Nanotime | ||
Bart Kosko | ||
Avon Books, 311 pages | ||
A review by Wayne MacLaurin
Built on a solid technical backbone, Nanotime is a taut cyber-thriller. Combining
elements of chip-head cyberpunk with those of a more conventional
spy-thriller, Bart Kosko has crafted a remarkable novel.
It's a rare, wonderful occurrence to find a novel that is written by an
author with the expertise to back up the plot. Nanotime is just such
a novel. Written by an leader in the field of fuzzy logic and machine
intelligence, Nanotime reveals an Orwellian tale of a world gone
crazy with governments that can watch virtually everything an individual
does, a world run by ever-more powerful computers that are constantly
getting smaller and cheaper.
The year is 2030, the world has doubled in population and oil reserves
continue to be depleted. But in a world where everything depends on computers, those
computers still need energy to run.
Enter John Grant, a brilliant young engineer who has patented a
new molecule that can split water and produce hydrogen. Grant's quest
to bring his technology onto the world market leads him into conflict
with a master Sufi terrorist. Hamid Tabriz has learned to encode
the mind in computer chips and replace parts of a living brain. These
chip-heads make ideal assassins and Tabriz starts a campaign of
terrorism that is aimed at starting a third world war -- a war that
will end with the destruction of the world's oil reserves and with
Tabriz controlling Grant's new technology as a source of unlimited energy.
Nanotime is a startling realistic glimpse at our future and the world's
reliance on oil as a major source of energy. The implications of smart
weapons (like cruise missiles) being cheaper than the defenses against
them are, to say the least, scary. Bart Kosko's world of prying government
eyes is only a small leap from our own world where computers have
already made privacy a major issue.
Wayne MacLaurin is a regular SF Site reviewer. More of his opinions are available on our Book Reviews pages. |
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