A sometimes-thought-provoking, sometimes-talky and sluggish speculation on reality and human nature.
A man’s anguished search for the meaning of life leads to the discovery that it’s all a computer simulation in this debut SF novel.
Vovchenko’s cosmic tale of ideas follows the adventures of Robbie, a 20-something technical writer in Seattle with no clue what he wants other than to play video games and ponder arcane subjects, from the existence of the soul to the mysteries of quantum physics. A seesaw picaresque ensues as he cycles through business careers and reversals, marries, and loses everything when his wife dies in a car crash that leaves their young son blind, deaf, and mute. Grief-stricken, Robbie decides that life is a pointless ordeal of suffering and brutality under a “sadistic God.” But then his speculative science streak kicks in and he brainstorms the notion that “this duality of light being a wave and a particle doesn’t make any sense unless the world is computer-generated.” That epiphany makes the author’s hitherto grounded and realistic narrative blast off into fantasy. Robbie wakes to find his consciousness enmeshed in a robotic body on an airless planet inhabited by other robo-humans and ruled by disembodied beings called Mitras. This is the real world, he is informed, while humans are indeed artificial intelligence programs that live, breed, and evolve in a simulated world running on a Mitra computer. Enlightened human AIs like Robbie are occasionally “extracted” from the simulation to live robotically in the real world and help the Mitras, who are spiritual but not very smart, develop technology. It all checks out, and Robbie and fellow extractee Isaac Newton get entangled in wars between Mitra factions, the rise of an insurgent lizard god, and ethical quandaries in which the survival of the computer simulation and its billions of human AI consciousnesses hangs in the balance. In its (simulated) earthly phase, Vovchenko’s ruminative yarn is a sometimes-affecting story of a thoughtful young man trying to reconcile the practicalities of life with philosophical and moral principles. The author’s conception of the world as a computer model—the probable randomness of quantum physics is actually a computational shortcut that economizes on technical resources—is intriguing. And while his prose is sometimes awkward and needs a strong editor—“Modern poor seemed to Robbie like pussycats of the real poor of the past”—he manages flights of plangent lyricism. (“His soul was a lonely and dull star flying away from the constellations of other brighter and happier stars,” Robbie reflects during a sojourn in India.) The novel’s phantasmagorical second half is imaginative but less successful. The “real world” of the Mitras feels utterly artificial, as simplistic, contrived, and cartoonish as a computer game yet so uninvolving that Robbie flies away from the Mitra planet and spends years brooding alone in dark, empty space. The narrative often bogs down in long stretches of intellectual bloviating with dubious conclusions. (“Art is completely relative to the viewer and his ability to comprehend an art piece; what” the artist “meant by it; what associations it creates; and if a viewer can appreciate the effort and creativity which went into that art piece. Therefore, art should never be compared.”) Readers may wish Robbie would retreat back into the simulation and stop overthinking things.
A sometimes-thought-provoking, sometimes-talky and sluggish speculation on reality and human nature.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-56225-4
Page Count: 223
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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