purplecthulhu

I won a pre-publication copy of this book at the last BSFA meeting. There were others there envying me the win, so I thought I should deliver at least some recompense by writing a review.

And the person I promised a loan to now knows that its available...

For the spoler-phobic the review is hidden...

Recursion is about a future dominated by self-reproducing machines and the AI(s) that control them. Its also a story about the human tendency to run away from choices, and to look for authority figures when difficult questions arise.

The book is made up of three separate interleaved stories. They only link up at the very end in a kind of coda. This allows the writer to cover a lot of ground in terms of both space and time, but regularly leaves the reader, at least in the first half of the book, wondering what the three stories have to do with one another.

The first of these stories, and the one set furthest in the future, is that of Herb, the playboy son of a wealthy family who makes the mistake of thinking he can be a planetary engineer. We first encounter him looking down on a planet that was meant to blossom with new cities to Herb's designs, but instead turned into a kind of chunky grey goo because there was a bug in his design for von Neuman machines. Instead of building cities and then dying, they've instead eaten the whole planet.

Herb is then surprised when an agent of the EA (Ecology Agency) arrives in his ship and, as an alternative to punishment for killing a whole planet, recruits him to join a two man war against a nameless Enemy that has taken over far more of the galaxy than humanity has yet colonised. What follows in this thread is largely a travelogue as Herb and his captor, Robert Johnston, tour and then invade the enemy Domain, and in which we find that Mr Johnston is rather a lot more than he first appears. It eventually emerges that the war and tour are also intended to teach Herb a lesson about growing up, which he has signally failed so far to do.

The second story is set closer to our own time, and concerns Eva and her bids to leave the suffocating protection of Social Care. The world of the 2050s portrayed here is a rather worrying Blair/Blunkett utopia where universal surveillance allows everyone to be looked after, whether they want it or not. The only exceptions are occasional dissidents disposed of by stealth aircraft, and the only cloud on the horizon is the near-mythical Watcher that might or might not lurk within the surveillance system.

Eva eventually joins a group of fellow refugees from Social Care and they make their escape from the system, only to have a rather closer encounter with The Watcher than they were expecting. They are then given the chance to choose the future of all mankind.

The third and, to me, by far the most consistently engaging story, concerns Constantine, a 'ghost' who operates outside universal surveillance to ensure the security of mankind's first steps to the stars. But flaws that he sees in reality gradually build, and the nature of his mission becomes increasingly unclear as he travels to a series of meetings that will set the colonisation agenda. He soon begins to question his own reality, as things become seriously warped.

Recursion is a bit of a curate's egg, made even more so by the separate nature of the three stories. Only the Constantine thread consistently worked for me. Both the other storylines had flaccid patches - Herb's travelogue, especially when in virtual reality, failed to engage me until very near the end, while Eva's story became distinctly flat when she reached the mental home and while wandering the woods. The depiction of Eva's and Constantine's worlds largely worked, but Herb was so abstracted from everything else that it seemed as if it must just be another virtual reality.

The issues that Ballantyne raises in the story/ies are important ones, especially with the modern SF fashion for god-like artificial intelligences. Does human free will have a future? If we could choose between freedom and comfort what would we choose, and what would be the 'right' choice?

Ballantyne makes a stab at some of these questions and comes up with realistic, if uncomfortable, answers to some of them. But he failed to fully engage this reader on the way to the questions.

The blurb on the back of the book says it 'will appeal to fans of Michael Moorcock and Stephen Baxter.' This surprises me. I can see the Baxter connection, though Ballantyne is far from the scientific rigor of Baxter, but I would have thought that Philip K. Dick would be a much better comparator than Moorcock. The Constantine story line, especially, was notably Dickian.

The one mystery that remains is why the book is called Recursions. The predominance of self reproducing von Neuman machines (VNM) throughout the book, and the centrality of the exponential growth rate that these produce would surely make the title Exponentiations more appropriate. This is even more appropriate since there is little recursion to be found here, unless you count the code for making a VNM.

But then we're all roughly VNMs anyway - a point that Tony Ballantyne seems to have forgotten.