The book presents the Sumerian language as the firmware programming language for the brainstem, which is supposedly functioning as the BIOS for the human brain. According to characters in the book, the goddess Asherah is the personification of a linguistic virus, similar to a computer virus. The god Enki created a counter-program which he called a nam-shub that caused all of humanity to speak different languages as a protection against Asherah (a re-interpretation of the ancient Near Eastern story of the Tower of Babel).”
Update: After originally reading Dune in late 2018, I’ve reread it in June 2020. Great book and it was interesting to see how much I had forgotten.
Here are also some quotes I liked:
“When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong – faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it’s too late.”
“Hope clouds observation.”
“The people who can destroy a thing, they control it.”
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” (how prescient)
“There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times to develop psychic muscles. — Muad’Dib”
My original subtitle: Intergalactic Feuds, Spice, Deserts and No Robots
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer” – Frank Herbert, Dune
Dune is one of the best-reviewed books in the sci-fi genre. The book creates a universe that is similar enough to ours, but different enough to be very interesting. There are many relationships (think: Game of Thrones), but you follow one family, and one person, in particular. This is Paul, son of Duke Leto of the House of Atreides.
You will follow him through a journey of betrayal, drugs, power and manipulation. Along the way, you will meet giant sand worms and people who can see the future (whilst high on spice). If you read between the lines, there is a lot of references to real-world settings.
What is different in Dune from other sci-fi books is the total lack of technology. It was only 1965 when the book was written, but Frank Herbert predicted the upcoming AI war (just kidding, hopefully). And instead of technology, some people evolved to take on jobs that you would normally expect computers to do (e.g. navigate ships by being very good at math).
Definitively go ahead and read Dune! And if you want to only know the plot, watch the video below, it’s hilarious.
I found this video on io9.com and OMG what a find.
It’s a summary of Dune, with images from Game of Thrones, Donald Trump, Albert Einstein and more.
It does give away the whole plot. But man, watch it after you’ve read the book.
Want to learn even more, and have some more laughs?
Here is the Thug Notes of Dune, summary and analysis.
