58% TOO FAR

An anthropologist journeys to an idyllic faraway planet where human-descended colonizers have integrated alien “quantum AI” in Noordermeer’s SF novel.

Zadie Thornton, a contemporary anthropologist of Bahraini and English descent, has dedicated seven years of her rather cloistered life to pursuing a doctorate degree focused on the future of artificial intelligence and its impact on humanity. She bitterly concludes that her work was in vain; the field evolves too rapidly. Her archaeologist uncle introduces Zadie to an ancient relic that teleports her many light-years away to the idyllic planet Mushēški. Here dwell descendants of ancient Sumerians, the first Earth civilization to make alien contact. These Sumerians summoned an extraterrestrial race, the Abgal, who enhanced the humans’ simple society with agriculture, city-construction, and the written word. Some Sumerians went further, joining the Abgal in deep space and allowing their DNA to be interwoven with AI at a quantum level. These enhanced humans now call themselves Anunnaki (readers of “ancient astronaut” texts will recognize the name) and share a conflict-free, long-lived, collective-consciousness culture. The Anunnaki maintain vast bio-dome environments preserving earlier, now-vanished species of ancient Terran hominids (including yeti/Bigfoot types) who live in unspoiled tribal splendor. Zadie is alarmed, however, by the dark side of the Anunnaki, which includes a loss of individuality, minimal emotion, “a policy of compulsory euthanasia at 840 years,” and a pernicious slow dementia known as “Quantum Psychosis.” Zadie finds herself abandoned by her dementia-stricken hosts in one of the prehistoric zoos. Noordermeer’s impressive debut is mind-expanding anthropological SF that conveys wisdom and persuasive arguments via an Alice-in-Awe-and-Wonder-Land setup and such dubious conceits as talking abominable snowmen. The science (more genetics and sociobiology than physics) is not too intimidating, the issues carry weight without relying on cackling techno-tyrants or villainous robots, and the characters are appealing, even those whose personalities have all but thinned to biological-computer level. While a long stretch of the narrative involves a series of lab-bound experiments (but what experiments!), the author manages to keep things moving forward. The conceit of a modern researcher set amid primordial beings should appeal to fans of Michael Bishop’s No Enemy but Time (1982).

This heady SF yarn satisfyingly explores a cave-full of human dilemmas and evolves surprisingly well.