Society of the Mind: A Cyberthriller

by Eric L. Harry

A brilliant and beautiful research psychologist is invited by the world's richest man to fly to his top-secret island paradise and fix his latest invention, a supercomputer gone berserk due to a contagious virus. Reprint.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Thriller, Psychology

672 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Raised in a small town in Mississippi, Eric L. Harry graduated from the Marine Military Academy in Texas and studied Russian and Economics at Vanderbilt University, where he also earned a J.D. and M.B.A. In addition, he studied in Moscow and Leningrad in the USSR, and at the University of Virginia Law School. He began his legal career in private practice in Houston, negotiated complex multinational mergers and acquisitions around the world, and rose to be general counsel of a Fortune 500 company. He left to raise a private equity fund and co-found a successful oil company. His previous thrillers include Arc Light, Society of the Mind, Protect and Defend and Invasion. His books have been published in eight countries. He and his wife have three children and divide their time between Houston and San Diego. Contact him on Facebook or visit him online at www.EricLHarry.com.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a very interesting book...I was engaged from the start. With a story premise like this, how could I not be? Yet, this is not an especially good book. I was about a fourth of the way through when I realized I was annoyed frequently. It took me a bit to put my finger on exactly what was causing this low-level exasperation. Then I had it: Laura. The main character. I hate her. Considering this is the character so pivotal to the whole story, such a central person with whom all others interact, she is a completely unbelievable ninny. Brilliant tenure-track Harvard professor of psychology??? I don't bloody think so. She seemed to have no grasp on actual psychology...she didn't even seem to have basic feminine intuition! Who goes to meet her new boss for a $1 million week job dressed in jeans and a fucking t-shirt?? Even if she were going through a particularly difficult menopause, her emotional hormonal outbursts and mood swings would be difficult to excuse. And talk about slow to understand ANYTHING!! Jesus Christ! A randomly chosen bimbo model that Gray picked up at an airport would have reacted the exact same way in many many of the scenes. She lurched from one hysterical over-reaction to another throughout the whole book. Every new bit of tech that she encountered elicited shocked suspicion and fear. A virtual reality helmet....oh my god!!! You'd think it was the alien from Aliens. I was continually baffled by her motivations and thought processes behind all her inane questions and inappropriate decisions. The conversations between her and Gray were particularly infuriating. I totally lost my shit when she stormed into the house, coated with drying mud a few hours after watching Gray return in the same state, much to the dismay of Janet, the majordomo. She proceeded to wander through the whole house looking for Gray because she URGENTLY needed to have yet another angry conversation with him, whereby she leaps wildly to obviously erroneous conclusions and Gray calms her down without telling her a goddamn thing. The inconsideration of the muddy mess she just tracked through the house for Janet to clean up made me want to telepresence a robot to stomp on her.
On the other hand, the fact that I could rant with examples for many more paragraphs indicate I was, at least, emotionally invested in being annoyed by this book. I just think the author is terrible at characters and dialogue. And yet...I liked the small parts and characters of the other "manager team" people. Dorothy was charming.
Also, I have a problem with the hastily constructed ending. The asteroid decelerated successfully...as Gray said it would...and THAT was enough to totally reverse the entire world's opinion? In ONE day?? Withdraw the military? Placate the U.N? And the next day, plane loads of people return to play with the model 8's? No mention of WHAT exactly the always mysterious Gray TOLD the whole world about what had just happened!
And then, of course, there's Grays whole big reveal, which is simply an analogy of knowledge behaving like a virus throughout history. Big deal. I've read that before. Interesting, but not shocking.
Well, despite Laura, that dumb bitch, I still had fun reading this book!

[RuinEleint · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nonsensical and annoying. Best avoided.

[Philip Hanson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. I can't say how much of that love is from memory association and how much is from the literary quality but I was glued to this book and have intense fondness for it. When I was a late teenager I got into some trouble while out of town and got stuck in Phoenix, AZ while waiting for the judge to throw the book at me ;) . I live in WA. It was the longest July of my life. I discovered the Science fiction genre through this book. I loved the characters, their relationship to the technology and ideas and scenarios explored in this book. This book started my obsession with sci-fi and the ideas it explores. I still think about and feel a connection with "Gray's Aberrant Mainframe" 13 years later.

