I’ll be honest: When the rotting zombie violently raped and killed the immortal death addict, I started to skim.

But if you can handle depravity of that sort, don’t let its presence throw you off the trail of a gripping, well-told story. There’s an abundance of rich veins in the setting the author has dug out, and he is quick to excavate them with precision and care.

Prime Intellect is a God-like computer governed by the Three Laws of Robotics as proposed by Isaac Asimov – protect humans, protect itself, and obey humans except when this violates the first or second law. The result of an all-powerful machine applying these laws to the universe at large serves as the thrust of the plot – what happens when God refuses to let anyone die?

The result is a story told from two perspectives – Caroline, the 36th oldest human alive and a top ‘Death Jockey’, a type of exhibitionist sport where bored immortals try to off themselves in novel ways – and Lawrence, the creator of Prime Intellect, and later its semi-caretaker and regretful father.

The novel is intensely engaging – the pacing sometimes gets a little sloggy, but when it shines, it shines. I became interested in learning the past of Prime Intellect, its rise to power, its interaction with humans, exploring the possibilities of near-omnipotence, knowing more about Lawrence, more about Caroline – and the author did not let me down. With a narrative shifting from past, present, and future, he elucidates both a history of the characters’ choices and the resulting consequences. The result is fun, fascinating, and incredibly intelligent.

There are problems, of course. The story is not perfect; its framework is afflicted with a nest of plot-hungry termites. The humans are at odds with their own immortality, but we’re never given an opportunity to see anything from the perspective of those who are happy with their near-omnipotence. Rather, our perspective is relegated to the dissatisfied – Caroline (who craves a level of authenticity impossible within a world without consequences), Lawrence (who is terrified his super-computer will divide by zero and obliterate the universe), and a group of sadists who can only inflict their sadism upon consenting masochists (who will never die). The author seems to realize this is not enough to justify Caroline’s aim to end paradise – so he throws in a sideline about how the computer has put 400 alien worlds in stasis on the basis that they might pose a threat to humans. This becomes the primary motivator that pushes Caroline to action.

But Caroline never even asks what these alien worlds are like – it’s quite possible that they all consist of various types of mold. I’m not particularly at odds with screwing over a planet full of the stuff that keeps ruining my hamburger rolls. On top of that, the computer’s reason just reeks of absurdity – a near-omniscient computer with absolute control over matter and space can’t figure out some way to reduce the threat aliens pose to humans down to effectively zero? Not without permanently shelving them? Caroline’s indignance over this rings hollow; at times, it feels less like a motivation and more like a sticky note the author slapped on her forehead.

Which brings me to Caroline herself. She doesn’t work as a positive character. I understand that the author likely didn’t intend for us to think of her as a saint, or even particularly nice – but as the central character (and the person who gets to reflect on the events at the end), she serves as the reader’s moral anchor – and many of the things she does are far beyond reprehensible, far beyond irresponsible. She tortures someone to the point of reducing them to a state of permanent, irreversible, immortal insanity – and then gloats over the accomplishment. She attempts to destroy all humans throughout the universe because she thinks there’s something wrong with the way things are (has she stopped to ask what everyone else might think?). And at the end, rather than show some degree of reverence for the sheer destruction she has wrought, her response is essentially: "No use crying over spilled milk. Let’s fuck." No, seriously.

Not that these moral qualms ruin or even do considerable harm to the story; it remains exceptionally entertaining and an exemplar example of the genre of speculative science fiction. In fact, I think it speaks to the author’s skill that despite me finding Caroline to be unsympathetic, I still found myself very eager to see what happened next.

One note for the depravity, since it’s been mentioned in other reviews: I skimmed over the worst of it, but I think it’s necessary for the story’s honesty to demonstrate the depths to which Caroline will plunge in order to attain a degree of satisfaction and authenticity. It’s much harder to swallow the idea that this existence is something Caroline would want to end without showing just how far she’ll go to feel alive.

Anyway, four and a half stars. Excellent read, and would definitely recommend to my (unlikely-to-be-triggered) sci-fi reading friends.

PS: HUGE bonus points for avoiding the obvious Biblical reference at the end. I mean, there were still tons of parallels to the whole Garden of Eden thing, but the author didn’t make any direct connections. I could swear I heard the Twilight Zone theme music queuing up in the back of my head as I read that last chapter; I cannot tell you how much it relieved me to be proven wrong.

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