Member Reviews
Interesting concept but it was immediately bogged down in the execution.
I found it very hard to become engaged with this novel. A lot of sci-fi ideas are thrown at the reader in the opening, which wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't for the jargon. This is done at the same time as the establishment of characters and plot.
If people are willing to stick with it, I'm sure things will become clearer. As a rule, I don't "stick with it."
I originally chose this because I thought it might work for teens. It's definitely got an interesting premise, and the mystery elements were compelling, but I think it might have worked better as a full length novel.
Published by Tor.com on April 11, 2017
Proof of Concept begins with a chunk of expository writing that explains both the premise and the Earth’s current condition. The exposition feature too many exclamation points and graceless sentences like this one: “Things weren’t going too well for life on Earth, in the Population Crisis — once known as the Climate Change Crisis, but population pressures driven by climate change had long ago become the really obvious issue.” It’s really obvious that the sentence could have used a good trimming. Quite a few clichés (“a mystery wrapped around an enigma”) could also have been profitably excised from the introductory text. Sadly, this is the kind of writing that gives science fiction a bad name.
In any event, the story builds on the discovery of a vast cavern deep below the surface of the Earth, which is an ideal place for a Needle that will permit interstellar travel, or multiverse travel, or so its inventors hope. Kir, who has an AI implanted in her brain, is one of the residents living in a framework surrounding the Needle.
Kir seems less interested in the Needle than in having petty arguments with her virtual lover Bill (among others), and feeling petty slights when people do not see everything from her perspective. She is, in short, a drama queen.
There are nuggets in Proof of Concept that could have been fused into an interesing story, but Jones too often relies on science fiction buzzwords like Thought Crime (shades of Orwell!) and baby permits and VR sex and Information Space and Extreme Population Control and Hives (population clusters, not the skin disease) rather than developing something original. A good bit of what passes for a story strikes me as gibberish. Sadly, none of the rehashed concepts come together in a way that could be remotely described as interesting.
NOT RECOMMENDED
Locked away in an underground bunker (a massive cave) for a year-long experiment to find the secret of star-travel, Kir, a young scientist with a super-computer in her brain tries to figure out what’s really going on.
Is it me? I read a lot of science fiction, but there were times when I simply didn't follow this. Not sure it makes me like it if it makes me feel stupid. And I REALLY wanted to like it. The blurb for the book explained things far more clearly than the text did. Sadly the jargon, somewhat hazy explanations and the heroine Kir who seemed strangely incurious and unemotional even when her emotions should have been screaming at her, put me off this.
Dreamwidth. Live Journal. Goodreads.
A little confusing. Good ideas, but sometimes I got lost.
A review in spanish: http://dreamsofelvex.blogspot.com/2017/05/tres-novelas-breves-de-torcom.html
For such a short novella, Proof of Concept is packed to bursting with plot threads, thematic questions, and worldbuilding elements. The story takes place in a fascinating dystopian world where pollution and global warming have pushed the world's population into giant "hives" separated by toxic "Dead Zones" where impoverished non-citizens try to eke out their short existences. MegaCorps have a chokehold on culture and politic, and even scientific endeavor must be turned into pop-culture and seek the approval of the GAM (Global Audience Mediation AI). The issue of extreme population control is hotly contested, as is the future of the human race. The quest for hyperspatial travel is seen as humanity's last hope. To get funding, the serious scientists have partnered with the popular reality-show stars to live underground in isolation to create a proof of concept for hyperspatial travel.
The story is as packed with genre elements as it is with worldbuilding concepts: a Vernesque journey to the center of the earth, a coming-of-age story, a romance, and even a strong tang of mystery. There are so many ideas packed into this little novella; I just wish there had been a little more room for character development. The timespan of the story is so wide, the cast so large, and the worldbuilding is so broad that I think in some ways, the characterization and driving urgency of the plot got a little lost. I never got a real sense of the different characters, and while I think this contributed to the shock factor of the ending, I found it also rather unsatisfying. In particular, and quite at odds with the rest of the story, I felt that the end expected me to unquestioningly accept the author's definition of "good guys" and "bad guys" and accept that the "good guys" can do absolutely terrible things and yet remain the "good guys" by definition alone… more time spent on characterization of both the faceless antagonists and the tarnished protagonists would have helped greatly, I think.
