Subject: "Toolmaker Koan": review, spoilers

From: [email-masked] (Wayne A. Throop)
Date: 8 Sep 88 17:24:28 GMT

Toolmaker Koan by John McLoughlin [**]
     Baen Books, September 1988, paperback, 3.50, 344pg

A flawed book with an interesting idea.  It answers the Fermi Paradox
(you know... the "where are all the aliens?" paradox) in one of the
usual ways: all toolmaking species destroy themselves before they can
expand into interstellar space.  The idea is that predators of some form
are going to develop intelligence first, and eventually the predatory
and competitive instincts will destroy the species as the effects of
aggression are amplified by technology to have consequences beyond the
ability of these instincts to evaluate.

There are several flaws.  Perhaps the worst is that this isn't a very
persuasive "natural law".  Running a close second is the fact that
nowhere in the book is the "toolkmaker koan" (as the author calls this
law) actually presented *as* *a* *koan*.  This was most annoying,
because I was looking forward to casting this point of view into a zen
paradox.  Further, the way the characters invoked the so-called koan to
explain any-and-everything, usually by having one character look
meaningfully at another and say simply "Toolmaker Koan", quickly made me
want to take the next character to act in this way and beat them with a
stick.  (Hey, maybe there's some zen here after all?)

(From here on, there be spoilers.)

But perhaps the worst problem is the ending of the story.  Like the PDQ
Bach opera "Carmen Ghia", the story winds up with everything blowing up
in the faces of our protagonists "and then everybody dies".  Not
satisfied with this ending (too sad, don't y'know), everybody then jumps
up and in an epilogue sings several choruses of "HappyEnding,
HappyEnding, HappyEnding...", and everybody lives happily ever after.
Very lame, to say the least.

Despite this, the book has an interesting idea.  It takes the usual
"what if the dinosaurs had developed intelligence" scenario, and makes
it real in *our* world rather than an alternate reality.  The dinosaurs
*did* have an intelligent species.  But it destroyed itself 65 million
years ago, using space-based warfare, ultimately "throwing rocks" from
the asteroid belt, leaving the iridium-rich layer everybody has heard so
much about.

After all, what would one expect to find as evidence of such an event?
Well, a great extinction event, with a nuclear-or-asteroid-impact winter
at the time of the cataclysm.  It explains why the extinction started
before the impact as the toolmaking species develops technology and
starts to monopolize the biosphere, just as we are causing minor
extinctions now.  A minor disapointment to me is that this isn't
generalized into a Nemesis-like hypothesis, where toolmaking species
arise roughly every N-million years, neatly accounting for many major
extinctions at one swell foop and providing a reason for not finding a
celestial Nemesis to synchronize with them.  The Nemesis is within.

Anyway, I found the book to be good food for thought, but only fair when
considered as an entertaining story.  A 7,000 word essay would have
suited me better.

--

Wayne Throop      <the-known-world>!mcnc!rti!xyzzy!throopw