[Koen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shutdown van Eric L. Harry, de bestseller auteur van World War III, ISB Nummer 90-229-8365-X
Dit is de Nederlandse uitgave van Aeropagus. Ik kon de Nederlandse uitgave niet op Goodreads vinden, dus heb ik maar de Engelse uitgave genomen.

Als ik me goed herinner heb ik dit boek ook gekocht de eerste keer dat deze werd uitgegeven. Dat zal dan rond 1996 geweest moeten zijn. Deze uitgave geeft geen informatie wat betreft de druk en jaar van uitgave.

Ik heb dit boek bewaard toen ik aan de grote opruiming begon op zolder. Ik heb toen elk zevende boek wat ik had bewaard om niet ondergesneeuwd te raken. Ik had een goede herinnering aan het verhaal en wilde het boek weer opnieuw lezen.

Personages:
• Dr. Laura Aldridge, Harvard faculteit psychologie.
• Joseph Gray, miljardair en geestelijke vader van de neurocomputer.
• Jonathan Sanders, collega van Laura aan dezelfde faculteit.
• Paul Burns, collega van Laura op Harvard.
• Professor Paulus, Harvard faculteit filosofie en docent van Joseph Gray.
• Professor Petry, hoofd faculteit wiskunde MIT.
• Dr. William Krantz, Harvard faculteit natuurkunde.
• Janet Baldwin, hoofd van de huishouding van Gray.
• Dr. Margaret Bickham, hoofd van de softwareafdeling.
• Dr. Gregory Filatov, hoofd van de hardware afdeling.
• Dr. Dorothy Holliday, epidemiologie.
• Franz Hoblenz, hoofd beveiliging.

Wat is goed aan deze cyberthriller:
• Het verhaal leest makkelijk en de personages zijn leuk omschreven.
• Het boek is in 1996 geschreven en geeft voor die tijd een goed beeld hoe over computers gedacht werd en wat de mogelijkheden zijn voor de toekomst.
• Er worden verschillende gradaties/versies van computers/robots naast elkaar in het verhaal gezet. Hierdoor wordt de ontwikkeling van de neurocomputer in het boek, goed geaccentueerd.
• Toen (rond halverwege de jaren 90), heb ik dit boek in een sneltreinvaart uitgelezen. Nu ben ik er op een wat rustiger tempo doorheen gegaan en vind het nog steeds een leuk boek welke tot de verbeelding spreekt hoe de ontwikkeling zal gaan wat betreft de computer in combinatie met de maatschappij.

Wat is niet goed aan deze cyberthriller:
• Het karakter van de hoofdpersoon, Laura Aldridge, is soms uitermate irritant. Ze wordt neergezet als wetenschapper maar gedraagt zich regelmatig als een gefrustreerd wicht. Dit klopt niet en dat had veel beter gekund. Daarmee mist Eric. L. Harry een kans om een evenwichtig persoon neer te zetten en verder uit te diepen.
• Het uiteindelijke plot lijkt een makkelijke manier om het boek af te raffelen. Hier was ook een mogelijkheid voor Harry geweest om dit beter te doen. Met name de manier dat de gehele wereld in één keer de opinie 180 graden draait, is opvallend.

Al met al heb ik dit boek met vier sterren gewaardeerd. Drie sterren voor het verhaal en één ster extra voor de leuke herinnering die ik heb toen ik dit boek twintig jaar geleden heb gelezen.

[Brandy B · Rating 5 out of 5]

I either read this book when I was in high school or my freshman year of college. I read it really, really quickly. I couldn't put it down. I kept thinking of the implications of the book and how you would expand on that. I went right out and bought Arc Light which was more militaristic and not my thing at all. But Society of the Mind really stuck with me. I looked up the author and his email address was on his publisher's profile (early days of the internet). I emailed the author (assuming it would go to some sort of fanmail pile) and told him how much I enjoyed Society of the Mind and how I hoped he expanded on some of those themes with his future novels.