One of the most interesting themes in the story involves Kir, a child "saved" from the Dead Zones to act as the "wetware" for an artificial superintelligence quantum computer. Is she a captive or a willing participant? Is she deluding herself when she believes the woman who cut her head open and installed an ASI inside sees her as a person rather than a tool? Is the thing who shares her head a being with its own identity or merely a sophisticated calculator, and despite the supposed firewalls, what influence does it have on her behaviour?
"You're going to put a supercomputer in my head. It's going to share my brain. Okay, I can't stop you. But what if he goes wrong and starts eating me?"
Overall, Proof of Concept is itself an interesting proof of concept for a world and idea that I think fully deserves a longer novel. If you're looking for a fascinating little novella, Proof of Concept is worth a look.
~3.5
“Proof of Concept” by Gwyneth Jones is the story of Kir. A young woman living on a 23rd century, over-populated Earth with all the encumbent environment and social problems, she has something the majority do not: an AI named Altair living in her head. A scientist cum reality tv star, Kir gets the chance of a lifetime when she agrees to live deep below the Earth and participate in a project called the Needle, doing her part to research FTL travel. Seemingly mankind’s only hope to escape the cauldron of pollution and poverty it created on the surface above, things start to get weird when Kir’s colleagues begin dying one by one.
If that paragraph seems to pack a lot of ideas, indeed Jones’ novella does. “Proof of Concept” is at times sardine-like. The story style is dense and blocky, with movement neither smooth or flowing. Jones immersing the reader without introduction to the 23rd century, it’s an experience to grope through—seemingly with intention, given the parallels to the subjectivity of information in Kir’s world. (That being said, I have read other of Jones’ short fiction, and it had a similar style.) Close reading is required.
But what Jones accomplishes from a social media perspective, tends toward obfuscation in other areas. I am not one of the legion of reviewers looking for “likable characters”, but I do point out that “Proof of Concept” is the type of story that depends on the presentation of its characters and flow of scenes to achieve the impact of its ending. Character and scene as much a milieu as technology and setting, however, there is little for the reader to anchor themselves to. The text contains a lot of em-dashes, ellipsis (ellipsi?), parantheses, brackets, and the paragraphs are generally quite brief. In other words, the novella rarely settles into itself, meaning that moments do not often come to life or build momentum—a fact proved by the sudden, quiet ending. The ending in fact fitting the heart of the story (Jones’ accomplishes her mission intelligently), it nevertheless lacks the impact it could have had were the preceding story organized with fluid purpose. What stands is a matte photo of a busy scene.
In the end, “Proof Concept” has interesting ideas regarding the perception of society and the channels which we allow ourselves to view it, but given the manner in which Jones presents her story, feels almost schizophrenic, the other ideas packed on lost in the jumble. A story that deserves to be stretched out to truly breathe, it is caught between the desire to be coy and yet explain things—a juxtaposition never fully resolved by the sylistic approach. The final result is familiar genre material wearing a tangle of clothes.
I read the first two chapters of this novel and was immediately into it, despite the fact I had no clue what was going on. I was under the impression that everything going on would become clearer as the plot unfolded. That’s… not exactly what happened. In fact, I’m even more confused than when I started out.
Proof of Concept follows Kir, a girl saved from post-apocalyptic Earth by a super-genius scientist who puts an Artificial Intelligence computer in her brain. For some reason, because this happened when she was still very young, this stunted her growth and I suppose, her ability to conceptualise everyday situations. Either that, or the character development and explanations within the narrative are so flat, Jones misses the point entirely… Anyway, Kir sets off on this experiment expedition to subspace, where they’re looking for somewhere new for humanity to settle. That’s barely what I was able to decipher from this plot and even that I’m unsure of.
