feinesache

So-so near-future techno thriller in the Jurassic Park vein: technology X leads to beastie Y set loose on unsuspecting society. The technology in question is Artificial Life, and the monster basically a souped up version of a computer virus. "Artificial Life" means the virus, rather than being a designed program, has evolved from a basic bit of code to a sophisticated and intelligent, um, bit of code that can grow, learn, be trained, and eventually starts showing predatory behavior. The story is well-written, but unfortunately the author makes the mistake of showing the actual evolution of the beastie in too much detail, leading to many, many sections of "the entity awoke, confused about where it was... it realized it was limited to just ten percent of the nodes it was assigned before" and so on and so forth --- basically large chunks of text describing how the code evolves from a very basic problem-solving routine to the predator we all come to know and fear. It's just too much detail, and after 5 or 6 of those sections I started skip-reading them. It led me to lose interest in the story about halfway through. I did finish the novel, and found some sections of it interesting, but over all I think it just didn't work as well as it could have.

2020-08-05 20:09