From /tmp/sf.3694 Sun Nov 8 23:10:27 1992 Path: isy!liuida!sunic!psinntp!psinntp!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!pacbell.com!pacbell!pbhyc!djdaneh From: weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu!weemba (Matthew P Wiener) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: Writing Rings around Tom Maddox HALO Message-ID: <1991Dec23.200131.6291@pbhyc.PacBell.COM> Date: 23 Dec 91 20:01:31 GMT Sender: djdaneh@pbhyc.PacBell.COM (Dan'l DanehyOakes) Reply-To: weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu!weemba (Matthew P Wiener) Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Organization: Pacific * Bell Lines: 81 Approved: djdaneh@pbhyc.pacbell.com 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 (weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu)