Reviews and Comments

Reid Malenfant has a plan to go to the stars, and it's very Musk-like even before Musk was a thing. OK fine. Most of the first 12% of this book (which is where I pressed the eject button) is taken up by a sophist discussion of the chances of human survival. So here's the argument: either human population grows exponentially/polynomially, it levels off at a sustainable level, or it crashes. Following so far? The fact that you are alive means that the most likely outcome is the third. Here's the logic: In the first two scenarios, the vast majority of all humans will live in the future. So if you picked someone (you) randomly, you'd most likely be in the far future! Because you are here, the most likely outcome is that humans die off soon. In the story, within 240 years at the most.

First of all, this is not a plot. Or characters. Or poetic language. Or description. Or ... any of a hundred other things that would be interesting. This is someone smoking too much pot and explaining their pot-infused philosophy to you. If an author wants to set up a coming apocalypse there's so many better ways to do it than this "clever" thought experiment.

Second of all, this therefore means that if humanity does survive into the far future, they have sent a message back in time to us with instructions on how to survive. That whole sophistry just sets up Reid Malenfant's purpose to be to look for the message from the future. This whole first part of the book is just to set that up. That makes no sense and I had to read it all for that reason? Give me a break!

At this point I searched for reviews of the book to see if anyone said the later parts of the book are worth it. And the top review of Manifold: Time that Google referred me to is one from Kirkus. It's fairly spoilery, so if the above BS is actually intriguing to you, don't click the review. Anyway, I've no interest in reading the schmoz that's described there.

DNF at 12%.

After a string of less than enjoyable Reacher novels, this was one I liked. As frequently happens, Reacher stumbles into a town based on its name ("Mother's Rest"). Turns out there's crime happening there, and Reacher is a one man A-Team. Reacher and former FBI Michelle Chang form a duo looking for her partner, Keever who stumbled on something happening and then disappeared. Reacher and Chang go from Mother's Rest to Oklahoma City to Chicago to Colorado Springs to Los Angeles to Phoenix to Menlo Park and finally back to Mother's Rest mostly because the actual criminals in Mother's Rest are very Keystone so Lee Child has to introduce lots of other elements to fill out the book. Which is all acceptable to me… except that the Menlo Park dude is someone building a super secret search engine for the "Deep Web" which Child explains is the Tor project. Searching Tor project web sites is not hard. Anyway, as long as I don't know how something works it's easy enough for me to suspend disbelief and enjoy it! And I did, other than the stupid "search the Deep Web" parts.

I agree with many of the authors' conclusions and political positions, but this book is mostly a facile argument for "abundance". It's best feature is the articulation of an "abundance" (as opposed to scarcity) political theory. But the chapters arguing that it is right rely on anecdote and suffer from severe survivorship bias (the logical fallacy that examining winners reveals how to succeed). As I noted in a comment, they also subject degrowth to a pretty withering critique that they do not subject their own theory to: degrowth is a political dead end because it includes policies like vegetarianism that are political non-starters. Nowhere in the book do they talk about how one of their core positions, subsidize things you want like heck, is a really hard sell because it means giving a lot more money to people who have money. Another of their core positions is that liberals value too many things, and because of that don't do any of them, especially building stuff, particularly well. But they do not really articulate what goals liberals should give up in favor of building things. Is it the environment? Is it equitable distribution of wealth? Is it diversity? About the only thing they are clear that should be given up is lengthy process. And I kind of agree with them on that, but process is what ensures those other goals are considered. If not process to accomplish goals, what is the alternate way to achieve those goals. If that's not figured out, we give up all those other goals, just so we can build some shit.

And as a side note, the authors are very positive about "AI" in the book, and that's another thing they may not have wrestled with to the extent they should. But I'll critique that if they ever write a book where the main topic is AI.