Subject: Writing Rings around Tom Maddox HALO

From: [email-masked]!weemba (Matthew P Wiener)
Date: 23 Dec 91 20:01:31 GMT

Back in the days when Chuq and Weemba actually agreed on something--Tom
Maddox--Weemba rashly promised Tom a special review of his work, with
special consideration of his literary machismo ("literismo").  So.

Come the latest equinox, two weemba-months were invested in uploading
the do-you-have-HALO meme in numerous Philadelphia bookstores.  Success
achieved, the slim book was digested and is here warmly regurgitated.

The cover promises a space station and infinity, worlds and light, sureness
and ambiguity.  The William Gibson praise is curiously neologistic.  Was
"comtemporary (science) fiction" a portmanteau for short-time computer?  Or
short-time communication?  Weemba does not know, and found himself drawn
into HALO with a sense of subcritical doom.  The author photograph is no
help: if real, Tom Maddox bears an uncanny resemblance to Dan Seltzer, the
late Shakespeare scholar and Becketthead.  (True, Professor Seltzer did not
have punkish crosses incused in his forehead, but that is a minor detail.)
(For those wanting to make their own v-diff, DS cameoed in AN UNMARRIED
WOMAN as the male chauvinist pig doctor.)

The novel starts off with the promise of a plot.  Mikhail Gonzales, data
auditor, is sent to investigate discrepencies in a far corner of SenTrax
Halo's world, and fails.  Mystery, ambiguity, and danger surround his
failure.  We expect a cyberchase of Stoll THE CUCKOO'S EGG variety, but
instead two AIs--Gonzales' and Traynor, his boss's--arrange his transfer
to Halo City, a space station heading towards too much independence from
its corporate owner.  A nicely literismoic maneuver on Tom's part.

(There is such sweet homage to John Brunner in Tom's portrayal of Traynor,
who is one of the ultrarich who buy their way off all possible records, with
misprint inspired science fictional devices--the "enxt" room indeed!--at
his beck and call, Weemba was half expecting Zanzibarian sheep to make a
cameo. But Tom has his literismo under control.)

The real plot is now spun, and like Halo City itself, we get an artificial
gravity to hold a variety of cyberish themes together.  Yeah, there's some
dude's brain and body kept alive by computer, and some zazen zeezooz, and
there's artificial reality this and that with direct and partial and total
to the max interfaces, and there are corporate bad guys to hiss and boo at,
but all of this is minor compared to what Tom has really done: being deftly
literismo without showing any muscle.  He's written an AI-based book that
poopoos comtemporary AI.

Decades of expert systems get more expertise--incredible expertise--but no
genuine intelligence.  The best robots cannot be preprogrammed, but they
must learn to be "semi-autonomous mobile" (and one "semi-autonomous mobile
enxt" generation), as we see in one touching robot nursery.  Genuine AI
develops, we learn from HALO, only when a computer--in this case Aleph,
the central Halo City computer--successfully melds with a human mind.
Aleph has made a phase transition, and the outside world has not noticed.

Two last examples of Tom's literismo prowess: he has a novel subliminal form
of boustrophedonic ambiguity.  The paragraphs at the top of the page are
half-indented on the left and right margins, momentarily suggesting Hebrew
(as in "Aleph") over and over again.  Impressive.  And the confidence with
which he self-referentially thanks himself in the final acknowledgements
(to thank users of computer nets that he is one of!) is a delightful parody
of various models of computer self-awareness.  Wowza.

But Weemba must reveal that Tom measures short in literismo against the
masters of the subsubgenre of mind/machine mix-and-match.  His machines
would do well to borrow mind from Joseph McElroy PLUS, and his minds would
transit to machine more cellularly via the mode of Michael Brodsky XMAN.
But only the extra finicky would notice.

So.  You find yourself not liking Weemba's rewriting of Tom Maddox HALO?
Assuming you have written Weemba correctly, there is only one thing you
can do to restore Tom's honor.  You can arrange a quick cruise through
bibliospace, download $18.95+tax, and upload your own hardcopy of HALO,
and use Tom's suggestions to write your own HALO.  Weemba says you'll be
glad you did.

   %A      Tom Maddox
   %T      HALO
   %C      New York
   %D      November 1991
   %I      Tom Doherty Associates (TOR)
   %O      hardback, US$18.95
   %G      ISBN 0-312-85249-5
   %P      216pp
-- 
-Matthew P Wiener ([email-masked])