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Sub-Human (2012)

by David Simpson(Favorite Author)

3.6 of 5 Votes: 2

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

Post-Human Media

series

Post-Human

review 1: The first book of the Post-Human series, it sets the action in motion.And, I have to say, does it in a very interesting way; the story is well written, makes you want to go further and see how the situation develops.As a first book, and a sort of prequel, as far as I see, to the main story, made me think I will read the other parts too.Not five stars but four, just because I still see the story as a little bit too dystopian (horrible future with total war etc.); I think though that the atmosphere is going to change in the development of the story (which I hope), so this part of my judgement is likely to change.Anyway, highly recommended for "serious" science fiction lovers.
review 2: From my "Short Shorts" review of _Sub-Human_ on the Sci-Guys podcast:I’ll st... moreart with the shameless plug. If you hop on Amazon and check out my _Architects of Tomorrow, Volume 1_, a book of interviews from all sorts of big names in the computing world, you’ll see that the first Q&A is with Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil won early fame as an inventor and programmer in the 1960s and ‘70s. He developed the first optical character recognition system and, in 1984, the first synthesizer capable of reproducing the sounds of real instruments. Around this time, Kurzweil also started diving into artificial intelligence and eventually produced a range of products for the education and financial markets.Ray Kurzweil is one of the most brilliant, and probably the most fascinating, men with whom I’ve ever spoken. If you’re into science and want to set your brain on fire, read his books. One of these, 2005’s _The Singularity is Near__, will introduce you to the concept of technological singularity, if you’re not already familiar with it. First popularized by sci-fi novelist Vernor Vinge and later much enhanced by Kurzweil, technological singularity refers to the inevitable melding of biological human intelligence with machine intelligence. Why inevitable? Because human intelligence is flat and machine intelligence obeys Moore’s Law. If we don’t assimilate machine intelligence, humanity will lose its dominant position in the world. The singularity is the point at which machine intelligence surpasses us. Kurzweil, a proven master at pattern recognition, has predicted that this will happen around the year 2045.I have a singularity-based novel series under development, but enough about me. Vancouver, BC-based David Simpson, actually has a singularity-based series written and for sale. He calls it the Post-Human Series, and book 1 is titled _Sub-Human_. It follows the adventures of Special Forces paratrooper Craig Emilson. Emilson begins with a suicide mission deep in nuclear-bombed territory, trying to destroy the world’s first strong artificial intelligence. I’m not spoiling anything by telling you that Emilson dies...and that’s only his beginning.Sub-Human has time travel, parallel universes, nanotech, AI... It’s a high-speed blender ride of a novel that grabs you with the strength of cybernetic prosthetics and does not let go. Some readers may find it too fast. There were times when I wished Simpson might have sprinkled another fifty pages or so of character development and world-building throughout the book. But if it comes to a choice between erring on the side of speed or sloth, Simpson clearly chose well.Simpson graciously answered a few interview questions for me, and when I prodded him about keeping things simple and fast, he said, “I try to give the reader just enough and to never impose on them my idea of how things ‘should’ be. Long-winded analysis all clustered in a page or two is bad writing (in my humble opinion). The protagonist of _Sub-Human_ is developed over the course of the series, and he’s still being developed in the 5th book that I’m writing now, titled _Inhuman_. When readers are finished book 5, they’ll be thinking of him in a new way, and likely thinking about the whole concept of ‘who’ a person is in a new way too. It’s an important theme in the series, and it can’t be captured in a mucky moment of author intrusion and clumsy ‘tell.’”Simpson notes that he wrote the first chapter of the Post-Human series immediately after reading an interview with Ray Kurzweil -– not mine, alas -– that discussed nanobots in our blood, downloading body upgrades, ending aging, and upgrading our intelligence. All of these things show up in the Post-Human series. After reading Kurzweil, it’s hard to think that we won’t have software-based immortality in the future. This idea, said Simpson, “that 300 years from now we’re in starships with laser pistols strapped to our thighs…it becomes tough to swallow. What happens after we increase our intelligence by adding billions more pattern recognizers to our brains than we currently have? What happens when each of us is ten times as smart as Einstein?” Nobody knows, but Simpson takes a great stab at guessing.Despite its frantic plot and Mach 1 character portraits, Simpson still presents us with plenty of moral ambiguity. The bad guy makes some very valid points, and the good guy may not always get things right. “Even Kurzweil points out regularly that technology is a double-edged sword and has challenges,” Simpson noted. “It was fun to create characters that could intelligently point out all of the reasonable arguments for why we might want to prevent these technologies from arising.”On its own, you can grab the ebook version of _Sub-Human_ for $2.99. I recommend the books 1 through 4 bundle for ten bucks, and look for book 5 in late April. This is great independent sci-fi from a young writer you’ll want to follow. less

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