Redemption Ark

Strictly, this is last week's book report, but due to frantic essay writing and a total exhaustive collapse on Thursday, I've been letting things slide a bit. So, what did I read? Despite promising myself I wasn't going to read any fiction, that I was going to devote myself to the Cartesian Meditations, I got caught up in a re-read of Al Reynolds' Redemption Ark, the sequel to Revelation Space.

Galiana, the much loved leader of the Conjoiner faction, has returned from a 190 year mission to explore deep space. Trouble is, she hasn't come back alone: she's brought a wolf, a hostile machine intelligence, back with her. In order to combat the threat, the Conjoiners decide to resume their lighthugger building program and send their war leader, Clavain, to search for the hideous Hell Class weapons which they believe are currently in orbit about an out of the way planet called Resurgam.

Clavain, though, has other plans. When shown the evidence of the Closed Council's scheme to leave the rest of humanity to the wolves, he decides to defect. Things don't go according to plan and he ends up in a near relativistic pursuit of fellow conjoiner Skade, with each trying to beat the other to Resurgam and the weapons.

Meanwhile, on Resurgam, all is not well. The population are being whipped up into a frenzy by a rebel called Thorn, the Inquisitor of External Threats still hasn't found Triumvir Ilya Volyova despite half a century of trying and something very alien is happening to the outer planets of the Delta Pavonis system.

Redemption is every bit as good as it's predecessors I'd recommend it to anyone, but purely as a matter of personal taste, I think I prefer Chasm City and Revelation, more for the things they leave unsaid about the wolves, than anything else. That said, it's nice to get to know more about the mysterious Conjoiners and some of the wolf scenes, especially the ones set on the seashore, are genuinely frightening.

As with Revelation, the characters and drives of two of the main characters, Skade and Clavain, seem to mirror each other. Both a driven by a conviction that they alone are acting in the best interests of humanity and both possess a similar determination to do whatever it takes to get the job done, despite the personal costs.

There are even some nice moments of philosophical introspection. Clavain, after being introduced to the Master of Works, complains that it is a mechanical slave with intelligence but not free will. Then there's the perennial question of what constitutes a complete computer simulation of a person: is an alpha level simulation formed from a complete brain scan all that different from a beta level simulation built simple heuristics designed to mimic behaviour? As Clavain's beta level says when Volyova attempts to dismiss him by claiming that she has no way of knowing how the real thing would react, "Ah, that old fallacy. You sound like Galiana. The fact is, the real Clavain might respond differently in any number of instances where he was presented with the same stimuli..." All very Cartesian.

Current gothic obsession

For some mysterious reason, I've suddenly developed a bizarre craving for classic gothic novels. Since Thursday, I've read (or re-read):
( Rambling summaries )

I now have to decide whether I can be bothered to read Mrs Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, or whether I should move on to War and Peace — the new Penguin translation is supposed to be very good.