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To Hold Infinity

John Meaney's first novel, To Hold Infinity, is a recent entry to the post-Snow Crash, post-Trouble and Her Friends realm of cyberspace adventure. While Infinity technologically resembles the latter novel, and resembles the former in its integration of high-tech throughout society, it does them both a step better by taking the whole milieu and moving it to another world being colonized by humans, and building a whole planetary culture around people who 'plug in' to the net.

On the planet Fulgor, the upper class are populated by the Luculenta, people who have had computers ('plexcores') implanted in their bodies and who can plug in to the net through the airwaves. With all the processing power at their command, they can think faster than normal humans, interact with each other remotely through virtual reality, and easily control the majority of their world's economy. Having immigrated to this world, Tetsuo Sunadomari has been upraised to the ranks of the Luculenta and is struggling to integrate into that stratum. But a moment of curiosity resulted in his gaining hold of secret information for which a hunt team comes to kill him. He escapes into the unterraformed region of Fulgor where he joins a politically active group of wanderers.

Meanwhile, Tetsuo's sponsor for his upraise, Rafael Garcia de la Vega, has achieved a technological breakthrough, which would not be so bad except that he's a psychopath, and is now using his technology to break into the minds of other Luculenta and steal their minds into his own personal network, leaving them effectively dead. No one knows that he's doing this, not even Tetsuo. He's otherwise regarded as an upstanding member of society.

Finally, Tetsuo's mother Yoshiko, a highly-regarded scientist who contributed to the technology used by the Pilots who drive ships through Mu-space, facilitating faster-than-light travel, arrives on Fulgor to visit her son. Finding him gone, she befriends a family of Luculenta and a visiting reporter from Earth and begins to investigate, thus putting herself on a course intersecting Rafael's, and eventually sending shockwaves through Fulgor society as a whole.

To Hold Infinity is an ambitious novel, dealing with the breakthrough from human to posthuman which Vernor Vinge often talks about in his writings but generally skirts actually portraying in his fiction. The Luculenta aren't entirely human, but to varying degrees they have human characteristics and interact with humans. More pointedly, the book concentrates on the amorality that posthumans might feel (or what seems amoral to us), not to mention the amorality that comes of huge differences in the power that two groups of people wield. Rafael's behavior is contrasted with Yoshiko's emotional devastation over the death of her husband, and her feelings for her missing son and her friends. On those terms, the novel is fairly successful, although perhaps too focused on the adventure and the play and counterplay between the characters. The ending doesn't feel particularly comforting or even like a true resolution, as there are larger issues in the culture which are just starting to break through and which would require additional novels to properly consider. (Fortunately, Meaney has already written a second novel in this universe, Paradox.)

I'm still unsure how I feel about the technology portrayed in the story. The technology is so central to Infinity that I kept feeling that it ought to be revolutionary, new and breathtaking. But it's really just an incremental improvement over the novels I mentioned at the beginning of the story. People don't have to be in a particular place to access the net: check. People extend their consciousness with computer processors: check. Luculenta have fast and precise control over everything that is controlled by computer: check. While Meaney portrays his world clearly and evocatively, it doesn't feel as revolutionary as it should. Maybe I'm just jaded, but reading the novel felt a bit like going through the motions of world-building, and then grafting a specific story onto this particular world. Maybe it's just my natural resistance to novels dealing with cyberspace. While I was entertained, I wasn't blown away like I was with Vinge's ambitious A Fire Upon the Deep, or even with Ken MacLeod's more directed The Cassini Division or Alastair Reynolds' 'cybergoth' Chasm City.

To sum it up: If this story sounds like your cup of tea, then To Hold Infinity will probably be perfectly entertaining to you. Otherwise, though, it's not required reading.