Well hey all, its that time again. Hope to see lots of folks tonight at our science Fiction book club meeting. It will be fun to see what people thought of our book the Kraken Project.
See Evans info below. Original message:
Hello Folks,We continue to have a good showing to discuss our books. All those who read it very much enjoyed The Companions by Sheri S. Tepper. For our next meeting, we’ve chosen a book by someone who isn’t generally considered a Science Fiction writer, but this book certainly is SF. It’s a tale with plenty of action, but which also raises some very thought provoking questions which are beginning to be considered by forward looking thinkers, and will become only more urgent in the next couple decades. We’ve chosen The Kraken Project by Douglas Preston. The next meeting of the Science Fiction club will take place on Thursday, March 12, 2015.Place, Book Nook at:http://conference321.com/masteradmin/room.asp?id=rs7867a2369e0e <http://conference321.com/masteradmin/room.asp?id=rs7867a2369e0e>Time: 9 PM Eastern, 8 PM Central, 7 PM Mountain, 6 PM Pacific, and 02:00 UTC. Our book, The Kraken Project, is available from both BARD and Bookshare. The link to the BARD version is at: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.nls/db.79300 <http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.nls/db.79300> Here is the NLS annotation:NASA is designing an exploratory probe to be dropped into the Titan methane sea, Kraken Mare. But during testing an explosion kills seven scientists and the probe's AI program flees into the Internet. Ex-CIA agent Wyman Ford must track down the rogue software.The link to the Bookshare version is at:https://www.bookshare.org/browse/book/829338 <https://www.bookshare.org/browse/book/829338>The Bookshare Long Synopsis reads as follows:Wyman Ford is back again in The Kraken Project, the thrilling new novel from New York Times bestselling author Douglas Preston. NASA is building a probe to be splashed down in the Kraken Mare, the largest sea on Saturn's great moon, Titan. It is one of the most promising habitats for extraterrestrial life in the solar system, but the surface is unpredictable and dangerous, requiring the probe to contain artificial intelligence software. To this end, Melissa Shepherd, a brilliant programmer, has developed "Dorothy," a powerful, self-modifying AI whose true potential is both revolutionary and terrifying. When miscalculations lead to a catastrophe during testing, Dorothy flees into the internet. Former CIA agent Wyman Ford is tapped to track down the rogue AI. As Ford and Shepherd search for Dorothy, they realize that her horrific experiences in the wasteland of the Internet have changed her in ways they can barely imagine. And they're not the only ones looking for the wayward software: the AI is also being pursued by a pair of Wall Street traders, who want to capture her code and turn her into a high-speed trading bot. Traumatized, angry, and relentlessly hunted, Dorothy has an extraordinary revelation--and devises a plan. As the pursuit of Dorothy converges on a deserted house on the coast of Northern California, Ford must face the ultimate question: is rescuing Dorothy the right thing? Is the AI bent on saving the world... or on wiping out the cancer that is humankind? Finally, here’s a glowing review from Booklist taken from Amazon’s page for The Kraken Project: *Starred Review* Preston’s latest solo novel (he’s mostly known as one half of the Preston-Child team who write the Special Agent Pendergast series) takes a wildly implausible premise and turns it into a very entertaining thriller. The Kraken Project is a NASA initiative to send a probe to Titan, a large moon of Saturn. Because of the distance involved, real-time control of the probe is impossible, so NASA decides to make the probe autonomous via cutting-edge artificial-intelligence software. But the software, called Dorothy, malfunctions and escapes into the Internet, where it plans a reign of terror that begins with revenge against its creator and will end with the annihilation of humankind itself. Dorothy’s creator goes on the run; Wyman Ford, ex-CIA agent and star of a few previous novels, is tasked by the president to find the woman (who, most everyone suspects, deliberately unleashed Dorothy). Whether or not you buy the premise of sentient software roaming the Internet, you won’t be able to deny that this is an exciting story. Preston sells the premise by sheer force of will: his characters are so compelling, his storytelling so persuasive, that we buy it all completely, at least as long as we’re inside the book. Bravo. But there’s a bit more to the book than simply an excellent thriller. Come join us to talk about this one next month.Evan
-- Lelia
