Crux

I took this one at a leisurely pace because the children deserved it. All of the children, the post human, the autistic, and the abandoned needed a little bit of love to see them through this dystopian near-future. The call was just as strong for me as it was for Sam.

I haven't lost any of my deep desire to be a part of the emerging consciousness of Nexus, despite the abuses or the moral quandaries. Indeed, I love its promise as much as Kade.

I suppose this means the novel did its job, whether or not I'm going to eventually classify it as a novel of great ideas or as a novel of great writing. Something about it didn't quite match my hopeful expectations. It didn't have the same pace as the first novel, but there was certainly better show more action and higher stakes, so I suppose things balance out nicely. Holtzman was at first an annoying detractor to the story, but by the end he served the story's needs awesomely, propelling yet more conflict into the future with his death. Thank god.

All things being equal, I really enjoyed it. On to the next in the trilogy! show less

3.5 stars
In the beginning of this book, Kade is using his back door to Nexus to make sure it is not being used by people driven by chaos. In one instant, a man is using a virus passed through Nexus, to coerce a girl to letting him rape her:
"Memories came back, streaming from bogdan's mind. Corfu. Ibiza. Mykonos. Three Nexus-aided thefts. One leading to a murder.
And worse. He caught a glimpse of a girl, terrified, senses mentally crippled, her clothes half ripped off, her body held down by bogdan's will and his perverted code as he...
Kade grimaced, and yanked himself away from bogdan's memory. Thousands of miles away, his stomach rose up. His fists clenched.
You're disgusting, Bogdan.
Kade started in on the rewiring, tying neural show more circuits together. Bogdan's knowledge of programming. His understanding of Nexus. His concept of violence. His capacity for sexual arousal. All of these Kade tied to nausea, to crippling anxiety, to pervasive pain.
The man yelled at him. What are you doing?
I'm neutering you, Kade told him, Grim satisfaction rising in his thoughts. You won't ever steal, or kill, or f*** again.
Bogdan gasped in shock, then resumed his rage. You can't do this! What gives you the right?
I made this, Kade told the man. That gives me the right.

Ilya Alexander, Kade's friend who helped program Nexus 5, is captured and being held prisoner at the homeland security complex. She's been tortured for the passcode to the back door, but nothing has broken her so far. She knows she won't be able to hold out for much longer, so she selects a program within Nexus to end her own life. I almost cried at this part:
"she had to do it. She wouldn't give them the codes. She wouldn't live and have others die or be degraded instead.
Lub-dub.
The meaning of a thing is the impact it has on the world around it, she thought. The meaning of a life is the impact that life has on the world. I won't have my life mean slavery in mind control for others.
Ilya Alexander took one last deep breath, and ran the code she'd written. Her body trembled.
Lub dub. Lub... Dub.
Her heart beat one last time, then nothing. The world began to fade away, bit by final bit.
she heard a tone sound as she left the world behind. An alarm. The sound of a door opening and people rushing in to keep her alive. To break her.
But they were too late. Too late.
As the last light of consciousness left Ilya Alexander, she felt, as if far far away, the thoughts of other minds. Children's minds. Messy, chaotic, and so very... Very... Bright. And her last thought was one of Hope."

Shiva Prasad is a billionaire who promotes children receiving Nexus 5. He believes that Nexus 5 can be used for good in the world. Sam looks up what he's done with his foundation, Mira, because she's hoping to join it when Shiva allows the children that must move from the orphanage where she's helping, to move there with him to his island complex But so far, he won't allow her to come with them:
"A corrupt Laotian Governor -- who'd swapped medicines Mira delivered for fakes, sold the real ones on the black market, hanged in his living room.
A criminal gang in Burma who'd abducted and gangraped three female Mira foundation workers. The gang members had been found hog-tied and chained to the floor, face down on their knees, dead of massive hemorrhaging from the blunt objects they'd been violated with.
No crime had ever been pinned on Mira. But across the net she found the quiet assumption that Mira had been responsible, and approval that they'd taken on the thugs that plagued the developing world.
She reached the case she remembered last. The Dalit orphanage in Bihar, in Northern India. A rumor had spread among villagers that it was the site of transhuman experiments, that loathed Dalit children inside we're being turned into superhuman untouchables with black magical abilities. Tensions had run high. Then one night the orphanage Gates had been chained shut from the outside and the whole structure had been burned to the ground. 35 children and half-a-dozen orphanage staff had burned to death.
Sam Shivered reading it, thinking of her own childhood, of the suspicions of the villagers from mae dong. Of the bottle throwing, the attack on Jake.
There had been a trial, with a lacklustre prosecution and a judge who'd dismissed all charges against the seven villagers charged with the murder.
A week later, those villagers, the judge, and the prosecutor had been found dead, crucified and burned to death just outside the village."
Now that's Justice!

