Paths to Utopia

We're underway this week, so I visited the used bookstore and found several James P. Hogan novels. Regular WaW readers (ha!) may recall that I read his Inherit the Stars last month; happily, one of the books I've found is the sequel, The Gentle Giants of Ganymede.

But this post is about Paths to Otherwhere, a novel about geopolitics and parallel Earths.

Scientists dealing with the Many-Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics are being brought together in Los Alamos for a secretive government project to draw information from parallel realities. Things become much more complicated when the researchers start crossing over into these realities, by... well, it's never really understood, but it's sort of like astral projection. For brief periods, they find their consciousness transferred into the body of their alternate self on other worlds.

The military- which is desperately seeking means to deal with an impending world war- sees this as being even more of an intelligence boon than they were expecting. The scientists use the technique to explore the vast realm of human possibility, and end up discovering a world without war.


The good parts: the characters are better-drawn than in Inherit the Stars. Hogan resists the urge to make military people into cardboard cutouts, in spite of the fact that the military is basically the villain of the story. He has fun with parallel-reality computation, especially at the start of the book; I almost wish he'd stuck with examining the implications of these.

The bad parts: the assassination subplot doesn't make much sense. There's less conceptual ping-pong than there was in Inherit the Stars (although this isn't necessarily a bad thing.) And the utopia world is, well, utopia; and Hogan doesn't do enough to make me believe it could work.

Come to think of it: the big problem is that it's set into a historical context. Their world is one where WWI ended early, in a fairer negotiated settlement; and this allowed human progress throughout the 20th century ending in a better place for everyone. That's not unbelievable, in itself; but it becomes jarring when we read that the economy is based on people giving money away. Because it's set so clearly in history, it's hard to suspend disbelief as I would with a pure-fantasy utopia.

But I'm going into some depth on that point because the novel made me think about it; which is fun and worthwhile on its own merits.