InterstellarNet: Origins by Edward M. Lerner
FoxAcre, $23.00, 290pp, tp, 9780981848747. Science fiction.
Science fiction doesn’t necessarily have to focus on physics or astronomy or any of the other “big” sciences. Library science, psychology, and even economics are perfectly reasonable bases for hard science fiction stories. And in InterstellarNet: Origins, Edward M. Lerner proves he knows enough real-world, present-day computer science and economics to combine them into a wonderfully thought-provoking story.
The biggest flaw in this book (which is a fix-up novel comprising five previously published novelettes and novellas) is that Lerner carefully dates each section… and first contact with intelligent aliens comes in 2002. In his foreword, Lerner says this novel is alternate history, because that first installment (dated 2002) was published in 2000. I had trouble with the alternate history concept, because that’s pretty much the only alternation to our world I could see. Everything else strikes me as a logical extrapolation from our world of today, as the best science fiction lets the reader feel he is living in a plausible future.
Okay, leaving aside minor grumbles, let’s get to the meat of the book. As the tag-line on the cover says, “When the first call from the stars comes, do we even dare to answer?” Lerner clearly answers that question, and many more arising logically from it.
Lerner posits a universe without faster-than-light travel, so it’s pretty obvious our first (perhaps only) contact with alien intelligences will be via some form of electromagnetic communication, radio, probably. But after saying “Hi, how are you?”, where will the conversation go?
Interstellar commerce trading intellectual property is Lerner’s answer. And Lerner knows what he’s talking about. Rather than the warm, fuzzy first contact stories of the past, or even the horrific terrors of modern-day first contact, Lerner writes for us the gritty, grimy side of politics and business, which seems to me the most probable way things will unfold.
Section 1, “Dangling Conversations” (first published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact in 2000), is set at the United Nations in 2002. When the word comes from the stars, and we start to translate it, how will we respond? Will we respond at all? And what arguments will go into that decision-making process? Well, politics is the field of human interactions, and while most of us first-worlders assume many things simply based on where we are, any global commentary is going to have to take into account second- and third-world countries and people, and their views of things are likely to be vastly different than our own. All of that will be grist for the mill of deciding who, how, and if we’ll respond. In this episode, we met computer genius Dean Matthews and UN official Bridget Satterswaithe, who will found a family that play instrumental roles in all the following stories.
Section 2, “Creative Destruction” (Analog, 2001), takes place 48 years later. Earth has joined the interstellar trading net, and the UN agency overseeing it has become far more powerful than the almost toothless body we have today. The UN’s Interstellar Commerce Union determines which technologies we’ll buy from our trading partners, and what we’ll offer them in return. That’s fine, until a large enough company (megacorp, in Lerner’s terminology) can afford to circumvent the system, and purchase a proscribed technology which will give it immense power and wealth. Thwarting this attempt leads to the introduction of agents: artificial intelligences transmitted between worlds to handle the trading on-site.
Section 3, “Hostile Takeover” (Analog, 2001), is set 52 years later still. The alien artificial intelligences doing a bang-up job trading, and the trade has matured enough to let individuals and small corporations make their own interstellar deals. But there’s always a danger in adopting a fully developed technology when you don’t yet know all its ins and outs. And when one of those alien technologies becomes an integral part of the human economy, hidden back-doors allowing the aliens to turn it off leave humanity open to blackmail on a species-wide scale.
In Section 4, “Strange Bedfellows” (Artemis Magazine, 2001), it’s a scant eight years later. The threat to humanity has been averted, and the threatening artificially intelligent agent has been disabused of the notion that threatening your customers is a good idea. Now the problem is not with an “evil” AI agent, but a friendly one; one who doesn’t want to die. AI agents can be overwritten, just as an old computer program can be overwritten. But there’s a difference between modifying a non-intelligent hammer and forcibly modifying the personality of a self-aware computer program, or at least, there should be, shouldn’t there? What happens when an alien AI asks for asylum, to avoid that overwrite? And what happens when our own, home-grown AIs start wondering the same thing about themselves? Perhaps that solution may also lead to a solution to the latest problem in international (and interplanetary) relations, when parent nations try to stomp down their upstart former colonies.
Finally, Section 5, “Calculating Minds” (Jim Baen’s Universe, 2009), offers perhaps the smallest of stories in the book. Set in 2126, this was the weakest part of the book, centering as it does around an elaborate theft attempt, rather than the larger ideas presented in the preceding parts of the book. Again, Lerner’s world-building and extrapolating are top notch; it’s just that the story didn’t grab me.
Nevertheless, taken as a whole, InsterstellarNet: Origins offers us an engrossing blueprint for an effective way to interact with aliens when we can only talk on the phone. Lerner’s well-thought out evolution of commerce, economics, and computer science make this among the hardest of hard sf, without actually sticking in any rivets. And only some of his characters are typical sf tropes: there are the computer scientists, professional hackers, and government functionaries, but there are also film producers, financial reporters, and double-dealing stock swindlers. Some of them are pleasant, some are off-putting, but all of them are real people. Lerner takes these non-stock characters and well imagined settings, and turns them into a very good read.
[Reviewer’s aside: hard sf stories based on unexpected sciences are rare. I mentioned library science, which was the science in Fred Lerner’s “Rosetta Stone”, which I published in the first issue of Artemis Magazine, and economics, which was the science in Susan Shwartz’s wonderful Hostile Takeover. I’m open to hearing about others.]