Holtzman is a government scientist who is finding out how corrupt his employers are. He's been told to do work that he's no longer comfortable with: finding a vaccine for children who have been infected with Nexus, and forcing Nexus out of the brains of the children who are imprisoned in the homeland security complex. He finds out that the government started a group pretending to fight the government's attempt to stop post-humans. Domestic Terrorist attacks:
"Someone had used the Nexus from his lab. Someone had used the software his team had built. They'd used it to take control of Steve Travers, to turn him into a robot assassin, they'd used it to tell him to fire.
And to fire half a meter to the left of his Target.
They'd used it to shoot at the president, but not to hit him. To miss.
'they could have at least been better shots!' Anne [his wife] said in his memories.
Oh no. They hit exactly what they meant to.
Who had the most to gain? Nakamura's voice asked him.
Stockton [the president] was losing until the PLF tried to kill him, Anne answered. He's going to win because of the assassination attempt.
The answer was clear.
The president had the most to gain."

This part, where a monk named Ananda had taught Kade how to control his thinking, to fight against the government trying to capture him, trying to torture him to give them information. I need to remember it when my machista ex-husband says cruel things to try to hurt me, and my mind becomes so enraged that I can't think clearly:
"then Ananda was in his thoughts. A memory of the monk.
When you suffer, Ananda had told him, when you rage. When you weep. When you crave. That is when you must still your mind."

I liked this book; I like how Sam stopped working for the CIA, and joined Kade's efforts to stop people working chaos with Nexus. it wasn't as good as the first book; there was just so much of these superhuman soldiers fighting like ninjas.
Moreover, in the afterward by the author, Naam talked about how what happened in this book is being worked on in real life. How experiments are being done on monkeys and rats, implanting things in their brains, to see if they can reach out to other minds.
This is what I hate: using animals without their permission. I've seen videos of monkeys with these horrors implanted in their brains. It brought down my opinion of the author very much, because he spoke of it as if it's a good thing. show less

Crux basically picks up where Nexus let off.

Nexus is a force in the world, with more than a million people using it, growing every day. One particularly interesting use is giving Nexus to children with autism to allow them to communicate directly mind to mind. Another is the children that were born to parents using Nexus. Interesting in both cases.

On the negative side, there have already been cases of people using Nexus for more nefarious purposes. Rape. Blackmail. Assassination. Like any new technology, there is the potential for much to go wrong. Something this big? Of course it does.

But where it really starts getting terrifying is when you consider the parallels with what Snowden revealed a few years ago and the current election show more cycle. The United States government (among others) in the world of Nexus has made such transhuman technology a crime. They are detaining those same children born with Nexus. One of the main storylines of Crux is just how deep such a hidden agenda might go. It's well written.

One note from a structural standpoint is that there is quite a lot of action in this book. It gets to the point where the action itself starts to drag. It could really use a few more breathers. It's certainly not a dealbreaker, but I think Nexus did it better.

All together, an excellent book. I look forward to the conclusion.

Final note: Feng is my favorite. He's hilarious. show less

Naam, Ramez (2013). Crux. Nottingham: Angry Robots. 2013. ISBN 9780857662972. Pagine 512. 6,79 €

È l’atteso seguito di Nexus (atteso, quanto meno, da me e da quelli cui Nexus era piaciuto). Ed è un bel seguito, che ci guadagna dal non dover spiegare troppe cose e dal non doversi preoccupare di delineare i protagonisti (almeno da quelli che sono sopravvissuti alle carneficine di Nexus), ma di potersi anche permettersi il lusso di approfondirne la psicologia e il modus operandi.

La nota che vedete riprodotta sulla copertina qui sopra è un’investitura di Ramez Naam come l’erede di Michael Crichton, e c’è un fondo di verità in quella che, dopo tutto, è soltanto una trovata pubblicitaria: il romanzo è un page turner, ti show more acchiappa tanto che si fatica a metterlo giù una volta che l’hai iniziato; la scienza è spesso rigorosa, e comunque sempre credibile; l’autore, come Crichton, ha una tesi o una preoccupazione etico-politica che vuole portare a casa dentro e oltre la finzione romanzesca. C’è una differenza di fondo, però. Crichton era un gran reazionario. Nel suo romanzo dedicato alle nanotecnologie, Prey del 2002, emerge tutta la sua tecnofobia: le nuove tecnologie non sono mai un bene, sono al più neutrali, ma sono anche intrinsecamente incontrollabili a causa della loro complessità e dell’emergere di effetti imprevisti e imprevedibili (vi ricordate il giochetto – sexy – che fa Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park con la goccia d’acqua?).


Ramez Naam, al contrario, è un fautore del progresso tecnologico e aspetta con impazienza che un futuro post-umano diventi possibile: senza i fanatismi e i partiti presi di Zoltan Istvan e del suo Transhumanist Wager, e anzi con molte preoccupazioni filosofiche e molte riflessioni sulla libertà e sulla responsabilità, nondimeno propugna con un certo entusiasmo un’era in cui si possa stabilire una connessione tra le menti meno precaria di quella che sperimentiamo ora con l’empatia e i neuroni-specchio.

