Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Factoring Humanity, by Robert J. Sawyer

After my ups and downs with Sawyer's "Neanderthal Parallax" trilogy and the enjoyment I found in reading his "Flashforward", I thought to read another one of his older books. As I expected, some of his earlier writings are substantially better than his latest and I ended up enjoying very much what he created in "Factoring Humanity".

This book is a story of first contact between humanity and extra-terrestrials, somewhat in the same vein of Carl Sagan's unbeatable Contact. Radiotelescopes on Earth suddenly start picking up signals from Alpha Centauri, which are initially decoded and understood. Further pieces of the message however remain shrouded in mystery for 10 years until a scientist is finally able to figure out its meaning. The decoding of the message changes humanity in a way that I had not seen proposed in any other work of science fiction, so I found this book quite creative and interesting.

A concurrent thread in the story explores the work of another scientist whose research in artificial intelligence and quantum computing run the risk of coming together. Although I found this thread also very interesting, at times I found that it wasn't well integrated with the main plot of this book. In the end, the author does manage to pull the threads together, but I felt that the integration was not terribly smooth and could have been done better.

All in all, this was a fast and satisfying read, but definitely not a masterpieces in the genre. The science is understandable and fairly convincing, what is always a pleasure to find. What was really interesting for me as a faithful Sawyer reader was the recurrence of themes from the "Neanderthal Parallax" trilogy. "Factoring Humanity" was written years earlier and exposes themes such as women in science, sexual abuse, and quantum computing, which featured prominently in the "Neanderthal Parallax". I'm curious to see if his future works will revisit these themes and how.

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