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On a friend’s recommendation, I just read David Weber’s Bolo! this weekend, and from early in I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was reading a modern variation on Asimov’s I, Robot (the short story collection, which has little relation to the movie by the same name), and I enjoyed it almost as much.
Some of the similarities are apparent on the surface. Both are a collection of stories about a particular universe, and focusing on the development of a particular technology within that universe over centuries. In both cases the technology is robotic – for Asimov, classic robots, and for Weber massive highly-weaponized tanks with integrated AI to allow better combat responsiveness and autonomy. The stories hang together in both cases not just because they are about the same machines, but also because the lessons learned about embracing these technologies are reflected in the new forms they take in the more advanced models introduced in the next story.
The underlying themes the collections play with are also similar. How much trust should we put in our technology? Why is it that, even when faced with overwhelming evidence that the technology outperforms humans, we still want people “in the loop”? How can programmed machines deal with the frequently contradictory forces at play in most moral decisions? Will advances in technology eventually destroy us? Or save us?
If I had reservations about Weber’s work, it was that the questions and answers did not, ultimately, feel significantly different than Asimov’s from sixty years ago. The technology was likely a more accurate estimation of how full fledged AI will come to pass – via military projects and embedded in a non-humanoid system. But as a modern work (the stories were written in 2005), it felt like the most salient new theme was the question of how we might change as people as we are able to start integrating our intelligence with machine intelligence. And yet there was very little said here, even though technology to accomplish exactly this is introduced in the later stories. This is the new question that is being asked, and it felt odd that a book that does the work to introduce exactly the technologies that are projected to bring about “The Singularity” shied away from discussing that concept in any depth at all.
That said, the stories were fun, and as someone who doesn’t tend to read military fiction, I actually found the detailed descriptions of the battles readable and even interesting, probably because I was interested in the logic that the AI was applying in reasoning out their strategy. It felt like a plausible future, given our current uses of robotics in warfare. Worth checking out if you enjoy technology-oriented sci fi.

Based on how much I enjoyed “The Professor and The Madman”, I have read two more books by Simon Winchester in the past few months: “The Map that Changed the World” and “The Man Who Loved China”. Both continue the theme of tracing the life of a researcher who embarks on an immense project cataloging some portion of human knowledge in minute and exhaustive detail, often to their own personal detrement along the way.
“The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology” covers the creation of an exhaustive geological map of England and, along with it, a shift in the culture of geological research. The trend moved away from geology as the collection of fossils and generally being a hobby for the upper class, towards what, from the outside, seems like the birth of geology as a science. While the book looks at the very data-driven processes that Smith uses to begin to assemble his exhaustive maps it also explores who these new geologists are and how their background and their funding sources put them in conflict with the tradition of geology in place in England in the early 1800s. Smith’s work is largely funded by piggy backing on his paid work as a surveyer, primarily for planning England’s growing canal system. A combination of financial mismanagement on his part and hostility from the British Geological Society led Smith into debtor’s prison and it was only later in his life that his contributions to the field were recognized.
“The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom” has some similiar themes. It follows the life of Joseph Needham as he moves from being an accomplished biological researcher to traveling throughout China in the early 1940s, officially as a scientific liason between Britain and China but personally to collect information for a book about the science and technology of China. His goal, which he sticks to for decades, is to collect evidence of the array of scientific and technological discoveries that actually originated in China, to restore China’s deserved intellectual respect for these accomplishments, and to ultimately explain why, after being ahead of the rest of the world for so long, it seemed that China had stopped moving forward at the same time that the Renaissance pushed the western world forward in leaps and bounds. The end result is a set of over twenty-four volumes that is still being expanded based on his research. Along the way, Needham’s socialist convictions and political naivite pull him out of favor in most circles but, like Smith, his awesome academic achievement ultimately brings him back into his former prominence.
If you like Winchester’s style, you’ll like these books – there is a reasonable coverage of the content of the research but the main focus is on the people performing that research and the various pressures on them as they attempt to accomplish unimaginably complex works. Out of these two books, Needham is the more colorful character, with his extensive travels and his multitude of affairs. One also feels less sorry for his hardships since it seems that they might have been avoided if he didn’t think quite so well of himself and assume that others would do the same. Smith falls on the other side of the spectrum, being equally passionate about his project but less assured he will be granted the opportunity to succeed.
Ultimately, Winchester’s books celebrate people with a vision so immense and world-changing that their success required a life-long commitment and, ultimately, the ability to convince at least one or two other people to make the project their life’s work as well. If you have ever balked at the daunting task of organizing a semester (or year, or five’s…) worth of research into a paper or article or book, these accounts will make you feel chagrined at the relative ease of your task to the hurdles before Smith and Needham. In a significant part these stories can also be read as accounts of people who were faced with immense amounts of information and an intuition that there must be a pattern hidden in there that they could draw out which would make sense of each of the individual facts – in one case a map of our geological history and in the other a cataloging of a lost piece of our global history of science.