zomg – I read another book. This is getting crazy. Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve already grabbed something else off my shelf. I suspect once I’ve got a car again, this reading thing won’t continue. But I was also checking out audible.com last night, and though it actually costs $$$, the idea of listening to books to the drive to/fro work does have its appeal.

So, I just finished reading Halo by Tom Maddox. Maddox is another of the cyberpunk alumni whose work I hadn’t sampled, beyond his short-story Snake-Eyes in Mirrorshades. According to wikipedia:

Maddox is the originator of the term Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics (or ICE). According to Maddox[1], he coined the term in the manuscript of an unpublished story that he showed to William Gibson at a science fiction convention in Portland, Oregon. Gibson asked permission to use the acronym, and Maddox agreed. The term was then used in Gibson’s early short stories and eventually popularized in the novel Neuromancer, in which Maddox was properly acknowledged.

I found Halo to be an excellent extrapolation of the way an AI could kinda evolve out of a complex set of computer systems, and thought it dealt really well the kind of growing pains that this might entail.

It also pre-saged a notion I’d encountered before – that when an AI did come forth, people might worship it as they might a god.. and that the best way to detect it might be to look for such cult-like behaviour.

The playful nature of AI, Aleph also reminds me of the Rabbit character in Rainbow’s End.

This, and the fact that the book was by’n’large non-distopian in subject makes me file it under post-cyberpunk. But it does share the same love affair with pseudo-Zen philosophy that inhabits Neuromancer and Metrophage.

This also reminds me that I still need to track down those X-Files episodes Maddox co-wrote with William Gibson.

UPDATE – Digging around his site I discovered there’s a prequel to Halo, The Mind like a Strange Balloon.