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Souls in the Great Machine
We've got another science fiction review today, this time of Sean McMullen's Souls in the Great Machine. The book is about a post-apocalyptic future with the re-birth of technology - click below to learn more if you want this book in your stocking this year.
Souls in the Great Machine
author
Sean McMullen
pages
448
publisher
Tor, 06/1999
rating
8/10
reviewer
Sviluppo Lavoro
ISBN
0-312-87055-8
summary
The rebirth of technology in a world 2000 years after a global apocalypse and a new dark age.
The Scenario
The novel takes place in Australia about 2000 years in the future, following a great catastrophe (which takes place about 100-200 years from the present). This catastrophe created a period of global drop in temperature known as Greatwinter. There are no electrical devices, due to the presence of orbiting satellites (known as Wanderers) that pass over periodically and EMP the hell out of any device using electricity. Thus, the technology of the civilization is limited to clockwork and human powered machines (there are various religious sanctions against the use of steam power--a leftover fear of global warming and its consequences, which are believed by the people to have caused the eventual Greatwinter). It is the latter category that brings out the most impressive feature of the novel, the Calculor. The main librarian of the city of Rochester creates an analog computer using human prisoners as components. They work together as a giant processor to perform the functions of a computer. In fact, the prisoners are referred to as FUNCTION 9, MULTIPLIER 342, etc. The librarian, Zavora, is using the Calculor to try to predict the coming of a second Greatwinter, which does not appear to have resulted from internal causes on earth but rather an exterior force. The discovery and investigation of this force is quite fascinating. There is also a force on land known as the Call, which lures people to the southeast and eventually into the ocean. This may seem like fantasy fiction, but if you stay with the novel a rational explanation is offered. Although I was turned off by that particular plot device in the beginning, it is a unique idea, especially once it is fully understood. In the meantime, you have plenty of blood and action supplied by a large war and plenty of small duels (the preferred method of justice), and a healthy sprinkling of sex and drinking (mainly supplied by the Han Solo character John Glasken).
What's Bad? The novel does a poor job of getting you hooked at the beginning. It takes a little while to get to the plot, and itÕs also difficult to see how the novel is going to deal with such issues as nanotechnology and genetic engineering when youÕre wading through pages of medieval technology and society. But there are wonderful rewards for readers who stick with it. Also, I found the dueling to be impractical for continual conflict resolution, as it would end up with a lot of dead people and a few dictators who happened to be good with a pistol. But this isnÕt a particularly enlightened society.
What's Good? The variety of subjects covered in a novel this size without being an epic. The writing style is excellent, and doesnÕt put you to sleep or give you the whole picture all at once. IÕve never read anything else by him, but apparently heÕs fairly well received in Australia. (Any comments from readers in Oz?) The numerous positive aspects of this novel are covered in more thorough detail in the following paragraph...
So What's In It For Me? The range of issues is immense. Nanotechnology and genetic engineering are presented not as cure-alls or as the cause of all of the worldÕs problems, but as part of technology as a whole, which can be used for good or evil. There are also ingenious solutions to communication in a non-electronic world, and the use of encryption as part of that communication. The human computer system is an intriguing thought experiment, and I would love to see smaller scale versions tried out in math classrooms and computer science classes. Imagine a lecture on networking in which students carry pieces of paper back and forth and groups of students process the information or send it on to the next group, depending on where that particular packet is needed... But I digress. Something that springs up on you is the excellent treatment of women in the novel. Women hold many important positions in the main civilization featured in the novel, and are the holders of most of the important information. The main character is an incredibly complex woman whose motives are not completely understood until the very end. McMullen manages to accomplish this without putting the women on some sort of goddess-pedestal or making men into unthinking troglodytes. The novel also covers issues of religion, where language and science would go given 2000 years of isolation and no modern technology, and the never-say-never tenacity of the human race to pull itself up through a second Renaissance. It appears as though there will be some other novels to follow this one, so it should be a good series to read.
Purchase this book at fatbrain.
I don't necessarily mean to target this at this particular review, but why do practically all book reviews on /. get 8's? It kind of invalidates the ratings for me as it feels like all of the reviewers are afraid to give anything else. They don't want to praise a book to highly in case there are peeps out there who will rip them to shreds for rating it too high, and they don't want to rate it too low for the same reason. Howabout a couple book ratings for 3 books! I want to know what to avoid as well as what to buy.
