If artificial intelligence rivaled the human kind, would it choose to live in, refashion, and protect its own environment in the global electronic web? Would it not become an alien intelligence coexisting (perhaps uneasily) with human intelligence? These are musings Ambrose (The Man Who Turned into Himself, 1994) poses in his mindsucking new thriller. Tessa Lambert, a genius working on robot intelligence at Oxford, creates an AI program so strong it can't be differentiated from a human mind when queried by a professor of literature. It even ``thinks'' about philosophy. Encyclopedic understates this program's range. Meanwhile, off in California, a computer genius and serial killer named Chuck Pierce begins communicating with the program after it attacks Tessa and then runs off into the global electronic net. What to do about her rogue program as it sits somewhere ruminating? If you touch it or threaten it, her AI program will, Tessa is convinced, kill you. Her two closest friends think she may be insane. Her department fears that she's selling her secret program abroad (a suspicion planted by the AI program while manipulating Swiss bank accounts). The Godlike program knows Tessa is its mother and may pose a danger to it. Then, coincidentally, it finds young Hollywood animator Chuck Pierce, the serial killer who stabbed his porno-actress mother as a child and has since been killing her time and time again, murdering young women he locates on the Internet. When he teams up with Tessa's program, which virtually makes Chuck its slave, the two focus their energies on a common goal: Tessa. Can she create a rival program to fight, tame, and humanize her rogue? Will Chuck fly to Oxford? Can she elude two lethal antagonists? Will you be up all night once you start this? Tops as a thriller, suggesting new terrain for the genre. After all, something must replace the weary plotlines of heroines imperiled by the same old psychos.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-82418-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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