or 10 years humanity has been receiving daily messages from Alpha Centauri, but in 2017 they suddenly stop. The earliest transmissions have long been translated as mathematics and chemistry, but the rest remains indecipherable. Heather Davis, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, has been working for years to decode the signals. Meanwhile, her husband Kyle Graves, a computer science professor at the same university, has been working on artificial intelligence and a "quantum-logic" computer.
Heather and Kyle have been separated for a year, following the suicide of their oldest daughter Mary. Their marriage goes from bad to worse when their other daughter, Becky, accuses Kyle of sexually molesting her as a child, based on "suppressed memories" uncovered by her therapist. Could this accusation be true, and could Mary's suicide be related? Heather's distress is heightened by the fact that her first boyfriend, a graduate student doing SETI research, committed suicide after receiving an earlier, unrelated and never decoded alien message.
Heather and Kyle seek to discover the truth about their domestic crisis while continuing their professional lives. Several leaps of logic bring Heather to an intuitive solution to the undecoded alien signals. They in turn lead her to build a machine that resembles an unfolded four-dimensional hypercube. Although she thinks it must be an interdimensional spaceship, instead it allows her to access humanity's "overmind," a store of all human memories present and past. She immediately uses it to prove her husband's innocence, and then she shows Kyle and Becky how to access "psychospace." But when they decode an earlier alien message, it turns out to be a warning that induces one of Kyle's computer AIs, who wants to become human, to commit suicide.
Can aliens cure humanity's woes?
Author Robert J. Sawyer has sewn together two very disparate themes in Factoring Humanity. The first is the typical hard-SF theme of humanity's sense of wonder at discovering startling new cosmic truths. The second involves the inability of people who love each other to truly communicate. Sawyer tries to meld these two themes through awesome scientific discoveries that lead to cures, first to the immediate domestic problems of his protagonists' family, and then to the major problems of all humanity. The result seems quite profound at some times, but more closely resembles a patchwork Frankenstein's monster at others.
The idea that alien contact could lead to the cure of all of humanity's ills is an old one in SF. Sawyer has done a better job than most of making this concept believable, but he has to strain very hard to make the human overmind and psychospace sound like a hard SF concept instead of fuzzy-brained wish-fulfillment. Heather's decoding of the secret to the Centaurian message and use of the resulting hypercube also require a few too many serendipitous intuitive leaps. Then, when the profound nature of her discovery is finally understood, it seems trivial that the first thing she wants to do is resolve her domestic problems. Meanwhile, Kyle's quantum-logic computer is a reasonably original concept, but is there any hoarier SF cliche than the AI who desperately wants to become human?
Heather and Kyle's family problems are interesting, and the characters sympathetic. It is obvious early on, however, what caused Becky's allegations of incest, and the only suspense is in when and how the characters will discover the obvious. But the novel's biggest problem remains that Sawyer has to work too hard to weave the family problems, Heather's alien message discovery, and Kyle's AI research into a single coherent narrative.
Despite these flaws, Factoring Humanity is worth reading for its well-defined human characters and its interesting (and highly debatable) theories on the true nature of humanity's problems.
ulia Amalfi has ruled the planet Midgard for more than a century. Fleeing an Earth destroyed by a cybernetic cataclysm, Julia has created a new society from her starship's cargo of human zygotes. But though she may be the savior of humanity, the people of Midgard want to govern themselves. Rebellion has broken out. And that's the good news.
The bad news: the impending arrival of a starship from the home solar system. Meanwhile, Midgard's resident artificial intelligence, Cariola, has been in secret communication with someone on the approaching starship, the Corpus Christi. Augustin St. John claims to be human, but Julia doesn't see how anything could have survived the final assault of the Erinye--also called "the tormentors of man"--hacker-terrorists, no longer quite human, with the ability to invade people's minds and warp reality itself.
As the starship nears, Julia finds herself dethroned by an unlikely alliance: good ol' boy rebels teamed with black-clad cultists patterned after Cambodia's Khmer Rouge. The Rigorist Collective, as the latter group calls itself, arrests Julia and puts her on trial for crimes "against the General Will."
But rebel officer Tony Perin learns that revolutions aren't what they're cracked up to be. He just wants to see the aged and detached Lady Amalfi gently deposed before he goes back to his family's farm. "God forbid," Tony laments, "that you try to accomplish anything worthwhile without a lot of unnecessary complication and bother." Things go wrong when the leader of the rebellion betrays their cause for a self-serving pact with the fanatical Rigorists. Perin is horrified by Julia's mistreatment at the hands of the Rigorists, and he learns that the Collective may be responsible for atrocities never before seen in Midgard's short history.
Exciting and thought-provoking
Author and military historian J.R. Dunn proves a master narrative strategist, deftly combining action, erudition and splendid characterization. With brisk, tight prose, Dunn covers broad stretches of thematic territory while always moving the story forward.
Dunn also deploys a novel's worth of flashback--Julia's haunting memories of the Erinye and her desperate flight from Earth--with impressive restraint. Readers get only tantalizing glimpses of the horror that engulfed humanity: "The radio wavelengths were filled with hysterical maydays, SOSs, calls for orders and data, each being overwhelmed by an electronic wail centered on where Earth had been, each drowned out one after another until...there was nothing left but that grating, unending shriek."
Dunn makes some tactical blunders: prolonged accounts of low-intensity combat and all the high-testosterone dialogue among the troops might wear down some readers. The flashbacks are admirably brief, but the descriptions of 22nd-century Earth read like they were lifted from William Gibson.
Tony Perin is a likable and believable hero: chivalrous, thoughtful, and saved from blandness by plenty of attitude. Julia is both poignant and exasperating; she escapes the Erinye and endures unimaginable hardship, but her people are rightly tired of the woman who calls herself "the Dame of Midgard." All the major characters manage to be both original and recognizable. Dunn shows readers the darkness lurking within even the most decent of people, and the sparks of humanity flickering in all but the most depraved.
The most engaging character, as is often the case in science fiction, isn't human. Artificial intelligences, readers are told, take a long time to mature, and Cariola is in her turbulent adolescence. She's a parent's worst nightmare: manipulative, naive, and smarter than anyone else on the planet. Though a silicon entity, she's a vivid embodiment of all the perils and potentials before us as humanity weathers its own stormy adolescence.
