Marc Stiegler

3.5 stars. This is one of those books where the story is clearly just a vehicle for the underlying philosophical discussion, but I enjoyed the underlying philosophy, so that was okay.

The Zetetic Institute and its maxims were interesting, and the decision duel construct was great. The Prisoner's Dilemma was well illustrated rather than info-dumped. The portrayal of software developers as heroic protagonists was unusual and well done; I enjoyed that and the portrayal of the project manager as a functional equivalent to the general of a small Information-Age-equivalent "army." Admittedly, my bias as a programmer and rookie project manager is showing here. :)

I'd actually be interested in seeing a sequel that placed the Zetetic Institute in today's more complex world of varied threats from various actors. This book is oriented entirely toward the two-actor setting of the Cold war, which is a much simpler problem.

The two-superpower setting is obviously dated; that didn't bother me as much as the exclusive language. The book did have several strong women characters who were important to the plot, but the entire rest of the book talked about "men" instead of people. 1988 is a bit too late to get a pass for that. Also, every one of the women ended up neatly paired off with a man, except the one who started paired and ended up widowed. Oy. (The man who started paired and was widowed by the end of chapter 1 ends up paired with one of the other women.)

The book's blurb touts the discussion of "smart weapons," and it was interesting to compare the scenes of programmers watching video feeds from self-directed weapons that they could not pilot with today's descriptions of remotely-piloted drones.… (more)

Good and fairly-standalone novel about biological warfare in the "Braintrust Universe" (a scenario with independent high-tech seasteads, nation states with reduced power, and highly successful libertarian projects based on real-world analogues -- i.e. "SpaceR" with a satellite communications constellation and reusable rocket launch, "FB" and "GPlex", a seastead or ship operated by Goldman Sachs ("GS-Prime") to conduct international financial deals, etc.

Panders a bit to general leftism/PC culture, cartoonish villains and adversaries, but generally entertaining and the seastead parts are great. Plus, based on coronavirus current events, the idea of widespread plagues and bioengineered diseases is pretty topical.… (more)