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Candle
John Barnes has written 11 novels and 2 trilogies since his first publication in the mid 1980s, often delving into the political science (in which he earned his MA) and themes of social engineering, whether set on alien planets or our own. These "soft" ideas are combined with hard science fiction to realise credible environments and compelling stories. The variety of narrative style and subject matter across his career has kept his work fresh while his inventiveness and the quality of his writing continues to draw in readers.
The framing story of Candle opens with the narrator, Currie, being called out of retirement. He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable outlaws. Currie, whose final career was to hunt down such renegades, is reactivated to capture what might be the last "cowboy" and is soon tramping and skiing in the Rocky Mountains. The calm, glowing descriptions of the mountains in winter provide a spectacular vision of a world in the process of renewal. At the same time, the unemphasised detail of how Currie lives his life and the high-tech tools and equipment which he uses shows that the human world has changed. Having piqued the readers curiosity, the story maintains the gentle flow of the narrator's voice as he pursues his search. Despite the potential danger, this almost slips into longeur before the story changes pace. With an adjustment to the narrative focus, Barnes uses the Arabian Nights technique to reveal the underpinnings of Currie's world. The book is subsequently woven around the tales of two old soldiers who ended up on opposite sides in the Meme Wars, generating a patina of inevitability in the world changing events and softening the horror which permeated their early lives.
Barnes' concept of the Memes originates with the computer viruses of our own time, combined with the idea that ideas have an existence of their own. In Candle, Memes have jumped the sentience gap from hardware to wetware, allowing them to run within the human brain, placing beliefs directly and absolutely in the mind, incontrovertible except by the destruction or replacement of the meme itself.
The grim days of the early 21st century decay into the horror of the Meme Wars as the competing belief systems make a promiscuous advance across the minds of the planet until they come into open conflict, using humans as puppets or mercenaries. Beyond human life and death, the memes themselves evolve, becoming their own entity. The mind-viruses, the unfolding war and the effects of final victory on Earth for a single meme are all well developed and ably related.
Even so, Candle is more a novel of ideas. Perhaps it is inevitable that humanity will inflict itself with pain and horror; it may be that an ultimately rational overseer can lead each individual life to cause less pain and align fully to the greater good of humanity and the natural world. The book suggests that a governor inside the mind which could override and overwrite, "clearing" the psyche of its stains might allow us to be the best we can be. Such a position calls into question the value of free will and the meaning of human nature. The resulting debate between the logical and the visceral in which rational propositions are countered with emotional responses, produces an unbalanced and incomplete discussion. Nevertheless, Barnes is a good enough author that he shows the final outcomes of the arguments through their effect on society.
Candle has sufficient structure and purpose to carry the weight of its reflective elements, displaying originality in its approach to ideas as old as philosophy itself.
Purchase this book at FatBrain. It's out of stock at the moment, but they have been able to obtain out-of-stock books before, given enough interest.
I have heard this Idea before.
Sounds like these "Memes" are religions. The author has take the idea of absolute beliefs (religions) and given it a new carrier (a virus) instead of being passed through tradition.
You have heard it before and are reminded of religion because the reviewer's description of memes misrepresents meme theory. (I haven't read the book yet, so I can't tell whether the misrepresentation originates with the reviewer or the author.)
Memes are not something that just happened. Instead, "meme" is a recent term for an ancient phenomenon - probably as old as sentience, certainly as old as tradition.
The term was used in an analysis of the spread of ideas between people. The analysis that showed that an idea system had many of the characteristics of a lifeform, specifically: a virus.
Like other lifeforms that infect another species and modify its behavior, such idea-based lifeforms can be beneficial (improving the host's health, survival potential, ability to manipulate its environment, etc.), harmful (converting the host into a machine for propagating the infection to others, often at enormous cost), or some mix of the two. Like other lifeforms, what matters is that it does spread faster than it dies off (not whether some or all of its component ideas is "true"). Like other lifeforms it changes as it spreads, or even as it ages - with the more infective variants being more likely to propagate. And like other lifeforms it finds ways to defend its territory from other, similar-but-distinct, competitors.
So all the idea systems of history - philophies, religions, nationalisms, ideologies, scientific theories (and the scientific method itself), schools of medicine, schools of art, political movements, etc. - can be analyzed as species of meme. This allows the bulk of human history - including all the social movements, most of the wars, and the bulk of the misery of "the human condition", to be analyzed as epidemics of meme infection, evolution of distinct species of memes, battles for "ecological niches", inter-meme parisitization, and so on.
Which says nothing about the rightness or wrongness of any of the idea systems, of course, whether religious, scientific, political, or whatever.
