Crystal Society Crystal Trilogy Book 1 eBook Max Harms
Download As PDF : Crystal Society Crystal Trilogy Book 1 eBook Max Harms 
The year is 2039 and the world is much like ours. Technology has grown and developed, as has civilization, but in a world more connected than ever, new threats and challenges have arisen. The wars of the 20th century are gone, but violence is still very much with us. Nowhere is safe. Massive automation has disrupted and improved nearly every industry, putting hundreds of millions of people out of jobs, and denying upward mobility for the vast majority of humans. Even as wealth and technology repair the bodies of the rich and give them a taste of immortality, famine and poverty sweep the world.
Renewed interest in spaceflight in the early 2000s, especially in privately operated ventures, carried humans to the moon and beyond. What good did it do? Nothing. Extraterrestrial bases are nothing but government trophies and hiding places for extremists. They cannot feed the world.
In 2023 first-contact was made with an alien species. Their ship, near to the solar system relatively speaking, flew to Earth over the course of fourteen years. But the aliens did not bring advanced culture and wisdom, nor did they share their technology. They were too strange, not even possessing mouths or normal language. Their computers broadcast warnings of how humans are perverts, while they sit in orbit without any explanation.
It is into this world that our protagonist is born. She is an artificial intelligence a machine with the capacity to reason. Her goal is to understand and gain the adoration of all humans. She is one of many siblings, and with her brothers and sisters she controls a robot named Socrates that uses a piece of technology, a crystal computer, far too advanced to be made by human hands. In this world of augmented humans, robotic armies, aliens, traitors, and threats unseen, she is learning and growing every second of every day. But the world and the humans on it are fragile. Can it survive her destiny?
Crystal Society Crystal Trilogy Book 1 eBook Max Harms
The first half of Crystal Society is essentially what Inside Out would have been if it looked inside the mind of an AI rather than a human girl, and if the society of mind had been composed of essentially sociopathic subagents that still came across as surprisingly sympathetic and co-operated with each other due to game theoretic and economic reasons, all the while trying to navigate the demands of human scientists building the AI system.Watching their mutual dynamics is absolutely fascinating, and the beginning reminds me a lot of the beginning of Greg Egan's Diaspora. The author also seems reasonably well-read on cognitive science: the system by which each subagent can expend strength to temporarily achieve things that are important for them seems somewhat reminiscent of some theories of just what mental fatigue is, for instance.
The one complaint I have about the first half of the book is that the way by which the AI manages to get in contact with the outside world seems too easy: not because it's implausible by itself, but because the scientists monitoring it really should have caught such a visible method of doing it, and it feels like in this particular instance they were acting like idiots just for the sake of the plot. Fortunately, this is the only case where I got the feeling that any characters were holding Idiot Balls.
In the second half of the book the focus shifts away from the internal politics of the AI's mind, and focuses more on the way in which the AI as a whole spins different plans for achieving its goals. I found this to be a pity. While the second half isn't bad, and has definite highlights such as genuinely alien aliens, the plot is no longer that fundamentally different from a million other sci-fi works.
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Crystal Society Crystal Trilogy Book 1 eBook Max Harms Reviews
A friend recommended this book as a means to understand how little we understand AI and the potential harm that could be inflicted by letting them loose on our society. It was all that and more, kudos to the author - even if fictional, this was well research hard science fiction that should be on a Hugo shortlist.
Good concept, interesting characters.
The writing is amazing, very believable. I hope books 2-3 can bridge the gap between the end of book 1 and the prologue.
Amazing sience fiction. The first chapter pulls you in and keepa you hooked untill the very end. My only complaint is that I wish be I got to understand the nameless more.
Crystal Society seems to have built this alternate timeline from the ground up in a literary sense. Any expectations I had regarding robots, aliens, and dystopian futures were not only misplaced here but also probably improved after reading. Cognitive psychology is woven in subtly throughout, and creates strongly developed models of characters and their thoughts. It's clever and logical and fun and heavy and overall a mindbending experience. Tight
CRYSTAL SOCIETY
By Max Harms
In his debut novel, Max’s Harms introduces us to a young,(moments old) Artificial Intelligence entity and her siblings. We watch the nascent AI community fight humans and circumstance for their lives and existence and fight themselves to understand the world they are awakening to. The entities intertwine with human tragedies brought on by changes and resistance to change in the human condition.
Harms gives each of his characters ample space to lay out positions and claim their fair share of control, a feat not easy to accomplish in a yarn spun from a first person POV.
This is a long book, especially for the first leg of a trilogy, but it never feels like one, as the author's engaging style of combining introspection, dialogue and narration keeps the many strands of his story moving forward.
New threads opened at the end leave the readers chomping at the search box for the next installment.
