This book is in three parts; the first, "The Robot's Twilight Companion" was previously published in a collection with that title. It is also the strongest of the three sections in this volume. It relates the story of how Orf gained sentience through Orf's perspective. The chronology of how this happened wasn't entirely clear to me (again, it's told through Orf's perspective, and it is eminently reasonable that Orf's memories of its earliest consciousness would be muddled) but it involved a tech only partially turning off a decommissioned mining robot and a geology grad student imbuing a mining robot with what remained of the consciousness of his dead mentor, Victor Wu.
Orf is a wonderful viewpoint character, and unlike most of the other sentient A.I.s I've read. It has no knowledge of the outside world, no connection to any global databases to pull information from, and it wasn't intended to be an A.I. at all, so was given no algorithms to help it understand humanity. It knows rocks, and it reads books, and it observes everything it possibly can. Through Orf's eyes we get a little bit of a sense of coming apocalypse, but Orf itself can't understand what it is observing because it does not have the proper frame of reference. Orf's viewpoint is very much the viewpoint of a precocious child, and that lends a great deal of tension and tragedy to the events that unfold around it. "The Robot's Twilight Companion" firmly belongs in the tradition that flows from Mary Shelly's Frankentstein, and it is a worthy addition.
The second part, "Pennyroyal Tea," jumps ahead 200 years. The apocalypse has happened, and the viewpoint character is Jarrod, a member of the Rangers, U.S. Forest Service personnel that banded together to protect Olympia National Park from both loggers and environmental extremists immediately after the world fell apart. I read very little post-apocalyptic fiction, and this experience is not likely to change that. Jarrod is a likable viewpoint character (though not as likable as Orf); the quest structure works decently well; I enjoyed exploring the various cults Jarrod gets tangled with. However, it was a very dark future (to be expected from post-apocalyptic SF, but still) and the section with the Cougars was downright painful to read. The section then ended very abruptly with Jarrod meeting Orf and a second apocalypse that rendered Jarrod's quest futile.
The third part, "The New Exiles of California," makes the transition from "The Robot's Twilight Companion" to "Pennyroyal Tea" seem brilliantly smooth. While hints of the apocalypse to come are found throughout "The Robot's Twilight Companion," and we can see the eventual shape of the conflicts "Pennyroyal Tea" throughout, far too much happens off screen between "Pennyroyal Tea" and "The New Exiles of California." Time jumps 800 years further into the future, where contact has already been made with other intelligences and an entirely new science has arisen to do everything. (And I mean everything -- as far as I could tell, the technology of this future was at least as advanced as the technology in Star Trek, but it was based on aesthetics and the terranes -- no computers, no worry about power, nothing, really, that I could understand at all.)
The tone of this section was also just bizarre. The viewpoint character is Noah, a shaman, a symbologist, and a scholar, dealing with a worry about something called the Chunk, that everyone can tell is heading towards Earth at faster-than-light speeds and is messing with their trance states, which is how communication (with planets, stars, and who knows what other types of beings) is accomplished in this future. His worry, however, takes the form of musing on history (which serves to fill us in on a little of how this new world order came about) and rambles about aesthetics -- a field in which my only experience is reading short selections from Plato and Aristotle in college. The section is very short; he has an "Aha!" moment where he intuitively grasps the Chunk's purpose and then quickly puts everyone into action to attempt to save the planet. And there the story ends -- we are left to guess whether Noah succeeded, or even whether or not he was correct in his intuitive leap. Orf makes another cameo, this time as Noah's psychologist, but has no real impact on the story whatsoever.
Overall I have to say I did enjoy this book. Daniel's writing is strong, and I loved "The Robot's Twilight Companion" so much that I think I would have recommended this even if I had hated the second two parts. And I didn't hate either "Pennyroyal Tea" or "The New Exiles of California" -- they just weren't exactly up my alley. I do think Daniel could have accomplished the transitions a little more smoothly (maybe with a dip into Orf's perspective between each, to fill us in what's going on?) but other than that I don't have any real problems with the text from a technical standpoint. I will most likely be checking out more of Daniel's work (he has three novels: Warpath, and the duology Metaplanetary & Superluminal; looking at the descriptions it appears they all follow a more standard narrative structure) but I can't help wishing that "Pennyroyal Tea" and "The New Exiles of California" had been more like "The Robot's Twilight Companion."
