Recursion

I did the math a couple of weeks ago and realized that if I read a book a week from the unread books pile on my shelves, I would have more than enough books to keep me busy for well over a year. Now that I am finished school, I have decided to begin to make inroads on this pile of books, since I can now indulge in the life of a free woman: I can read what |I want to, when I want to and how I want to.  As a result of this freedom, I have gone through a number of books over the past couple of months that I have been meaning to mention on here, but have neglected to write about thus far.

It is time to rectify this situation.

The first book I picked off my shelf was Recursion by Tony Ballantine.  I had picked up this book a couple of years ago at the sale section of the library for .50 cents.  I had never heard of the author before |(this apparently was his first book), and I have not read much science fiction in my reading history thus far, but I came to the conclusion that there must always be a first time for everything

At first the book was confusing.  The first chapter was about a young rich man who destroyed a planet through rogue robots and had gotten caught by a mysterious, powerful stranger.  The second chapter was about a young woman who was trying to get away with her own suicide in a society that has its every moved watched.  The third chapter was about a young man who could function in this omniaware society without being seen, like a ghost, as he followed a strange woman to the heart of a technological city to hear about its secrets.  Needless to say, the novel made no sense to me at first.

As I persevered however, the stories began to converge as the overlining plot began to be revealed, and the truth of the plot was something quite profound indeed.  The book was asking the basic existential questions that if there was a being such as God, who had the power to make everything in our lives perfect, whether it would be worth the surrendering of our privacy, free choice and free will to have our lives planned for us?  We would all be happy, but would that be worth the cost of our freedom?  Not only that, but if one person's happiness was worth the destruction of another person's happiness, which person would you choose to make happy?  The book, in its subtle way, makes the reader slowly aware that the basic human skepticisms about theodicy are simplistic in their assumption that a good God must always act in a way that brings about our happiness.