May, 23, 2024 archives

Exadelic by Jon Evans is a science fiction book of the sort that I consume all too frequently. The characters and dialogue are clunky, the ideas are heavily recycled, and it still gave me things to think about. I am going to spoil it here, so don’t keep reading if you don’t want that.

Adrian Ross, our protagonist, is an obvious author stand-in and basically a “Gary Sue” as needed. He’s the boring one from what turns out to be one of those really important friend groups that define certain eras. It’s a diverse cast of characters in Silicon Valley, of course, where the men are whatever and the women are all Asian. (Kind of? I forget. It felt like a thing.)

The punchline is that his reality is just part of a multiverse of simulations, “magick” is a way to exploit bugs in the simulation to jump between them, and most of the book is a race to develop just enough “AI” to start exploiting those bugs but not enough to trigger the end of each simulation which apparently happens when a weekly cronjob notices that one of the simulations got too smart.

Things happen, Adrian gets tortured and forced to participate in rituals where techbros have orgies and he goes into trances and teaches them magick, but then escapes and starts to learn that things are all crazy and the simulation he is in is going to end but the AI (called “Coherence,” so look forward to that release from OpenAI) opens a portal to... another simulation.

That is one where Africa has dominated world development. This happens in one chapter that is about 18 pages long in a 908 page book, at least in Libby form. This concept could probably be a whole book on its own, but instead it boils down to him spending three years (!) living in poverty while shacked up with a woman. As it turns out later, the mere fact that he spent this time in a simulation so different from the others is what makes him the only one who can find their way out of the simulations. I’m just thankful that the author seemed to realize he wasn’t really up to the task of doing much with the world he lays out and just bounces back to settings more comfortable for him.

Which turns out to be mid-century Los Angeles, where Adrian runs into L. Ron Hubbard, Jack Parsons, and Marjorie Cameron, all exciting if you’re really into that era of weird Hollywood history, the occult, and probably won’t shut up about it. Jack and Marjorie ending up joining Adrian on his next jump to another simulation, along with an appropriately generic and boring love interest he picks up along the way.

When we finally get “outside” the simulation it turns out that it’s because some bored post-Earth humans wanted to meet one of the characters that it is in fashion to watch in simulations. All of these simulations are running in a Dyson sphere that has replaced all of the planets of our solar system, and the remaining humans live in mostly underpopulated habitats floating around inside the sphere. They are underpopulated because before the limiting systems were put in place to prevent simulations developing super intelligent AI that could break out of system into the real world, they would do that periodically and take along a bunch of humans to ascend with them. So what’s left when Adrian ascends is basically a bunch of nepo babies who fetishize being actually human (although they are backed up nightly and can be restored to cloned bodies at any time). Oh yeah, it runs on bitcoin. (There are also some weird/gross racial aspects to it that are lamp-shaded before being swept under the rug.)

This made me think of Elon Musk’s fascination with The Battle of Polytopia, a cartoony, limited version of the classic Sid Meier’s Civilization games. Dave Karpf wrote a great analysis about what that says about Musk. I imagine that in the world of this book, Musk would be one of these post-Earth humans playing in simulations of the past because it’s not challenging.

For some reason, Elizabeth Smart (better known as the Black Dahlia) is a character in the final chapter. Why? No particular reason, it seems that the author just wanted to drop the name and be able to point out in the afterword that there is a tenuous real-life connection between her and Jack Parsons and Marjorie Cameron. In fact, the afterword is stuffed with name-checks for all the ideas he has cobbled together into this Frankenstein’s monster of a story.

It’s worth quoting the beginning of the afterword:

Science fiction is sometimes called “the literature of ideas.” This sells it short—more precisely, it is literature plus ideas, which is why it is harder to write—but its ideas do matter.

The ideas are weak, the literature is not there, but I’d say this still solidly qualifies as science fiction. It’s a pretty low bar.