I was somewhat surprised that the cover of the mass-market paperback edition of Spin, the 2006 Hugo Award winning novel by Robert Charles Wilson, quoted a review in the Rocky Mountain News as having said that it was “the best science fiction novel so far this year”; that seems like damning it with faint praise, as it is without a doubt the best science fiction novel I’ve read in the last fifteen years. While Axis, the sequel, is not quite as epic in scope, it was also a very engrossing read, and now I’m eagerly awaiting Vortex.
In the mean time, I purchased two of Wilson’s earlier novels, The Chronoliths and Blind Lake, Hugo Award nominees in 2002 and 2004. I’m astonished that The Chronoliths is already out of print. I just finished reading the Blind Lake, and while the story is very different from Spin, it was every bit as hard to put down, and created the same sense of awe.
In Blind Lake, a government research facility dedicated to “New Astronomy” is suddenly quarantined, with no explanation to the researchers or the journalists that happened to be there. Food is delivered weekly by autonomous trucks, but no contact with the outside world is allowed, and those that attempt to leave are killed by military drones.
About a quarter of the way into the novel, I thought I had a good guess as to the reason for the quarantine, but I was completely mistaken. Anti-spoiler ahead.
The Blind Lake facility and its sister facility Crossbank use O/BEC computers, quantum computers that run self-replicating evolving software. They were tasked with extracting weak signals from the noise of failing space telescopes examining planets in nearby star systems. Although the systems occasionally have hiccups, they generally do a remarkable job, especially when they keep working even though the telemetry from the telescopes completely fails.
My immediate conclusion was that if the O/BECs can be trained to use quantum effects to provide images of life forms on planets fifty light years distant, they could also be trained to provide images of things right here on earth. Train an O/BEC with a spy sat pointed at a particular target. Once it has locked in, you don’t need the spy sat any more, and you can get the O/BEC to focus on a particular person and follow them around.
Like the problem with Asimov’s “chronoscope” in his short story “The Dead Past”, it would destroy our notions of privacy, especially as technology advances bring the size and cost of an O/BEC down from something found only at government research labs to something you can buy at the shop around the corner for $499.95.