So religious wars can indeed be analyzed as "meme wars". Particularly successful religious or philosophical memes can easily produce generations of (relative) social unity (or brainwashed zombism, depending on your point of view) among large fractions of the human population. (Recent examples: Confuscianism, Islam, the Christianity of the middle ages, Communism, etc.) But their rise (or fall) can be accompanied by enormous battles (the Crusades, Jihad, assorted revolutions, the World Wars) as they displace or are displaced by their competitors, and their unity requires maintainence as those with other ideas or who otherwise don't fit are converted, often forcibly, or eliminated (Pogroms, Inquisition, "self-criticism").
Right now much of the English-speaking world (and some of the rest) is blessed with a small number of prevalant meme-sets that include religious tolerance and the suppression of violent religious conflict, and political mechanisms that subvert meme conflict from war into elections and lobbying. There's a major meme battle going on in the United States (between what I call the "American Pluralist" culture and a newer one that labels itself "Progressive"), but its battles occur mainly in schools, legislatures, and bureaucracies, rather than on the streets.
But there's no reason to believe that the memes that keep the battles sanitized will survive indefinitely. So the future might also be a scene of religious/philodophical shooting wars and inquisition-ridden Paxen.
And as "artificial intelligence" databases and other computer programming begins to approximate human thought patterns, or even as it becomes more integrated with human activity, forming an intelectual system with components on both sides of the hardware/meatware boundary, the boundary between a meme and a computer virus blurs, and may eventually disappear.
Perhaps it already has: Look at internet rumors and chain letters for examples. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
In Candle, Memes have jumped the sentience gap from hardware to wetware, allowing them to run within the human brain, placing beliefs directly and absolutely in the mind, incontrovertible except by the destruction or replacement of the meme itself.
.NET).
Who needs Memes/the-escaped-computer-software for that? We already have memes/regular-old-ideas for that, and they can cause enough chaos as is.
The part about software jumping the computer and landing in peoples' heads like a virus? That is science fantasy (or paranoid delusion if you look beyond Bill Gates' plans for
But people getting wrong ideas into their heads and acting on them as if they were true? That's entirely too hard to believe.
We live in an age where a lie, told sincerely enough, takes on a life no truth can hope to match. That high-pitched whirring sound is Mark Twain, in his grave, spinning like a dentist's drill.
It doesn't have to be some sort of mutant freak of programming to be absorbed -- if people like the tune coming from the bandwagon, they'll jump on even if it's being drawn by a jackass.
I'd like to blame television for this, but deep down, I know the problem is just people being lazy. They don't understand the news, they don't read the news, they hardly even skim it. Someone reads it to them on the radio in the morning, or they hear appetizing bits around the water cooler, do a little half-assed research, and decide, "Well, that's good enough for me!"
Those memes also use their hosts as armor; try to attack a meme like that, and the person holding it will take it as an assault, and fight back.
And memes mutate quickly. To follow up the bandwagon metaphor above, once people jump on, they'll start belting out the theme they think they hear. Ever play 'Telephone'? You whisper something to one person, then watch as it gets sent around, and when it comes back, it's been mangled beyond recognition. Memes (uppercase) are I assume perfectly self-replicating, but memes (lowercase) rely on peoples' powers to emote, speak, hear, and comprehend. They change en route not because they want to, but because the transmission vector is faulty.
The book gives the phrase "How do you fight an idea?" a sinister twist, but doesn't provide a solution to handling the real-world problem of bad memes.
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You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
So if one of the core ideas of the book is that it's possible to write programs (and AI programs at that) that run on human brain hardware.
/dev/random > /dev/brain
That implies that one could port Linux to the human brain - or at the very least, whip up a device driver.
So, this is your brain:
/dev/brain
And this is your brain on drugs:
cat
Any questions?
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
always clowning around behing your back, making fun of you, walking into the wind, that danged in a box thing, and that frightening white facepaint.
I think a meme war would be a good thing, let see them stay silent when they get run over by a tank.
This book sounds like it plays on age old fears about being excluded from society for refusing to consent to being "one" with the masses.
It's like that whole concept of the "666" mark of the beast in Christianity. Unless you have the mark you can't buy or sell or otherwise take part in society. But if you do take the mark you are somehow damned.
This is a great theme to work with because these "religious" fears are so ingrained that they affect the psyche of even persons who are outside of the traditional realm of Christianity. Hey, just watch "The Omen" I, II and III and see if it doesn't make you a bit uncomfortable.
I think this book will be going on my "to read" list also. It has hit upon one of those "universal themes" that are sure to keep this book current even many years from now.