Book Report-Endless Blue
A couple of weeks ago I read Endless Blue by Wen Spencer. My feelings about the book were somewhat mixed, as there were some elements I didn't care for and others which I had the nagging feeling could have been explored further.
The book is set in the context of an interstellar war between the human race and an alien race which seems to attack without any discernible purpose besides causing destruction. An important detail is that the humans have genetically engineered a subspecies of themselves referred to as 'reds' for use as shock troops. The two main problems of the novel are the need to win or end the war and the problem of the treatment of the reds, who though trained to behave brutally, are of fully human intelligence.
The story opens with the discovery that a failure mode of the faster-than-light propulsion technology which had been presumed to be totally destructive is not; the engine of a ship which had disappeared a decade before reappears without explanation (and without the rest of the ship), but encrusted with coral growth and dead sea creatures. The protagonists are selected to deliberately induce failure in their starship's propulsion to attempt to travel to the location of the lost ship (and presumably many other ships which had been lost in the same manner).
The location turns out to be a spherical space, referred to as the Sargasso, containing an ocean on its inner surface. Orbiting above the ocean (at smaller radii) are large rocks which present significant navigational hazards to the few spacecraft which manage to avoid hitting the water initially. It turns out that many ships belonging to a number of intelligent races have crashed in the ocean and the survivors of the wrecks have formed permanent communities which are mostly peaceful to each other.
(From here on there be Spoilers)
Shortly after arriving the heroes find that unlike in the larger human civilization, the reds have been allowed to interbreed with unmodified humans (as have 'blues', another genetically modified group created for. . . rather less warlike purposes). This demonstrates the artificiality of the distinctions among the subspecies, and most of the bad-guys are characterized by a desire to maintain the enslavement of the genetically modified individuals.
To short-circuit a chain of information which takes the protagonists the entire book to work out fully, it turns out that their enemies in the war (the nefrim) are not present in the Sargasso because on arrival they are transformed into the insubstantial seraphim. The seraphim are attempting to return to normal space an object, called the Shabd, whose absence has driven insane the nefrim still in normal space. To do so, the seraphim have directed a group of other beings (some humans and other aliens) to modify surviving spacecraft engines to be able to leave the Sargasso again. (The appearance of the engine at the beginning of the story is a result of this research.) The main antagonist is a power-hungry human military commander who wants to control the technology to escape. Eventually the shabd is recovered, the bad-guy vanquished (by the concentrated memory of his own evil deeds, no less), and the heroes return to normal space and end the war.
One of the things which irked me most about this book was that the author does a pretty nice job with inventing a strange setting, but then does very little with it. On the one hand he has the excuse that the protagonists aren't really in a position to research the details of the Sargasso's nature, but designing something like that and then explaining nothing about it is maddening. What keeps the rocks in orbit? Why is the volume filled with water and air? How is it lit? Is there night time? How big is it? The answers to some of the latter questions might have been covered; indeed I'm baffled about how they could not have been, but it's been a few weeks since I read the book, and perhaps I missed or forgot them.
I didn't care for the substantial number of sex scenes which appeared in the book, although I'm willing to agree that at a number of points they were important to furthering the subplot relating to the humanity of the modified humans (or rather the recognition of their humanity by the unmodified humans).
One key aspect of the plot that felt underdeveloped to me, or perhaps handled in a less than ideal way, was the interpretation of the situation of the nefrim. In the text this was mostly discussed using terminology borrowed from buddhism, but I mostly ignored this because I was reminded of ideas from Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, and I mostly looked at it in that light, namely that the nefrim appear to be working toward technological singularity, using the Shabd to integrate their individual minds into a single, overarching consciousness.
In A Fire Upon the Deep a group of humans attempt to jump-start their work on achieving technological singularity using equipment found at an old alien installation. Disaster occurs, however, when the resulting construct seizes control of its creators (or awakeners) and embarks on galactic conquest. The resulting super-intelligence, rather than withdrawing out of the galaxy as others habitually do, seeks to subjugate the many lesser intelligences within the galactic disc (and is only stopped by a counter weapon of similar antiquity which alters the structure of space in the region of conflict to both prevent faster-than-light travel and greatly curtail the scope of intelligence).
The situation in Endless Blue is different in that the nefrims' malevolence results not from achieving a unified intelligence but because of the disruption of the process, apparently the shock at being forcibly separated from their increasingly deeply connected mental network. This is, then, a treatment of a different aspect of technological singularity, asking 'What could go wrong in the attempt?' rather than 'What will be created by success?'
The latter question is possibly addressed somewhat with the Hak, another alien race who appear in a somewhat oracular capacity. The Hak have a physical appearance equivalent to large tortoises and spend nearly all of their time meditating; they claim, or their statements are interpreted by the humans to mean that they claim, to be more thoroughly enlightened than any other race present. Uniquely among the races presented, there is no evidence that the Hak arrived in the Sargasso accidentally or even that they require spacecraft at all. On the other hand, there is only the lack of evidence, never evidence to the contrary. The Hak never demonstrate any capabilities beyond those of the other races, besides having a more clear picture of what has happened to the nefrim. I'm not sure how ambiguous the author intended the Hak to be, since they could they should be interpreted either as having transcended (and so being mostly concerned with problems and ideas beyond the grasp of the other races) or as another race working toward that goal.