Genesis

By Poul Anderson

Artificial intelligence has been developed to a point where a human personality can be uploaded into a computer, achieving a sort of hybrid immortality. Astronaut Christian Brannock welcomes this technology, technology that will make it possible for him to achieve his dream of exploring the stars.

A billion years later, Brannock returns to earth to check on some strange anomalies. While there he meets Laurinda Ashcroft, another hybrid upload, with whom he joins forces in investigating Gaia, the supermind dominating the planet. They must learn the truth of her shocking and terrifying secret plans for earth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Apr 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9781429970334

Poul Anderson

Poul Anderson (1926–2001) grew up bilingual in a Danish American family. After discovering science fiction fandom and earning a physics degree at the University of Minnesota, he found writing science fiction more satisfactory. Admired for his “hard” science fiction, mysteries, historical novels, and “fantasy with rivets,” he also excelled in humor. He was the guest of honor at the 1959 World Science Fiction Convention and at many similar events, including the 1998 Contact Japan 3 and the 1999 Strannik Conference in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Besides winning the Hugo and Nebula Awards, he has received the Gandalf, Seiun, and Strannik, or “Wanderer,” Awards. A founder of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, he became a Grand Master, and was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. In 1952 he met Karen Kruse; they married in Berkeley, California, where their daughter, Astrid, was born, and they later lived in Orinda, California. Astrid and her husband, science fiction author Greg Bear, now live with their family outside Seattle.

Reviews for Genesis

[liscarey · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

More than half of this book is the story that was published under the same title in Gregory Benford's anthology, Far Futures. The new material, unlike Starfarers, has a distinct air of rehashing old territory. Not bad, but not particularly recommended either. Enjoyable if it happens to be lying around and you don't have anything new.

[randystafford · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In the far future, humans only inhabit the stars as personality simulations, subroutines in vast, powerful artificial intelligencies that form a "galactic brain". One such uploaded mind is Christian Brannock. As an engineer, he helped build the first great works in space and was one of the first to work in intimate symbiosis with the AIs who, rather than man, colonized the stars. On Earth, the reigning intelligence is Gaia, a computer that rules human affairs and also posseses, in its libraries, presevered human minds it uses to ruin elaborate simulations of real and alternate histories. Millions of years pass in this novel's almost Stapledonian sweep, and the galactic brain becomes concerned about the seeming obsession of Gaia with Earth history, her secretiveness, and her unresponsiveness to their proposal on whether the now geologically ancient Earth should be saved from a bloated sun, a test run for greater galactic engineering to come. A version of the Brannock mind is copied and sent on his way to Earth. There he, and a slightly different copy, attempt to figure out what Gaia's up to. One version, inhabiting a robot's body, explores the dying Earth. The other engages in talk and travel with Lucinda Ashcroft, a personality inhabiting Gaia. This novel puts together, in a surprisingly successful way, just about all the strains of Anderson's previous works from the epic sweep of Tau Zero (SF Collector's Edition) (Gollancz SF collector's edition)to his heroic fantasy to the uploaded minds of some of his most recent science fiction to alternate histories and time travel. The novel's sense of true tragedy is not new to Anderson, but, as the title hints, there is an unexpected theological flavor that is rare, but not unknown, in his work. This novel should not only satisfy any fan of Anderson's but also serve as a good introduction to the rest of his work.

[marianstanescu_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Well, I guess that Poul Anderson will never truly be on my taste after all.I gave this book 3 stars because the magnitude of the underlying idea and background awesome; also probably because I might simply lack taste, since this piece of work won the John W. Campbell Award back in 2000.Personally, I have really struggled to finish it and I speedily removed it from my eReader's library, since it definitely won't tempt me with an eventual second pass. Most probably, I'll probably have forgotten all about it by this time next year.No more comments on this work, except to say that I have found the use of "(myth)" explanation to be excessive, disruptive, and actually patronizing. It didn't help me in situating the story in time, or in getting the slightest idea of who is the story teller either. Too bad.