Count to a Trillion by John C. Wright
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Spoilers abound, so read at your own risk. However, I will say, if you had to choose one or the other, I'd recommend reading this blog post over the book itself.
Now then, where were we. Ah, yes. Count to A Trillion by John C. Wright. What an odd book this is.
It starts off as a high-concept sci-fi of the first order. Humankind discovers a monument orbiting* an antimatter star. (A real star, too, which is kind of cool.) The monument has a message from other beings encoded in higher mathematics. And the contents of the star will change human destiny.
...Ok. So far so good...
And in order to delve into the mysteries of the monument (oh, yeah, and harvest some of that there antimatter to solve some of our energy woes here on earth) the most powerful men, including the prince of Monaco, and the governments of Spain and India** on earth recruit a spaceship crew consisting of the brightest mathematicians on the planet.
...Yup. I'm with you...
One of these is a man named Menalaus Montrose. A Texan lawyer, which, in what's left of the USA means one part orator, one part gunslinger.
Wait, what?...
Moreover, due to his Texan nature, Menalaus Montrose is the only one of the several hundred brilliant mathematicians who has the audacity to realize that mere human intelligence will never be enough to decode the monument and comes up with a way of modifying his intelligence to become post human.
...Wait, go back, you said he was a gunslinger, what's that about?...
Unfortunately, the experiment goes horribly wrong, and Menalaus wakes up thousands of years later. The journey to the stars has been and gone and now he find that his crewmate and a beautiful young woman who was on the ship (unbeknownst to the protagonist, of course) have used the antimatter to take over the world.
...Nope, I'm still stuck on the fact that he's a gunslinger. And from Texas...
Then there are a whole bunch of plot twists about how an alien race is coming to enslave us. Or maybe not. Each plot twist is delivered basically as a "And suddenly Character X figured out the next section of the monument." Some of the ideas are really interesting. Most of them, I'm pretty sure are bull$#^&. For example, I am guessing it is not the case that if you only had sophisticated enough game theory you could work out precisely and quantitatively the inter-planetary and inter-species dynamics involved in figuring out whether the energy expenditure of conquering a people many thousands of lightyears away is worth it.
...At least there are vac-trains drilled through the core of the earth...
There's also a romantic subplot, which might be interesting if the female character had any personality whatsoever. Writers: if you ever need an example of a dreadful, and unrealistic female character. Princess Rania is your blueprint.
...but she's pretty!...
Yes, and insipid and boring, except when she's talking about game theory.
...and that tower thingy is cool...
Yes, I do like space elevators, and it's neat that they blow one up in the climax. But what is up with the ending? I get that we're not supposed to know whether Menalaus survives, and I think his decision to detonate the tower, means that Princess Rania is going to go negotiate for the freedom of the species, but the whole thing is unclear. Far too many of the plot twists happen in the last 20 pages.
So, yeah, basically, this book has one good character, several very bad characters, a bunch of interesting ideas. It is also of note that this is the slowest book I can ever remember reading. (Not slow in terms of plot details...plenty happens: the world is destroyed and remade twice in the first 100 pages.) No, I mean physically slow to read. I had less than 100 pages left of this book when I got on a multihour plane flight, and when we landed I had only been able to read 50 of them.
* Or something. The logistics in this book were not what you'd call clear.
** The only functioning governments left, or something, see *.
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