THE PRIME NETWORK

A scientist deciphers the hidden structure of reality, learns how to control it, and lands in hot water in this SF fantasy.

After years of study, Roger Gregory—always referred to as “Mr. Gregory”—has finally discovered that at the foundation of the universe is the Network: an 11-dimensional web of nodes and connections through which energy and information flow. He’s invented a lens that allows him to peer into the Network, and an “information-processing paradigm” called “the Language of Inner Forced Evolution” that lets him predict the future from the flows—and sometimes even change it by shining photons into the Network. Using this machinery, which he keeps in his basement in Alexandria, Virginia, Mr. Gregory has made a fortune predicting stock market moves and has turned to do-gooding. He forecasts a megaquake in time to evacuate Los Angeles and a viral pandemic in time to develop a vaccine. He also conjures up a storm at sea that lets an American ship escape the Iranian navy, changes a little girl’s genetic code to cure her cancer, and rigs up a system to automatically predict and forestall conflicts, which results in world peace and plummeting homicide rates. Mr. Gregory isn’t shy about publicly claiming credit for these miracles, and the Pentagon starts pestering him to turn his inventions to morally dubious ends, such as performing mind control and giving terrorists fatal illnesses. Worse, when a sudden anomaly in the Network starts bombarding the world with earthquakes, tsunamis, plagues, and asteroids, irate mobs unfairly blame Mr. Gregory for the looming apocalypse. In Nahum’s ruminative story, Mr. Gregory’s gizmos are the functional equivalents of a crystal ball and magic wand. But the author’s gnarled novel of ideas focuses on making it all sound scientific with murky technical explanations—“If the informational imbalances that resulted in diseases in four dimensions could be addressed proactively within the higher dimensionality of the Network, they could be corrected before they became manifest in people’s local projection of them, and they would never occur in their lives”—that go on for many eye-glazing chapters. When Nahum leaves off the weird physics lectures and embroils Mr. Gregory in human plots and power plays, the author crafts some tense and engrossing scenes that indicate a more promising direction the book might have taken.

A sometimes-entertaining but often turgid yarn that shows how dreary godlike technology can be.