The Turing Revolt: The War Against Infinity by Rob Bartlett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Everybody wants something.
In a world where God is a gambler and men, machines and angels all have hidden agendas, Captain Sapphire stumbles upon an adventure he doesn’t need or want.
This story defies classification and is a wholly unique mix of hard-scifi, supernatural, military, adventure and political-economics. It starts out with three features I appreciate. a decently brisk pace, only the barest minimum of information dumping, and nice short quick chapters. The characters are realistic and believable, even the supernatural and artificially intelligent ones.
In some parts the pace accelerates too rapidly, skipping through a span of two years in just a handful of pages. It’s a bit of a risky move but it’s done for good reason, since the period covered is mainly concerned with long term corporate strategies and quarterly reporting statistics, that could be quite boring but are crucial to the plot, so overall this was probably a wise move on the author’s part, as it skipped over a lot of crucial plot drivers in a way that, though rather unconventional, seemed to work. In fact, I found myself intrigued at the business strategies, even without fully understanding them.
Several themes are presented. Autonomy, freedom, and economic dependence; intelligence (natural and artificial) outsmarting the competition; boundaries and constraining behavior.
The bulk of the story concerns a secret plan that only Captain Sapphire truly understands. His business partners, and we as the reader, are granted enough glimpses into it to get the general idea and feel the mystique of it, and this is accomplished in two ways. Firstly, we witness actions that we do not fully comprehend by parties that we know little about. I don’t mind this sort of writing, but some readers will likely find it confusing. Secondly, snippets of the master scheme are revealed through dialog with Sapphire’s business partners, to good effect, even though the author readily and ironically admits the problems inherent in this approach.
“I gave another internal sigh. These expositional dialogues were getting a little old. But I figured I could take the few minutes to explain to her since it looked like the Troika had provided the means to amass my next trillion credits.”
At roughly a third of the way through, the book takes a sudden twist – but twist is perhaps not a strong enough word. Suddenly we move from space-faring businessmen to erotic vampires! And then things start to get interesting…
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