Orf is a wonderful viewpoint character, and unlike most of the other sentient A.I.s I've read. It has no knowledge of the outside world, no connection to any global databases to pull information from, and it wasn't intended to be an A.I. at all, so was given no algorithms to help it understand humanity. It knows rocks, and it reads books, and it observes everything it possibly can. Through Orf's eyes we get a little bit of a sense of coming apocalypse, but Orf itself can't understand what it is observing because it does not have the proper frame of reference. Orf's viewpoint is very much the viewpoint of a precocious child, and that lends a great deal of tension and tragedy to the events that unfold around it. "The Robot's Twilight Companion" firmly belongs in the tradition that flows from Mary Shelly's Frankentstein, and it is a worthy addition.
The second part, "Pennyroyal Tea," jumps ahead 200 years. The apocalypse has happened, and the viewpoint character is Jarrod, a member of the Rangers, U.S. Forest Service personnel that banded together to protect Olympia National Park from both loggers and environmental extremists immediately after the world fell apart. I read very little post-apocalyptic fiction, and this experience is not likely to change that. Jarrod is a likable viewpoint character (though not as likable as Orf); the quest structure works decently well; I enjoyed exploring the various cults Jarrod gets tangled with. However, it was a very dark future (to be expected from post-apocalyptic SF, but still) and the section with the Cougars was downright painful to read. The section then ended very abruptly with Jarrod meeting Orf and a second apocalypse that rendered Jarrod's quest futile.
The third part, "The New Exiles of California," makes the transition from "The Robot's Twilight Companion" to "Pennyroyal Tea" seem brilliantly smooth. While hints of the apocalypse to come are found throughout "The Robot's Twilight Companion," and we can see the eventual shape of the conflicts "Pennyroyal Tea" throughout, far too much happens off screen between "Pennyroyal Tea" and "The New Exiles of California." Time jumps 800 years further into the future, where contact has already been made with other intelligences and an entirely new science has arisen to do everything. (And I mean everything -- as far as I could tell, the technology of this future was at least as advanced as the technology in Star Trek, but it was based on aesthetics and the terranes -- no computers, no worry about power, nothing, really, that I could understand at all.)
The tone of this section was also just bizarre. The viewpoint character is Noah, a shaman, a symbologist, and a scholar, dealing with a worry about something called the Chunk, that everyone can tell is heading towards Earth at faster-than-light speeds and is messing with their trance states, which is how communication (with planets, stars, and who knows what other types of beings) is accomplished in this future. His worry, however, takes the form of musing on history (which serves to fill us in on a little of how this new world order came about) and rambles about aesthetics -- a field in which my only experience is reading short selections from Plato and Aristotle in college. The section is very short; he has an "Aha!" moment where he intuitively grasps the Chunk's purpose and then quickly puts everyone into action to attempt to save the planet. And there the story ends -- we are left to guess whether Noah succeeded, or even whether or not he was correct in his intuitive leap. Orf makes another cameo, this time as Noah's psychologist, but has no real impact on the story whatsoever.
Overall I have to say I did enjoy this book. Daniel's writing is strong, and I loved "The Robot's Twilight Companion" so much that I think I would have recommended this even if I had hated the second two parts. And I didn't hate either "Pennyroyal Tea" or "The New Exiles of California" -- they just weren't exactly up my alley. I do think Daniel could have accomplished the transitions a little more smoothly (maybe with a dip into Orf's perspective between each, to fill us in what's going on?) but other than that I don't have any real problems with the text from a technical standpoint. I will most likely be checking out more of Daniel's work (he has three novels: Warpath, and the duology Metaplanetary & Superluminal; looking at the descriptions it appears they all follow a more standard narrative structure) but I can't help wishing that "Pennyroyal Tea" and "The New Exiles of California" had been more like "The Robot's Twilight Companion."
Evolution of machine and mankind: Orf is a sentient drilling machine designed to probe the very center of the earth. But the world is dynamic, changing through earthquake and cultural upheaval. The Pacific Northwest secedes from the US. Civilization changes almost beyond recognition. New societies arise. Humanity encounters strange new beings from within the earth and beyond until human life is changed almost beyond recognition. Now Orf must change as well, becoming both myth and monster, savior and mentor to future generations of humanity. A complex, dynamic and well-constructed set of intertwining plots.