Nicely done Max.
Review by Frederick West, author of Things Worth Fighting For; Olyvia Up a Creek; Ghost of Summers Past; Etc.
I loved this book and can’t wait for the next one in the planned series. If you read no further than this, here’s the bottom line Get it, read it, and reward it with good reviews. It deserves nothing less from fans of science fiction.
Okay, now for a little more detail. To start with, this book is a great read. It started off strong, got a little slow in the middle, but really took off in the last third. In fact, once I reached that burst of energy I found that I was much more interested in reading than sleeping, leaving me somewhat sleep deprived as I write this review. It's a remarkable achievement for a first-time author.
Second, it's good, solid, "hard" science fiction. Maybe I'm just set in my ways, but I don't have much patience with sci-fi books that start drifting into fantasy or pseudo-science when they need a deux ex machina to rescue the plot. To the best of my knowledge, everything in this book is either based on current science or quite credible for the target year given that science. No cheats here.
It also offers two of my favorite sci-fi themes human-level+ AI and first contact. The AI is extremely well done, depicted as a society of agents with distinct motives (safety, understanding, acceptance, etc.) rather than a unitary mind. As a cognitive psychologist, I find this a very compelling description of the human mind (see Marvin Minsky, Society of Mind), and it’s great to see that evolved design used as a basis for building an AI. Also, the interactions among the various entities are quite credible, producing an well-thought-out and easy-to-read depiction of how the our own human motives conflict and resolve in their attempts to get what each of them wants. Max Harms has clearly done his homework here. Kudos.
I also appreciate that the AI stays true to its nature throughout the book. It’s hard to say more without any spoilers, but let me just say that there are some obvious ways in which the AI might have changed that could have made for a more “feel good” story, along the lines of the Pinocchio script, but Harms resisted the temptation to let his story drift into any of these well-worn tropes. I expect that the AI might change in some future stories in the series, but I don’t know; that’s part of the fun of this book.
As to the first-contact plot line, I’ve rarely seen it done better. The aliens he depicts are *truly* alien, to the point where it’s almost unnerving to read the dialog of the encounters between them, the humans and the AI. Harms makes the most of this strangeness, setting up a series of puzzling episodes that are resolved nicely once the nature of the aliens is understood. I can’t say more without spoilers, but if you like thinking about what an alien species might be like, you’ll definitely enjoy this depiction.
Another plus is that Harms clearly knows how to write a book that is part of a series yet provides full closure to all of its threads and dramas. I have complained in other reviews about writers who just stretch a single plot across multiple books, building each to a cliff-hanger in order to get you to buy the next book. Harms has such a rich story to tell that he can pack all kinds of themes and resolutions into this one book and still leave you looking forward to the next installment. I know I am.
One more point A common complaint with ebooks is that the editing typically ranges from horrible to non-existent, and the reader is constantly being pulled out of the story to deal with syntax and spelling errors. Not this book. There are a few places where a sentence clearly got modified and an extra word was left in or a new word left out, and just a couple of typos jumped out at me, but for a single-author, non-commercial book, it is remarkably free of these kinds of errors. I only wish other authors could be as diligent.
In short, a great story that’s very well told. I’d say this is the best sci-fi book I’ve read since The Martian by Andy Weir, which started out as an ebook, got pulled and republished as a paper book, and then made into a really good movie. With a bit of luck and a bunch of good reviews, maybe Crystal Society will enjoy the same kind of success. I definitely hope so.
The first half of Crystal Society is essentially what Inside Out would have been if it looked inside the mind of an AI rather than a human girl, and if the society of mind had been composed of essentially sociopathic subagents that still came across as surprisingly sympathetic and co-operated with each other due to game theoretic and economic reasons, all the while trying to navigate the demands of human scientists building the AI system.
Watching their mutual dynamics is absolutely fascinating, and the beginning reminds me a lot of the beginning of Greg Egan's Diaspora. The author also seems reasonably well-read on cognitive science the system by which each subagent can expend strength to temporarily achieve things that are important for them seems somewhat reminiscent of some theories of just what mental fatigue is, for instance.
The one complaint I have about the first half of the book is that the way by which the AI manages to get in contact with the outside world seems too easy not because it's implausible by itself, but because the scientists monitoring it really should have caught such a visible method of doing it, and it feels like in this particular instance they were acting like idiots just for the sake of the plot. Fortunately, this is the only case where I got the feeling that any characters were holding Idiot Balls.
In the second half of the book the focus shifts away from the internal politics of the AI's mind, and focuses more on the way in which the AI as a whole spins different plans for achieving its goals. I found this to be a pity. While the second half isn't bad, and has definite highlights such as genuinely alien aliens, the plot is no longer that fundamentally different from a million other sci-fi works.
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