The good
A powerful space ship called the Invincible travels to a planet called Regis III to investigate the disappearance of another space ship called the Condor. What they discover, and what turns out to be the central idea of the book, is fascinating:
The planet is inhabited by tiny, insect-like, self-replicating machines that, individually or in small groups, are harmless and have limited abilities, but when threatened, they form into huge, powerful swarms that are able to destroy other life forms through massive blasts of electromagnetic radiation. One of these blasts completely wiped the memory of the crew of the Condor, leaving them as helpless as babies.
What’s unique about this idea is that the individual robots posses no real intelligence or self-awareness. All they have is an “instinct” to form into swarms when attacked. However, once in a swarm, new behaviors emerge that are vastly more powerful than what you get with any of the individuals. In fact, when viewed from the outside, the behavior of the swarm even appears to be intelligent. As I read, I kept imagining the similarity between these robots and the neurons in our brains—each one individually has no intelligence, but when you put them together, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. I suppose the same could be said of transistors in a CPU: a lot of simple parts, arranged just so, can produce an unexpectedly complicated result!
The scientists in the story speculate that these tiny robots evolved as the winner of a massive war between several groups of robots and organic life forms, where the winning tactics turned out to be (a) the ability to reproduce extremely quickly, (b) the ability to destroy the circuitry that provides intelligence for complicated robotic and organic beings through electromagnetic radiation, and (c) to be a simple enough being yourself that the electromagnetic radiation does not affect you. In other words, rather than evolution trending towards more and more complicated and intelligent life forms, on Regis III, the fittest that survived turned out to be simpler and less intelligent. And with no real intelligence, these robots also have no fear (e.g., huge numbers of casualties don’t bother them at all) and no morals (i.e., they indiscriminately kill anything that they find threatening, purely by instinct).
The crew of the Invincible is then faced with a dilemma: these robots are so widespread, that they are effectively a part of the planet’s ecosystem, and the only way to defeat them is with a planetary-scale attack (i.e., nuclear winter). Do humans have the right to wipe out an entire planet or an entire species because it attacked them? Even if the attack was no more conscious than that of a virus or poisonous plant?
The not so good
If this was a ~20 page short story that solely focused on exploring this main idea, I’d give it 5 stars, as it’s a deeply interesting concept, and fun to think about. However, this is a book that’s several hundred pages, and unfortunately, everything around the central idea feels like scaffolding.
The characters are flat military and science stereotypes and you don’t find yourself caring about any of them; the plot starts off with a good amount of mystery, but then reveals the central idea via a long monologue by a single scientist that out of nowhere seems to have figured the whole thing out (this was really jarring, as you go from understanding nothing to everything in a single leap, with no gradual sense of discovery along the way); and while the book tries to explore some of the interesting ethical and moral dilemmas, it’s done in a sloppy way, with the plot meandering towards the end, and eventually fizzling out with an unsatisfying conclusion.
Overall
This book is your typical hard sci-fi: superb central concept, wrapped in a story with weak character and plot development.
Rating: 3 stars
Yevgeniy Brikman
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