He emailed me back that day. He told me about a cookout he was going to with his wife and sons and told me all about the book he was working on and that he hoped I would enjoy that as well. I was floating for a week. I'm sorry that his writing career didn't work out the way he'd hoped and hope that he finds that spark again now that he's retired.

But even if he didn't? Sending a personal email to a squeeing teenage fangirl? It was classy! And I will always, always, always remember Society of the Mind fondly.

[J8el · Rating 2 out of 5]

I probably should finish reading this so I can return it to the pastor that lent it to me. Progress is made difficult by the misconstrued understanding of technology and how people will interact with it. I like the concept of the story being set around the romance of a scientist with a potentially bond-esque villain. I recall having difficulties with how erratic the heroine's emotions were, but experiencing falling in love myself since last looking at the book, I'll potentially relate to her more than previously.

Currently I give thoughts to Dr Horrible's Sing~along Blog. We need more of these 'villains' in the world. Though as I haven't finished the book I could be mistaken whether to include it in this..

[Ioana-Roxana Dascalu · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite book of all time on AI! The only thing I didn't like is the characterization of Laura. She shouldn't have been portrayed as a crazy high school girl with a crush for a super rich guy, but what she was described initially to be - a highly intellectual academic, the best in her cohort, at Harvard University.

[Elliot · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars

Okay, genuinely probably not the best idea to write this as soon as I’m done because my mind is reeling and not in the good way, but whatever, these aren’t meant to be particularly organized for my purposes — I just like getting my thoughts down and simply thinking more about the book, whether I’m interpreting things accurately or not.

Joseph Gray, our eccentric billionaire, who by all accounts is technically a genius, but he does suffer from what our real world’s AI developers fall victim to. The very easily avoidable question of “why”. Why are we developing things that strip people of their greatest power? Our creativity, our critical thinking, things that admittedly and clichéd-ly differentiate us from other animals. But, on the other hand (maybe this is a point, that he may be entirely insane later, it’s definitely a possibility, I do detest when people criticize books by simply not understanding the points which is why I try to entertain all of them and then critique the book’s ability to actually CONVEY them) he is EXTREMELY convoluted and contradictory (and I don’t mean his cryptic-ness toward Laura, I understand that he is gauging her “fitness” to receive his ideas). I mean that he still claims that he both fears and wants to respect the natural selection process. Specifically, on page 464, he says he fears that machines will fight other machines to determine the fittest, but he also adamantly refuses to interfere for much of the book. He also actively encourages it by not actively killing off the Other. Laura herself iterates that he doesn’t want to throw off the “natural balance” of the ecosystem, as if these robots weren’t entirely synthesized and not there previously — arguably, they’re an invasive species. Again, this contradictory behavior might hint at an underlying madness, but I don’t believe the book presents this skillfully — the vagueness doesn’t seem to hide deeper meaning, it seems to want to ENCOURAGE deeper meaning.

Laura oscillates between craving his approval and scorning his aloofness. And she bothers me a helluva lot throughout the book because of this. A theme the book attempts is that love is an unstable thing, and it can convince us of things we didn’t previously believe. While the book does admittedly premise early on that she highly values intelligence (and reading in between the lines [and the lines themselves] insinuates that a key flaw is how much weight she puts on others’ perceptions of her intelligence), it is infuriating to read how many times she’s desperate for Gray’s approval — it doesn’t feel realistic, it feels comical. She herself admits that she initially painted a picture for herself of this misunderstood genius (when she still thought she was being hired to psychoanalyze Gray himself), but when she’s constantly writing in what she believes him to be thinking, it gets to a point. A more specific instance that made me laugh aloud was when after she got offended at his order for her to leave, a model seven nearly takes her out when she’s in a transport model three(?). He’s concerned for your safety and this fear is solidified not a few pages later, so why are you acting like that? Love, I guess. She also, for being such a renowned psychologist, needed things spelled out for her a lot. Numerous times I felt she was told things only for her to bluster through asking if something was some way. A specific example was Laura already knew that it was possible to control the robots using the VR technology, and yet on page 471 she has to have it iterated to her again.

