Singularity Countdown

Robert Sawyer's WWW: Wake was a pleasure to read. The book explores the vision of an emergent intelligence arising nearly randomly from transient processes of the backbone of the World Wide Web. It also offers a taste of the world of the blind, through the eyes (so to speak) of Caitlin, a teen who deftly navigates the Internet with her screen reader. Finally, it touches on the life of an ape who itself begins to bridge the gap of consciousness. The whole tale itself appears to be a fable of the bicameral mind, a theory by Julian Jaynes that consciousness is a cultural construct that has only arisen in the past three millenia. I am mixed, however, by the author's apparent unwillingness to explore some tantalizing hints of social commentary.

Helen Keller, most famously known as a deafblind person through The Miracle Worker, a twentieth-century play and movie based on her autobiography, The Story of My Life, was an anti-war activist. Both she and her friend Mark Twain (also largely not remembered for his political activities) were radical activists, outspoken for universal suffrage, pacifism, and socialism. After reading WWW: Wake, one might be left under the common misconception that she championed nothing other than the rights for people with disabilities, when that was actually only the beginning of her work:

"I was appointed on a commission to investigate the conditions of the blind. For the first time I, who had thought blindness a misfortune beyond human control, found that too much of it was traceable to wrong industrial conditions, often caused by the selfishness and greed of employers. And the social evil contributed its share. I found that poverty drove women to a life of shame that ended in blindness." (Helen Keller, in Why I Became an IWW)

In this novel, Caitlin is a blind girl who is given the ability to see with an implant that also empowers her to envision the World Wide Web, and in effect to witness a post-human intelligence emerge from its background. By helping this intelligence that she names Phantom to understand its place in the world, she takes on the role of Anne Sullivan, the instructor who helped raise Helen Keller from her limited awareness of the universe around her. By tying it all together with an ape who learns to paint representations, Sawyer weaves this tale of bicameralism, with which he bludgeons his readers several times, even citing Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind in the text itself.

Interestingly, Sawyer seems to have some awareness of social inequity and is unafraid of breaking some taboos in mainstream science fiction: his main character is a blind, teenage girl, whose best friend is black, and whose father is autistic. She encounters everything from teasing to unwanted sexual advances. Like Helen Keller, Caitlin is a strong person who fights back against social injustice (at least when it is applied to herself). However, she appears to be completely unaware of her privilege of wealth and education: her middle classed parents, both in academia, apparently have to make no sacrifices to get her the experimental treatments throughout her life that finally lead to the endowment of her vision; and, she spends all her free time on the Internet and with Mathematica.

Likewise, the author hints at the injustices of racism with the eugenic policies that threaten to castrate Hobo, the ape in the novel, because he's a mixture of two species, even briefly exploring the history of zoos and contrasting it to racism in the South. In fact, in some sense, I found this mini-story of a self-awareness emerging from a cousin ape to be more compelling than the abstract notion of a nebulous consciousness developing out of the ether of the Internet.

Still, I feel as though he were holding back. He could have honored Helen Keller's memory by at least commenting on her social justice work (perhaps in Caitlin's fictional blog; especially considering that she held Keller as a hero and role model, she would have certainly been aware of her activism). He could have explored racism, prejudice, and class. Any of these would have placed this book in a more serious realm of science fiction, worthy then of the likes of George Orwell, Margaret Atwood or Dennis Danvers. Instead, the novel pranced around with some interesting ideas of emergent intelligence, but failed to place them in a meaningful social context.

On the other hand, this is the first of a promised three. There were enough hints of a more meaningful discourse to be had, and some loose ends that need resolution.

WWW: Wake, despite its shortcomings, is still a good read. I've made a note to myself to read Robert Sawyer's next two novels in the series, and hope that he's not afraid to commit himself to more fully exploring some interesting issues.