-FreshGroundPepper
on and on
waiting and waiting
and what the deal with Õ? I get them in both netscape and IE
-- Note: These Comments are Generated by ME! Not You! ME!
kindof the opposite i suppose, but HAB Theory presents what sounds like very much the same info ... and suggests it's happened before ... excellent read for the subject. by Allan Eckert, circa 1976 ... check out www.habtheory.com
waiting and waiting
I remember when I was growing up, there was a cartoon entitled "Visionaries". Now, like most shows in the early 80's, this was another Toy Advertising Vehicle, this one for stupid little dolls with holograms on their chest. But the show itself had a cool concept--all tech was destroyed, and everybody had to figure out how to survive.
;-)
;-)
I, a 10 year old techie at the time, was extraordinarily annoyed that anyone would presume all tech would just *disappear*. I didn't know about EMP yet. Necessity is the mother of horrific inventions, eh?
So, here I am a decade later, and I'm reading about a book based on a similar concept as that old show. This time, I know what EMP is...and also know that, if applied on a global scale, repeatedly, at the bare minimum much of the marine population would be disoriented to extinction. Sharks, and many other marine species detect minute variations in the electrical field to find their prey. Intermittent massive pulses of energy would almost certainly blind them, causing some pretty nasty changes to the ecosystem.
OK, OK, the Greatwinter could be argued to make such minor extinctions irrelevant. But consider--anything that would indescriminately destroy electronics would cause *any* metal to spark--so you'd actually be looking at a pre-medeival society, no?
I'm actually liking these Slashdot book reviews alot. Makes me realize I need to go read more
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
I'm going to open-source Natalie Portman, transform her into a stone statue, and lick her petrified marble toes.
I'm going to open-source Natalie Portman, transform her into a stone statue, and lick her petrified marble hands.
I'm going to open-source Natalie Portman, transform her into a stone statue, and lick her petrified marble face.
I'm going to open-source Natalie Portman, transform her into a stone statue, and lick her petrified marble hair.
This definately sounds like a mixture of both..
Post-Apocalyptic Australia = Mad Max
Anti-technology religion = Dune (butlerian Jihad)
ok. Well I guess if I tried I could fix in
a few more of the dune series, as well as the matrix, farenheit 451, and lemmings the video game.
"And how can this be? For he is the
The main reason I say this is that Sean is a Awesome person (I've had the pleasure to meet him socially a couple of times) and deserves your interest (and royalties)
From memory, There are at least 3 other books, either set in the same world, or containing short stories set in that world)
Anyway check out his home page at http://eidolon.net/old_site/02_mcmul/sm_home.htm.
the title is so similar to a really excellent 1980 book about Data General. it's set in the late 1970's when micro-computers were new. it's a very good story about the engineers as they struggled to create a 32-bit eclipse when other departments were siding with management trying to can the project. very good read.
Setting aside how much we liked it since we read it as kids, its honestly better than the Hobbit/Lord of the Rings. Its an excellent creation of background, characters and all other things literary. "But what about the Wanderers? I destroyed them." Such a great great book.
i have been approached by a new open source publishing company to write a science fiction novel based on the characters in my copyrighted undistributable open source game.
the story will be about a young, carefree gas station attendant named fat-time charlie and his love affair with a lubricating midget who has turrettes syndrome.
the two accidentally fall into some nuclear waste during a torrid sex scene and are transformed into crimefighting super heros.
i don't want to give away too much of the story, but i can tell you that fat-time uses the lubricating midget as a powerful automatic weapon! by holding the midget under his arm and squeezing, fat-time can aim the midget's ass at an enemy and spray him with a barrage of death-pellets.
this instant classic is certain to make oprah's book of the month club.
thank you.
Hmmm. Two post-apocalyptic book reviews on top of one another, just before the end of the milennium. Is /. subtly trying to prepare us for Y2K? Does CmdrTaco Know Something We Don't? :-)
Be afraid. Be very afriad..
Your local conspiracy theorist,
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Hey, I used to teach math at school for children aged 10 and 11. And we did make such experiments: we have "built" a machine playing the game where you have a set of heaps of coins and at one round a player takes some coins from one of the heaps. At least one, at most he/she removes the whole heap. The winner is the one who takes the last coin. The machine with "human" components won the game against humans though its "components" did not understand what is going on. They were given simple instructions on pieces of paper. Their homework was to find out how and why the "machine" was winning. Only three of them could solve it!
The book provides good insight into the characteristies (good and bad) that are often associated (rightly so) with librarians. I believe that is why the author's treatment of gender in the characters is even-handed and well done. Like Dune the warring is a tad overdone.
Why would this world be limited to a medieval level of technology? Using water and horse power humanity could probably get back to the early industrial revolution without much trouble. Use gas lamps for light like in the 1880s, belt driven machines for manufacturing, etc. Precision parts where going into guns in the early 1820s.
Besides, does anyone here think that a church prohibition would stop steam power? I mean really? It seems to be really stopping premarital sex.
