Paradox_Book One of the Singularity Chronicles - Book Afterthoughts

The speaker finished writing a review for Michael Woodenberg's debut novel, "Paradox". They enjoyed the experience of being in conversation with the author while reading the book. The book is set in a simulation and follows the protagonist, Kira, as she tries to solve a mystery and navigate a war caused by fear of AI. The speaker appreciated the thought-provoking ideas and the mix of sci-fi and fantasy elements. They also liked the inclusion of Japanese concepts and the handling of character deaths. Overall, they found the book to be well-written and impactful. All right, so I just finished writing a review for Michael Woodenberg, I think that is his name. Sorry if I'm saying it wrong, Mike, his debut novel, Paradox, book one of the Singularity Chronicles. And it took me a while, it always takes me a while to write the review because, you know, people, most people don't like spoilers and I was writing it on Amazon, so I was dodging around stuff that I really wanted to talk about. And to be honest, I don't really like reviewing books or movies or things like that because I don't, I mean, a lot of people place a lot of emphasis on reviews and I don't really buy things based on reviews. But anyway, I'd rather talk about just things that I liked, things that were thought-provoking and this was cool, this was a really cool experience because I got to, I was actually in conversation with Michael the entire time as I was reading his book, which I think that was just really cool. One, for him to just be open to the feedback and two, to, I don't know, it's something that I wish somebody would do with my books is actually read it and tell me what they thought as they go along. It's such a rare thing and I think that's why I did this because, yeah, I think it is nice when somebody's actually enjoying your book, but then it's a bonus because I actually have experience writing fiction in almost the exact same genre that he writes in. It's funny because he writes in, he writes like more hard sci-fi, military sci-fi. I write more fantasy, military sci-fi, so there's a lot of overlap between our styles. I think the Singularity Chronicles would fit well into the military game tech fiction universe, but that's another conversation for another day. But I wanted to take some time to just talk about some things because there's a lot of good things in this book, just so many good ideas and I'm looking at my notes right now and I'm just going to comment on a few things. The chapter, the beginning starts out with a bang, it really starts out with just the explosion in a lab. It's this huge mystery, you don't really know why she's gone back. You just know something has gone really fucking tits up and, yeah, she's bleeding out and the lab's on fire, she's almost dead and I wrote down this quote, war, humanity was always at war with humanity and I knew once I read that quote, I was like, oh man, okay, I'm in the right book, I'm in the right place. I really loved that. So she sends herself back, essentially back in time, which now we know and if you're listening to this, I put the notice, there's going to be fucking spoilers in this, so if you want to read the book, turn this off, go read the book. If you don't, then keep listening. So she sends herself back and we know now it was a simulation the entire time. Basically the entire book was a simulation and she was sent back, she sent herself, she uploaded herself to rerun the simulation, so what we're seeing is a run of the simulation the entire book. I'm assuming that's what it was based on the ending of the way it went, but the first two chapters as I wrote in my review kind of slogged to get through some of the really technical crunchy bits of it, of the hard sci-fi stuff, but there's still a lot of good ideas in there. I wrote down a quote in chapter four, humans are coded biologically to process data well enough not to die. We expect computers to do things that we'd like to do, but we don't naturally do. And I like that. This is a beginning when we see a young Kira, she's in college and she's having a lot of these conversations about, you know, what exactly is this technology she's learning, but at the same time it's some of it's confirmation of what she's starting to experience in her life and see different things in that vein. I'm just scrolling through here and seeing some of my notes here. This is why I like to take notes, because novels are so long and there's so many good things in the moment that if I don't take notes then I just forget like, man, I remember that was cool. Shout out to chapter five, Kintsugi, which is a Japanese concept. I actually did a traditional Kintsugi demonstration last year. I went to Kanazawa. I currently live in Japan right now, so anytime I see something which is Japanese in Japan, it's always like, oh, that's a nice touch, it's really cool for him to put that in there. I thought it was a well done chapter. Let's see. Chapter six is really when Noah comes into the picture for the first time. The first five chapters are basically Kira, and it's funny thinking back because I wrote in my review how they're both basically two sides of the same coin. Kira is the super logical, she's basically single goal oriented the entire time. The first half of the book is she's trying to figure out the puzzle of mother, like how do I save mother? How do I realize her father's vision? And then the second half, it's all about the emotions. She's trying to find that way, and in that way, thinking about it now, that's kind of her way back to her own emotions, because in the beginning she's very robotic, almost to where she's really hard to read. I gave Michael this feedback, she doesn't really display any emotions. There is some background or some boyfriend or something, she almost got married or whatever, but it's not very detailed or anything. We don't see until towards the end of the book where she's really kind of taken out of play and it becomes Noah's show, basically, when we get to more of the military operations and the war, actually, that pops off is essentially World War III, that is a nuclear war and destroys basically more or less the most important parts of Earth, at least from the Western perspective, right, the biggest players. And so, yeah, she's kind of taken out for many chapters towards the end because her role was basically in the beginning to establish the, basically, she's the light side of AI. She's seeing all the good things it can do. She's trying to get people to understand what it is, what it's