Il finale aperto di Crux fa ben sperare in una terza puntata.

* * *

Alcune citazioni che meritano (a mio insindacabile giudizio e con il solito riferimento alle posizioni Kindle).

Anzi, questa volta, proverò a ordinare le citazioni per tema.

Cominciamo dall’Arte della guerra di Sun Tzu ( e dintorni):

Transitions are points of vulnerability […]. [4812]

Chaos could produce opportunity. [4917]

He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot will be victorious. [4969]

All warfare is based on deception. [6583]

Filosofia californiana vent’anni dopo Microservi: tra Smart Cities, Being Digital, Strong AI e Kevin Bacon…

Software beings, all of them. Digital representation of brains. Like her. What mattered was pattern, not substrate. A physical brain was an information processor and nothing more. A mind was the information being processed, not the physical brain that did the processing. A digital brain, with digital neurons and digital synapses and digital signals passing through it, could process that information just the same, could give rise to a mind just as well. [467]

To sclerotic, stagnant, backwards-looking Europe of all places? [1024]

This city was alive. It was a living thing. The streets were its arteries. The cars and trucks and scooters and pedestrians its blood.
Ling closed her eyes and she could feel the nerve-signals of the living city, the vast pulsing web of data that interwove everything around her. She could lose herself in the web that linked people and cars and buildings. She could feel the far-off power stations and the local substations, the water pumps and sewage lines, the spy eyes and traffic routing systems and all the rest. [1858]

« […] They don’t need the old ones as teachers. I’ve undermined their authority, inverted the hierarchy.»
«Fuck hierarchy,» Feng said. [2118]

Six degrees of separation, Kade thought. In days his new agent would reach every corner of the Nexus world. [3091]

« […] That’s the Dilemma, Mr President. If you were a Neanderthal and could stop humans from coming into being, or stop them from getting a foothold, you might extend the life of your species, but leave the world a poorer place.» [3257]

Tutto il resto, comprese le invenzioni linguistiche:

Means, motive, and opportunity, he thought. [2062]

[…] chameleonware […] [2266]

«Whistle-blowing takes balls and a conscience. […]» [4957] show less

This is just as amazing as the book before it. The tech is super cool, sure, but the book also explores the societal implications of the Nexus technology in a whole bunch of directions -- this is science fiction at its best. There are a whole bunch of POV characters, and it's a bit tricky at first to follow all the plot threads, but they all have satisfying character arcs and it comes together nicely. I look forward to reading the next book in the series!

Nexus 5, a drug that enables humans to enhance their brains and become networked with other users has been out there for six months now. As the numbers of users increases the USA sees this as its greatest threat, especially as the Post Human Liberation Front is taking over the minds of users ands sending them on assignation attempts to kill the president

As people start to use the drug for good and bad, Kade, the architect of Nexus, starts to avenge those that have enslaved others through the back doors that he put into the code. Kade is on the run too. He is being hunted by the CIA, black ops and others who want to use that power for their own ends. In America, one man close to the president starts to see that what they are doing to show more stop the spread of Nexus is morally abhorrent, in particular the way that they purge the substance from adults and children. The plot builds to a thrilling ending

I really enjoyed this sequel. It is a really fast paced sci-fi thriller, set 25 years into the future, with plausible technology and that little extra that takes it over the edge. If I had one gripe, I thought that the characters were a little two dimensional, as more effort had been put into the multi threaded plot, but that is a small thing really. show less

I had mixed feelings about this series. I rated it a little higher because the science is, to me, believable and real. I've been into computers and electronics off and on for over 40 years, and "modern" computers for over 25. I was a programmer using the internet by 1990 (mainly newsgroups at that time), so I felt right at home with a lot of the technical talk. Much of the technical terms would be above an average reader's comprehension, though. If that were the case with me, I don't know if I would have enjoyed it very much.

I've read a lot of similar stories where human consciousness is uploaded, duplicated, backed up, etc; it makes you wonder just what makes us who we are, and whether we can effectively live on after our body dies. show more After all, people have parts of their body replaced without becoming less human, so what if you replace your entire body, and duplicate your memories and brain's capabilities? If you haven't read books that explore these concepts, you might be interested in that aspect of the book.

I also found it interesting to have servers running inside your brain, like having a server running on your computer. This is something else I've had a lot of experience with, so it all seemed real and understandable to me.

However, the main story was a different beast. I was often not sure who were the good guys and the bad guys. Perhaps that was part of the reason for the story - that people are not black or white. Many of the people did bad things for good reasons, but it's hard to know whether they were right to do these things - like trying to force their solutions on people. It was often hard to really be sympathetic toward any of the characters. The one I liked best was Feng, a clone who was built to be a fighter/killing machine. He was definitely the most entertaining to me. But overall, I found the story itself to be unsatisfying. show less