This novel feels like what would happen if a scientist, with no previous background in writing fiction, wrote a book. There are people, doing sciency things, and the readers are just expected to understand what the author means with very little to go on. Because Kir’s so emotionally stunted and insular, we don’t get the full scope of exactly what’s going on in terms of anything happening around her. Which is maybe the point. But this suffers from the same issues as Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, as well as any novel involving characters completely lacking in social cues. There are too many instances where Jones drops an interesting little nugget of information and I want to delve into it further, but then it’s gone again, and I’m left with nothing to go on. I have no clue what this experiment they’re doing is. I don’t understand the population control situation. I don’t have any grasp on the simulated intimacy that apparently goes on between coworkers… I just don’t understand.
I think the biggest reason this narrative struggles so hard with it’s plot is because it’s way too short. The plot and world building is stretched way too thin across a 175 page novella. There is not enough room there to fully develop characters and the experiment they’re doing, as well as a full breakdown of the futuristic setting. This is something I find most science fiction novels suffer from. Either there’s not enough background information for casual readers to latch onto or there’s far too much to fully appreciate the plot. With Proof of Concept, it feels like Jones took the iceberg principle, wherein an author should develop characters and world building as much as possible, but only show what the readers absolutely must know to understand the plot, and cut out far too much of all her development. She may know exactly what all her characters’ motivations are and how they relate to each other, and what kind of dystopian world we’re in, and how the science works, but she doesn’t share that with the reader. She simply assumes that we already know.
We can’t read your mind, Gwyneth Jones. You have to spell it out for us.
Another really weird tonal thing going on is the fact that this is a murder mystery? I don’t read many murder mysteries (haven’t read a single Agatha Christie novel in my life…) but if I did, I’d want to be at least emotionally attached to these people before they die. There’s no buildup and no real character development for anyone who died, so I didn’t particularly care if they lived or not. It wasn’t shocking, it was just there.
I went into this expecting there to be some Lovecraftian spookiness to it. And I think Jones was really reaching for it, but didn’t quite reach the mark. I was expecting some The Descent level scare-fests. They’re going deep, deep down into these caves, where maybe there are some pre-civilisation humanoids living down there. I wanted people to be picked off one by one that way. I wanted the AI in Kir’s head to take over and really mess things up in a disturbing way without her realising he’s controlling her mind. Give me some “I’m sorry, I can’t let you do that” realness! That’s what I wanted out of this novel!
I wanted a straight up space science horror novel and that’s not what this was at all.
I found the amount of in-universe jargon used for worldbuilding was just about impenetrable. Your mileage may vary, but I prefer more actual story and less futuristic technobabble.
Sadly, I didn't get on well with Proof of Concept. I loved the blurb, but read a little more into it than it intended to imply. Once I got my head around the simpler set-up (no actual manipulation of dreams here to keep the population compliant except in the more usual sense of mass media), I'm always up for a story about getting to the stars. However, I found the opening chapter difficult to latch on to - less in media res than in media it's hard to tell what is going on - and never really warmed to the narrative. I liked Kir's habit of fleeing the habitat for the empty caverns it was sat in; I never felt any of the other characters came alive or gained definition. Ultimately, that was my problem - it fell flat for me, failing to engage as a human story or deceive as a thriller. It was at best okay, and I will explore the author's other work on the strength of her reputation rather than on the strength of this outing.
30% in, and I have no idea what's going on. The narrative is all over the place, the dialogue is clunky, and the story just isn't capturing me. This is a short read, but I'm giving up after two chapters. Thanks to Tor for the NetGalley ARC, but this novella just isn't for me.
DNF.
I'm not sure if it's my reading comprehension or the book at fault, but I did have some trouble understanding the technology and political background to this. There's stuff which is obvious (overcrowding has forced people into hive-like cities, people want to go to nearby habitable planets) and then there's the science and the politics of funding the venture and... whatever all that means.
However, on the personal level it worked: Kir's connection with Margrethe, her difficult relationship with Bill, her half-a-relationship with the computer in her own head, Altair. The hothouse effect of the confined living space felt real, as did the consternation spreading through the group. The ending worked as well, though it felt a little rushed.
Overall, not the most effective of the Tor.com novellas, but that's a pretty high bar to try and clear. It was entertaining enough to keep me reading.
[Review link active from 6th April 2017.]