Code of the Speechmaker

James P. Hogan's Code of the Lifemaker starts off very nicely. An ancient alien survey ship, designed to set up automated factories on uninhabited planets, ends up damaged on the moon Titan. There, the imperfect automatons undergo their own kind of evolutionary process, ending up with something very like organic life.

(This prologue is the best part of the novel, and it's excerpted here.)


The rest of the novel deals with a human expedition to Titan, which over the ages since the prologue has evolved its own machine ecosystems and even sentient machine life. The robots are at a roughly medieval/Renaessance level of development, and the humans take great advantage of this as they prepare to make Titan into an economic colony.

The writing is solid. The characters, with one exception, are shallow but tolerable. Hogan works hard to make his bizarre mechanical-organic world plausible, and it kind of works.

There are two problems. The first is that Hogan puts speeches into various characters' mouths- mostly, in this novel, about the advantages of the scientific method. This gets old quickly.

The second problem is something I've noted about Heinlein: the assumption that politics is chess writ large, a completely rational and controllable game that smart people can arrange to their liking. This is implausible enough with humans, especially with religion added in; with an unknown alien race, the idea breaks down completely.

I suppose I was expecting a very different ending to the humans' various machinations and deceptions. But on Titan, you really can fool all the people all the time.

The Multiverse Isn't a Subplot!

Today's book of consideration is James P. Hogan's The Proteus Operation; there will be some minor spoilage, I'm afraid. (But only minor!)

The novel begins in an alternate history where the Axis had a very successful World War II. It's now 1975, and America and Australia are the only non-Axis nations left in the world; but it's only a matter of time for them.

So they develop time-travel, planning to go back to the early 1940s and change a few things; and make their world, in the process, very much like the one we live in today. But things are much more complicated than they first appear.

(Here go my minor spoilers!)


The Americans actually stole time-travel from the Nazis; or rather, from the 21st-century renegades who decided they'd prefer a Nazi world to their original history. So ours isn't the first history, or the second, but the third; the original course of history is an idyllic world where Europe reached a better ending to WWI, and averted the bloody course of the late 20th century altogether.

So far, so good. I love time-travel stories. And while I'm skeptical of utopias (something I've been seeing a lot of in Hogan) the neatness of the history-behind-a-history-behind-a-history appealed to my juvenile sense of wonder.

But then things get annoying.

It turns out that changing history doesn't scale forward: the Utopia world and the Nazi world keep going on, regardless of what changes occur in 1940. That's a standard trope of time-travel stories, and it seems to resolve some paradoxes.

But these parallel worlds aren't related to the time-travel changes. They're borne of the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, in which every possible position of an electron manifests in an entirely different universe. So the time-travellers are never really interacting with their own history at all (I think. But, really, who can tell?)

I don't mind the Many-Worlds Hypothesis; it can certainly be the basis for some fascinating science fiction. But it makes a lousy subplot. It's too big; not just in size, but in implications. It affects everything. Any fair treatment of it will tend to overwhelm any other story the author's trying to tell.

Greg Egan's done some good work with the concept: particularly his brilliant Permutation City, which I hope to review someday soon. But he does this good work by acknowledging the way the multiverse has a radical impact on the basic ideas that we take for granted.

Proteus wasn't a bad novel; and I'm still a sucker for time travel. But this treatment removes the logical paradoxes that are the mainstay of time-travelling fun. With that taken away, it's more like a period piece.

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.

Inherit the Plot

I just finished James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars, a 1977 science fiction novel. Astronauts find a 50,000-year-old human corpse on the Moon, and scientists struggle with the mysteries it raises.

Did he come from Earth? (Then why isn't there any evidence of this ancient super-civilization?)
Did he come from another planet? (Then why is his anatomy so exactly human?)

The tension between these two mutually-impossible problems drives the plot. It reminded me a lot of Asimov's writing style: set up a problem, and then make up and disprove one hypothesis after another. Kind of a narrative version of the scientific method.

The characters are weak, (as they usually are in Asimov) but characters aren't the point. The puzzle-work of ideas is the point, and I'm glad to say that my personal hypothesis was completely off the mark.

With that said: the weakest part of the novel is definitely the ending, which concludes with two dramatic new hypotheses- both of which are audacious, both of which have serious logical/evidential holes, but neither of which is questioned or debated by anyone. It's like Hogan was still going strong, and he suddenly ran out of novel.

But I give it a high ranking, regardless. I don't get an Asimov feeling from too many authors, and I treasure it when it happens.