‘Fools’ Experiments’ – Edward M. Lerner (Tor)

Ever since the Master Control Program started getting ideas above its station and usurping its real world operators (see the film ‘Tron’ if you don’t know what I’m on about) I’ve always thought that the concept of artificial intelligence running riot was pretty cool. The realisation that Skynet was in on the act as well just made things all the better as far as I was concerned!
When a copy of Edward Lerner’s ‘Fools’ Experiments’ came through the door, just before Christmas, I was looking forward to more MCP and Skynet goodness and I wasn’t disappointed in that regard. In other areas though I found that ‘Fools’ Experiments’ came up short...

In a near future world (that feels like it’s only a couple of years away from the present day) computer viruses are more of a threat than ever, especially with the advent of neural interfacing directly with computers... A particularly nasty virus is doing the rounds at the same time as a university professor conducts experiments into the development of artificial life. You can guess what happens next... All of a sudden the entire internet is under attack and the world’s first artificial life form must be stopped before the damage spreads into the real world...

Like I said, I love stories of artificial intelligence running rampant and ‘Fools’ Experiments’ certainly delivers this with a hefty side helping of moralising about how mankind shouldn’t play God (and if it absolutely has to then it should really treat it’s creations with a little more consideration). Personally, I found the latter aspect of the book a little heavy-handed, if the reader is shown the catastrophic results of mankind’s meddling then surely he doesn’t need to be told (again) whose fault it is... Does he? Once I got past my annoyance with this though, the story itself is an entertaining one (up to a point) with plenty going on and high stakes involved. To Lerner’s credit, he can make a battle that takes place across various servers (between two combatants) as enthralling as a real life battle involving a cast of thousands and this makes one of the highlights of the story particularly intense.

It’s a shame then that the story drags up to this point.

Lerner decides to take the approach of describing the birth of the artificial intelligence in great detail, perhaps too great for a story that feels like it needs to rattle along a lot faster than it does under the weight of what felt to me like needless detail. While it’s always good to know just how something has come about, how much of this do we actually need to know? As someone who is not really computer literate at all, I also found myself struggling when Lerner got technical regarding the movements of various viruses and artificial intelligence. I can understand that there needs to be an element of technical grounding, for the story to be plausible, but most of it went straight over my head... If this is your kind of thing though then you might get more out of it than I did.

The bit that really irked me though was that I was left with the impression that the concept behind the novel, good though it was, wasn’t enough to fill an entire book. If it had been enough then surely you wouldn’t have seen a finale halfway through the book and then have the plot repeated (by characters that you thought would have known better by now) for the second half...

‘Fools’ Experiments’ has flashes of brilliance, and characters that I really got into, but these were bogged down by what I felt was a morass of technical detail and a plot that was too repetitive for it’s own good. I’ll be sticking with the Master Control Program and Skynet for a while longer...

Five and a Half out of Ten