Tom Maddox (1945–2022)

The curse of the missing half star strikes again. Calling this book a three would be a disservice, but it's not quite entertaining enough to be a full four.

A Creative Commons novel freely available at Manybooks.net as well as the authour's own site and traditional formats, it's a trippy examination of what it is to be human. Sci-Fi in the truest sense - exploratory, and mind expanding.

It's difficult to review this novel after only reading it once - For me there was both lots to like and lots show more to dislike. The presentation especially fell into the latter category, mainly sticking to one viewpoint but wandering away from it almost at random to other characters, and slipping from story to sermon and back. Pieces of it (the cat for instance) just never quite clicked for me. Other pieces resonated strongly.

Somehow in the end if fell short of awesome, but you should read it anyway. show less

What makes a person a person? Is death really the end of existence? What is a mind, what an individual? Questions asked a thousand times and equally often tried to answer, but I really liked this take. The difference between man and machine becomes increasingly irrelevant when one merges with the other, as it's the case in this novel.

Unfortunately, the protagonist and POV character remains bland and lifeless - perhaps that's the nature of things as he's through most of the story just an show more observer, sent by the multinational intelligence corporation he works for to a space station to watch and review an experiment of the local AI Aleph and a dying man who's mind is in some form to be preserved. Instead to give us Gonzales' motivation and personality, Maddox rather loses himself in description and purple prose sometimes. On the other hand, the scenes with Aleph and the Collective as well as the development of Haymex and Mr. Jones was really well done. show less

Tom Maddox has delivered an amazing book that explores the relationship between life, death, immortality, technology and our reliance upon it.The book seems like a typical storyline at first - Gonzales is an information auditor with a large corporation that handles "information utilities." The story opens as Gonzales is reflecting on his last job, the end of which sees him nearly killed as guerilla pilots nearly shoot down his flight out of Myanmar. This near-death experience shakes him up, show more and as he describes to his memex, a personal computer that transcends the boundaries of what we think of as a computer, "I'm going to die, my friend ... Today, manana, some day for sure... and I'm still trying to understand what that means to me now." This sets the stage for the rest of the book, which sees Gonzales flying to a space station whose very life and soul is its computer system named aptly named Aleph (the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet, the beginning). The story is described from Gonzales point of view, which is that of an at first detached observer who becomes personally involved in the tale. Aleph begins to merge with a human, who though being vegetative and later dying, merges with the computer, and the two (as well other characters) begin to explore the implications of this. show less

What happens when a robot develops jealousy and a sense of appropriateness of actions when its (or their?) owner doesn't even realise that they're conscious?