Also, why would a computer use humans as components? Why not build a mechanical calculator? The technology does not require electricity and would be more dependable and repeatable.
Lastly, what is stopping humanity from shooting down the Wanderers or at least avoiding them? You can build a rocket without electricity, or a very large cannon (Saddam Hussein was going to try this incidentally). They've got the calculations for targetting. Simply activate a small electrical power system (or better yet several small ones in a pattern), wait until it gets killed, and repeat. Soon you'll roughly know the Wanderers orbits using some basic math you can do by hand. You will then know how to avoid the EMP sweeps and can use electricity all you want as long as you do it at the right times.
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
Last year Robert Silverberg published The Alien Years with a similar subplot.
Aliens zapped the planet with EMP rendering all electricity driven devices inoperable and plunging us into medieval times.
The reviewer mentions that he'd like to see experiments with human
computers like the calculor.
It turns out that, they used something similar to the calculor during
the Manhattan project. A room full of people with mechanical
calculators working on the same problem. They passed partial results
to each other on pieces of paper according to a sort of program.
Or for some other reason?
I bought this book over 3 years ago and the premise was very similar for the base idea. I.E. that something happened and then technology was made and all technology banned thus an ice age was created. Sounds like all this writer did was use a common idea and give it a different spin. Not that this is bad but remeember- the book is not 100% original.
Well, i havent read the book so i can't say what their actual level of technology is but..
Water power is covered under medieval technology, they used water-powered mills quite alot. Same for horses (although given 2000 years of winter i'd be surprised if any horses were still around). Natural gas-burning lamps wouldnt work well because 1) you need to get the stuff and that sort of drilling requires higher technology than would be available and 2) you need to pressurize it in a tank to be released via a valve for the lamp, which again requires technology that wouldnt be around (not to mention the ability to machine an air-tight tank to put the gas in).
As for the religious prohibition thing, in a pre-industrial society religion carries alot more weight. How much depends on a number of things. If this religion is, as it sounds, based around the prevention of another apocalypse, most people would probably willingly support it. If they've re-invented the process of creating cheap paper and the printing press then there'd be wider access to information and religion would lose power, if not then religious leaders would hold sway in information distribution. If the largest portion of the population believes in the god or gods worshipped then they'll probably abide by the prohibition whether they agree with the church's ideaology or not, on the off chance that the church may have gotten it right and they'd be smited.
As for shooting down or avoiding a satellite using pre-industrial technology... i dont see it happening. Those satellites would be, at least, in LEO which would require a missile (or cannonball) moving at mach 25 (escape velocity) to hit them. They'd have to predict orbits very precisely since you have to account for the fact that the projectile takes time to reach the satellite and moving at escape velocity it would not be affected by the earth's gravitation pull and so wouldnt actually go 'straight' up relative to the firer. Then there's making sure you actually destroy the satellite.. if you're trying to hit a small satellite with a solid projectile without targeting computers or self-propulsion (solid propellants take a good bit of engineering and chemical knowledge) in the right spot to destroy it from about 400 miles away... well, good luck. So you'd need to build a fuse that'd burn for the entire flight and explode when it reaches an unknown altitude (and wouldnt go out when it leaves the oxygenated portion of the atmosphere.. requiring an oxyidzer which couldnt be produced by a pre-industrial civilization). It just wouldnt work.. yes, they could probably build little rockets using gun powder, but they'd be horribly innacurate at more than short ranges and would have No hope of hitting something 400 miles up.
Dreamweaver
"If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live" -- MLK, Jr.
...or buckshot. You don't even want to try to hit the satellite with a single projectile. Instead, put a lot of little bits of metal or rock in its path. Let it run through a cloud of gravel a a few thousand miles an hour and your EMP problems are over. Cpt_Kirks
If you placed your electronics inside a Faraday cage, they would be invulnerable to EMP. A Faraday cage is basically a box (or a room if you're thinking big) which has an electrical conductor completely surrounding it.
Even with medieval technlogy this would not be too hard to build, and once you had the orbits of the Wanderers figured out you would know when the box / room had to be closed up. Figuring the orbits would be easy as there is no way the satellites could carry enough reaction mass to still be manuevering millenia later.
This led to one incident when some very important calcuation needed to be done, and the powers that be said to richard basically, "seeing as you have four problems going simultaneously, please put them all on hold and do this important one instead of all of them, we expect it to be finished at one forth of the speed of all those other calculations that you are doing", and were a bit horrified to find out that there was no way to achieve this speed, they had begun to rely on the "extra speed" of the system, which of course had not become inherently faster
You really should pick up one of richards books, he has some hilarious material on lock picking and breaking during the Manhatten project, mostly social engineering, but great stuff. A wonderful character.
C.
I sometimes write stuff