I finished Robert Sawyer’s Factoring Humanity several days ago. I enjoyed it, as I did the other Sawyer novel I read last summer. Also set in Toronto, Factoring Humanity blends human interaction — a marriage between university professors that family crisis has damaged — with three of the most challenging scientific problems in the world. (One wasn’t enough?) The novel is set in the “near future,” but it feels very “near” in most ways.
The scientific challenges:
- Artificial intelligence
- Quantum computing
- Search for extraterrestrials and understanding them once found
The husband creates a computer-based artificial intelligence program (Cheetah) which disappoints him in its inability to reach “humanity,” but the AI demonstrates more than expected. The husband is clearly quite a computer scientist, because he’s also nearly achieved quantum computing, to the point that he’s offered millions of dollars to sell his research to those who hope to take advantage of the ability to break the highest levels of current encryption. How he even has time to write the grant proposals to get money for his grad students and still do research/teaching of his own is beyond me!
But the wife really delivers, as she deciphers the alien messages that have been puzzling researchers the world over for years, and goes on to build the device described in the messages, and… well, read it yourself. I’m deliberately skipping a key, interesting subplot.
The strange part of this well-told tale is that many know the alien intelligence story quite well already. It’s Carl Sagan’s Contact, at least as performed by Jody Foster in 1997. Sagan wrote the novel (Wikipedia, with spoiler) from which that movie was made. The story is not identical, but the way in which the excitement of unveiling the meaning of the message and then making contact is described, the similarities resonated immediately. I wasn’t upset, but I do wonder about influences (this wasn’t mentioned on the author’s website).
Karma does win out. I introduced Vin to Sawyer, and he’s gone through several of Sawyer’s books. When I return Factoring Humanity to Vin, I’ll be asking for others.