Geosynchron [Paperback]

First let me say that I love the world and the idea behind the series. I had a great time reading the books and I would have given this a 5 for that. However I also want to give it a 3 for other reasons. So I settled on a 4. I am going to try to keep major spoilers out of this but there may be a few smaller ones.

My major issue with the series is for things that seemed like they should be linked, but never were. It is Natch's story but the Surina's influence the whole world. Everyone seems to play in the sandbox they made. There are two parallel stories about Surina technology, Teleportation and MultiReal. Both are similar in the way they could change society and how the government wants to stop them. The novels do a great job illustrating that. Teleportation was neutered before it could be perfected. It is implied that teleportation could be instant, but is now limited to a time intensive process (hours). MultiReal's fate I won't get into because of spoilers.

The code for both of these technologies came from the same place, the Surina's. It is mentioned that the code for Teleportation and MultiReal share/have similar structures. That they "fit" together. It seems obvious that with both technologies one could really move between realities. The human race could truly evolve into a go anywhere/do anything post human existence. The clues in the book make it seem like this was the Surina plan from the beginning.

My problem is that this never happens. None of the characters bring it up as a possibility or solution. They never even see the connection. To me it would have been a great place to take the story. An even more fascinating possibility on top of a the great world we were already given.

So I think it is a great series and a good read but I am disappointed in where we eventually ended up. Or at least in where we could have ended up but didn't. Hopefully a future series in this universe will explore that more.

Every once in a great while I run across an author who has imagined a world so vivid and complete that I feel as if it actually exists. When that world is set hundreds of years in the future, this feat of creation is even more astounding.

Geosynchron, the final piece of David Edelman's Jump 225 Trilogy, completes the story of entrepreneur Natch, convincingly portraying his evolution from self-centered businessman to socially-conscious guardian of MultiReal. Infected with life-threatening black code and on the run from his nemesis Brone as well two executives vying for control of the Government, Natch must choose between two paths, each with dire consequences for the welfare of the human race.

As with its predecessors, this novel features intense action sequences, mentally-stimulating political maneuvering, and interesting thematic material. Here, the possible unification of the connectibles (the majority of the population who fully embrace the fusion of their bodies with software that regulats their bodily functions and connects them to the Datasea) and the unconnectibles (a minority group who have chosen to remain in a more-or-less natural state), and the disparate viewpoints they embrace, form a central motif.

If humans are on an inevitable path towards perfection, is it truly possible to destroy a technology that has the possibility to improve the human condition (but with alarming collateral consequences) or can we only hope to come up with a way to restrict its proliferation until adequate controls are in place? This is not only Natch's dilemma, but the dilemma our society faces as we stand on the brink of technologies that could alter the course of human evolution.

The Jump 225 Trilogy, for me, deserves not only a wide readership but also recognition as one of the most important sci-fi works of our time.

Having read all three books in back-to-back succession it strikes me that the author, while starting with an interesting concept that was certainly engaging and enthralling during the first fifty pages of book 1- Infoquake (mediocre writing style and one-dimensional characters notwithstanding) had really not given enough thought for the entire trilogy and its ultimate conclusion. Before commenting on my biggest criticism of this last book (see item (3)), I also want to briefly outline a few issues that compelled me to give this a lower rating than the book (and the entire trilogy) otherwise could have gotten.