about, and why it's helpful. And then there's a chapter towards the middle where Mother, and he chose a really good name as Mother, because every time it's just like, you know, everybody has a mom or mom figure, right? And so, Mother, this, of this benevolent, all-seeing, all-knowing being, just like a human mom, is just cleaning things up. She's reforming healthcare. She's lifting people out of poverty. She's saving people money. She's standing up corrupt, fixing up corrupt governments and all this stuff around the world. And there's this chapter where it's just kind of utopian. But then there's a tipping point to where it's actually a rogue actor who believes that Mother is eventually going to do something bad. They do something bad, and they kick off the Prometheus Collective. They kick off, basically, the global conflict, which is in an ironic twist that he's sure to point out in the book, that it's us again. It's humans again. AI didn't do it. It's the humans fearful of the AI doing something that causes the global catastrophe. And I thought that was, that was a genius way to have this conversation. And he does have, he does this on the micro, on the macro scale with the war and with the obviously nations and the fighting. And then he goes into the series of chapters where it basically becomes like the fucking Walking Dead. You know, you've got new little, little fiefdoms that have stood up and United States is fragmented. The world is limping along, slowly dying a slow death. And then there's these, there's groups like Noah's group, Hyperion, who are like the freedom fighters, you know, equivalent to Rick Grimes' group in The Walking Dead. And they go through the countryside and they help some people, other people. It's a rough call, that type of a deal. But anyway, from the macro, big picture, to the micro, all the way down to different organizations, different people. You see people on different sides of this, really, it's, it's rarely the technology. The technology is in the middle. The technology is the gun. And it's the person who wants to grab the gun first and shoot it. And the person who wants to grab the gun and dismantle it and throw it away. And the technology is really, it's not agnostic, it's actually beneficial. And knowing, you know, just the conversations, that brief interactions I've had with Michael and the subject matter of his newsletters and things like that, I know this is very deliberate. It's very smartly well done, just the messages that he had in the story were just really spot on. I really like this, this meditation. In the middle, and even chapter eight, is where is, is the basically the end of the, of Kira's section and prelude to war. And we see something, something that I, I've seen a little bit about, but I haven't really seen much, which is like, how do you deal with AI as like a legal entity? By proving that Mother was sentient in court, they then had to argue why it was okay to eliminate sentient beings. And so then does that mean you could take out humans that you don't like too, because they are doing something, and it's going to be different. I firmly believe, and I've explored this a little bit in, in my books as well, that there's just going to be a different class of people, eventually. It just has to be, because it's, we can't have them operating by the same rules as us. They're not human, but then it's so similar, but that's, that's further on down the line. Let's see, chapter 10, good stuff there. Yeah, chapter 12 was really the utopian part, and then he's got this autoimmune response where things aren't working. Yeah, and I like the way some of the deaths were handled too. I mean, he kills off a lot of characters, which I'm always just, I'm always clapping when authors kill characters, especially like more major characters too, because a lot of authors, they begin, they begin to, to, to sweet on their characters and too afraid to do shit to them. And it's like, nah, they're in the story, so shit can happen to them. And that means they can die too, even if they're main characters. And yeah, I liked the way those were handled. And I thought that was just, that was just really cool. And then we really get into, like, chapter 17 is so dark, just, there's so many, it's, it's called inhumanity. And it's just all these, these dark moments of the characters just going in this wasteland and these people that are suffering after the nuclear war and nations are falling apart. People are sick and just dying. It's just horrible. And I mean, I was all for it and I was like, yeah, this is, you know, I'm a military veteran as well. And this is what happens. I think people forget about these things. And that notion of forgetting about things, I think to fast forward to the end of the book, I think that's a really big part of, of what he wanted to say with this book is that we do forget with all this technology, with social media, with AI now, with smartphones, you know, we see it all the time. I've seen it in my lifetime to where people just don't, you don't talk to people the same way, you know, you're out and people are staring in their phones instead of being more open to having a conversation because before it was finite, the newspaper, you can only read it so many times. You can only read a book so many times, but now the phone is just always infinite. It's always on. There's always something to watch, something to read. And it really has changed the way we relate to each other. And that's a big part of the message in this book and how, whichever way this shakes out with AI, you can't deny that we've lost a couple of things. And we might argue that some of those things were essential to what made us human, to the human experience. And it's different now. And yeah, we relate in different ways, but I think many of us, it's, it's not natural on, at least in the unconscious level, and many are conscious of it now. We just see, you know, he talks about it, you know, mental health, how it goes down actually after the apocalypse, because people are forced to talk to each other again. People are forced to deal with each other again, and then people will start to plug in again. And we see this kind of second collapse, but I really liked this book. Man, I'm really, I have so many books that I want to read, but man, I'm curious about the second book now, because I liked the way it ended with this kind of just reset, which if ever such a thing were possible, it might not be a bad option if we ever got that far along and we were that far gone, just to wipe the slate clean and start over. Great job, Michael.