The lack of urgency in the latter half of the book is so strange. To play devil’s advocate (what I call my speculation about the author’s meaning or commentary on the opposite end of what I believe it to be), maybe it’s to demonstrate how everything bends to Gray’s will — if he’s not all that concerned about how the deceleration of the asteroid, why should anyone else be? But that conflict gets sidelined for… what exactly? These robots are running rampant, having killed three people (it’s fine, they didn’t mean to), and yet Laura is still hurt about Gray’s dodgy behavior? As far as I’m aware, most people (not casting a right or wrong judgement here) would simply deem the robots as deadly and should be dispatched somehow? There are nonpermanent ways demonstrated in the book, and yet nope, let’s just let this happen yeah.

This book started off as a solid 4 out of 5 stars for me for a reason though because it was getting my brain to work, turning over various ideas about AI as it is so poignant now. An especially notable thought was that if this central computer was one of the pinnacles of Gray’s ideas and it is fly, why is the world in real life working towards artificial intelligence so much. Are we working towards purposefully flawed computing systems, or are we working to excise human flaws entirely — because wouldn’t that make AI not “intelligent” in the way we think? This central computer uses heuristics and therefore makes mistakes often. It says this itself. It is not a calculator — it mimics common sense in a way, not entirely gospel but something close to it. I’ll give this book the credit that it did make me THINK. The current route of artificial intelligence is dissuading many from doing just that.

[Brendon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found the female lead quite shrill and hard to empathize with, but the concepts raised were interesting and believably presented.

[Christopher McConnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Last 15 pages really did it for me

[Joshua · Rating 4 out of 5]

While this is an entirely different read than it was when it first came out back in 1996, it still remains one of my favorite books. During a recent reread, I was struck by the obviousness of some of the tech described as cutting-edge therein - but to call that a fault of the writing would be akin to labeling Jules Verne a plagiaristic hack. It was ahead of its time, and it still is in a few ways...

A Harvard psychology professor, frustrated by the departmental glass ceiling and her colleagues' inability to consider (or even grasp) new ideas, receives an intriguing offer from a reclusive billionaire on a remote South American isle: "come help me diagnose my robots." Dr. Laura Aldridge is thrown into a world of advanced technology, shyly inquisitive A.I., and virtual impossibilities driving her to answer a single question: where does technology end and the soul begin?

Eric Harry earned a spot on my top ten authors with his novel, and if you enjoy books that make you question your world, I highly recommend giving this one a spin.

[Kris Quistorff · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a good story, but also an interesting introduction to the idea of Memetics. Which as I understand it, it was actually written to be.

I do not recall it to be all that much of a thriller as it is made out to be, but opinions may vary. It is more of a mystery, suspense, with a lot of futurism that may still practically match the technical realities of what the earliest incarnations of tangible VR might look like. Even if some of the mechanisms would be challenging to implement as designed.

[Khayri Woulfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the book although I found the third act anticlimactic.

[Lainey · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5/5
It was a very interesting read and I definitely enjoyed reading it, but the book as a whole was okay. The whole last fifteen pages were a bit… 😭 But I appreciate the writing style and the human-like robots were my favorite part.

[Mike Nyberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though it was written in the 90s, the premise was still relevant. Really enoyed this book.

[Robin Gray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robots are sexy. Mmm.

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

A personal childhood favorite.

[Dave Drogowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

I still picture the people and places of this story with the wonder that I held when I first read them. This book first gave me the sci-fi bug.

[Tish McAllister · Rating 5 out of 5]

Personal childhood favorite !!

[Aileen Nelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book that has stayed with me over many years.

[Rika]

hiks,,, want to read it ASAP!!!!

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

it a good sic fi book I really enjoyed reading. i read it for class.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun read if your imagination can let you see Bill Gates creating his own world.