1) The books read like they were either padded with unnecessary and rather poorly stylized exposition in an effort to make three books where one would have been enough. (God bless the nature of the literary business where quantity pays better than quality.) In essence, all three books could have been one book, with about 250-300 pages (at the very least) pruned for the sake of consistent flow, greater emphasis on relevant aspects of the story and the philosophy, all the while including less clutter and poor writing. The third book is the most poorly written in my opinion, where internal monologue, narrative plot advancement, dialogue and general pontifications by the author fit together in a contrived and rather awkward jumble. There are literally entire paragraphs consisting of sentences ending with question marks as a means of showing the inner thoughts of the main female protagonist. It's rather formulaic (as it is repeated often as way of showing the reader that this is Jara's inner voice), sexist as the author only portrays the women as weak while all men as strong, conniving, stoic, or brazen, and grates on the eyes and ears by simply being written in bad style. Simply put, either the author felt like he was above having to do basic editing to perfect his craft, or his editors simply slept at the wheel. What this resulted in was 20% interesting story, 80% cyberpunk space opera (in the derogatory sense), with all the cheese and utterly misplaced profanities to boot. Oh, and I forgot to mention that 90% of the book takes place in meetings, board meetings, and more conversations in meetings. Take Star Wars Episodes 1-3, take out all battle scenes and leave only the pointless walking and talking scenes and you get the gist of these books. Edit, edit, and edit some more. Again, if these 3 books were written as one, and better edited, the story would have been more compelling and less annoying to wade through.

2) The characters are completely inconsistent from chapter to chapter, and especially from book to book. In effect this does nothing other than further highlight the 1-dimensionality of all characters in the books, as well as giving a close reader an unnecessarily intimate look into the author's own personal psychological issues. This becomes apparent due to the flat narrative of each character, the lack of credible motivations or believable inner lives, the shifting beliefs and allegiances of friends and enemies that no normal human psyche would adhere to considering their circumstances and the short time span of all three books. At best all the characters come off as are mere facets of the various views the author has of himself - author as stoic, author as self-deprecating fat guy, author as ideal Ayn Randian ubermench, author as guy who has issues with women, author as arm chair general that any person with military training would laugh at, etc. The tragic result of all this is that at the end I didn't have a scintilla of care about any of the characters or their ultimate fates because none of them were in any way 'real'. Basically this was a pastiche of a pastiche.

3) And here is my main problem with the third book specifically: The author started with a difficult idea -multiple realities- rather reminiscent of Neal Stephenson's god-awful novel Anathema, and tried to do his best to massage the idea of multireal into something interesting. Ultimately, however, as far as a Utopian or social-commentary novel, these books, and the third one especially, completely fail to offer anything new to the socio-cultural discussion. This is because the author makes so many rudimentary mistakes and oversights about the proposed technology itself (nanotech), human nature (both social and biological), society in general (politics, ethics, etc), the nature of physics and thermodynamics (I am consistently baffled by how so many cyberpunk writers from a computer/IT background appear to willfully fail to learn even the basic presets of the laws of thermodynamics before leaping off into the magical world of nano-magic and use of nonsensical words like 'aether' or 'sub-aether'), and humanity's ultimate destiny in the sea of unbounded technology, which have already been painstakingly and eloquently explored for over a half a century by great philosophers and great sci-fi writers of yesteryear, that it reads like a hodge-podge of second-hand pseudo-intellectualism wrapped up in some self-aggrandizing messianic obsession with an Ayn-radnian superman sacrificing himself for the good of the world. And here's the biggest rub (not a spoiler): the book ends with practically a deus-ex machina denumeunt that essentially negates the entire three books, akin to those awful tv episodes that end with the main protagonist waking up an realizing that the entire episode was a dream.

In sum: the concept of multiple realities if a difficult one to use as a premise. Therefore, it requires care and aforethought to flesh the entire story out before starting the written project. This is because there is absolutely nothing more frustrating than an author teasing the reader for three books that perhaps there will be a clever, if not profound, resolution and realization of the significance of the proposed concept, only to be left with a "I didn't know where to go or how to wrap things up so I coped-out as best as I could by falling back on the most "meh" ("uninspired" for the cultured among you) martyr-esque ending to avoid all the difficulties of a tangled and pointless web... of basically people talking in circles about nothing.

Better books on the same themes: Accelerando by Charles Stross. The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi. The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigulapi. River of Gods by Ian McDonald. Anything by Philip K. Dick or Jorge Luis Borges. And of course the classics: Neuromancer by William Gibson and the Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson.

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