Halo Paperback – June 1, 2004

I’m a fan of Tom Maddox, even though his output over the years has been humble. According to his online isfdb bibliography, his entire body of fiction consists of one pretty thin novel and eight short stories (eight titles, anyway, but given that one is likely only an excerpt from his novel and another is only a few paragraphs long, they’re eight titles that present more like six distinct offerings.) One of those eight (six) stories, 1992’s Gravity’s Angel, is my all-time favorite short sci-fi piece, and is also the last story that I know him to have written. Gravity’s Angel is sort of a black sheep among Maddox tales, since the older five all fall much more succinctly in the cyberpunk vein. They are very much a product of the (dare I say classic?) nineteen-eighties, Gibson-tinged cyberpunk foundation rock, the sort of pre-internet, pre-smartphone cyberpunk that authors were writing back when it was all still speculative and fantastic, and nobody was obligated to first debate whether or not it was still an extant genre. Halo, published in 1991, exudes that hip, and by now sadly retro, eighties cyberpunk air, and it’s a masterful if not a bit too slim representative specimen of what that era could produce. The themes and setting of this novel are very reminiscent of those of the seven-years-older Neuromancer, William Gibson’s multi-award winning novel and cyberpunk gospel text. That shouldn’t be surprising; Maddox and Gibson were both filling the pages of OMNI magazine during the eighties, they’ve since collaborated on scripts for two computer-themed episodes of X-Files, and Maddox even lists Gibson as one of his best friends on the author gratitude page at the end of Halo. That said, it would be wrong to try to pass Maddox off as a Gibson copycat. The two were contemporaries up until the point where Maddox more or less dropped off the sci-fi radar, but to read them side-by-side it’s plain that, although they may have farmed neighboring fields, they each spoke with their own voice and cultivated their own crop. And they do complement each other well; if you liked Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy of Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive, it’s not a stretch to say that you’d enjoy Maddox’s Halo, too, and vice-versa.Halo is actually a continuation/augmentation of two of Maddox’s short stories, both of which were originally published in OMNI in the mid-eighties. The first of those two, 1985’s The Mind Like a Strange Balloon, established the AI called Aleph. Aleph was incorporated into Athena station, a small research and industrial space station in orbit of Earth. In that story, Aleph seemed to be mildly malfunctioning, but was actually beginning, through interface with a blind scientist named Diana Heywood, to evolve beyond its design into something more intelligent and less artificial. In that story, Jerry Chapman was a troubleshooter sent to Athena station by SenTrax, the megacorp that designed and installed the system. Aleph, Chapman, and Heywood are all returning characters in Halo. They are joined by Lizzie Jordan, a character pulled from the second of Maddox’s Aleph-centered short stories, 1986’s Snake Eyes. In that story, Aleph was still on Athena station, and was continuing to interface directly with human minds in order to broaden its potential. The events of Snake Eyes aren’t as important to the plot of Halo as the events of Strange Balloon are, but Maddox provides enough back story that a reader who has read neither of the two predecessor tales should still have absolutely no trouble following this one.By the beginning of Halo, the Aleph AI has been transferred to Halo City, a vastly larger and more complicated deep space habitat orbiting distantly at L5 (a Lagrange point; check your Wikipedia.) Aleph now has a small community of people with whom it has voluntarily connected. Just like in the first two stories, Aleph’s chosen symbiots tend to be people with neurological maladies or quirks, misfits and savants who often gain a higher degree of functionality through interfacing, while simultaneously broadening Aleph’s sampling of human cognizance and consciousness. As a group they call themselves the “interface collective.” Socially withdrawn and exhibiting some of the characteristics of a hive mind, the interface collective is represented by Lizzie Jordan. Unlike in Snake Eyes, Jordan is now fully mentally sound in this book and she serves to speak for and advocate for the interests of the collective within the day-to-day operation of Halo City. The story of Halo centers on the fate of Jerry Chapman, who is comatose and slowly dying as a result of some particularly nasty food poisoning. Jerry’s dormant body has been taken to Halo, and has been plugged into Aleph in what is simultaneously an attempt to keep him alive and a SenTrax-sanctioned experiment with long-term human-Aleph interface. Heywood, no longer blind, wants to go to Halo to oversee the process. Before medical science restored her eyes, she used to plug into Aleph’s systems to piggyback them as a substitute for natural eyesight. This, along with the fact that she and Chapman were lovers, gives her vital interest in the Chapman/Aleph experiment. However, because her unauthorized work within Aleph ultimately led to her being discharged, the SenTrax board doesn’t really trust her to play by their rules. They recruit a man named Mikhail Gonzales to act as an official observer for the Chapman project. Gonzales, a character who did not appear in either of the short predecessor tales, is the main character of Halo. Gonzales is an auditor by trade, and in order to efficiently review complex corporate systems and records, he frequently connects directly to computer systems through use of an egg-shaped liquid-filled chamber reminiscent of the isolation tank from the movie Altered States. While inside his egg, Gonzales enters a voluntary and temporary stasis, not wholly unlike Chapman’s coma. Gonzales is also carrying around a little mental baggage of his own – returning from a recent audit in Myanmar, his plane was attacked and very nearly shot down. He didn’t really get a chance to come to terms with his own near death before SenTrax sent him to Halo City, and the trauma still hangs in his mind.After arriving at Halo City, Gonzales uses his egg to link with Aleph. He experiences Aleph’s machine space, a virtual environment of a lakeside cabin where Gonzales, Jordan, Heywood, Chapman, and Aleph itself all embody humanoid avatars. Gonzales’s virtual assistant program is also adopted by Aleph, and acquires its own anthropoid avatar. What started sweet soon turns sour, though. The conflict in Halo begins when SenTrax, embodied by a board hopeful named Traynor, starts to throw their weight around in the administration of Aleph’s meld with Chapman. Traynor eventually has Chapman’s body unplugged from Aleph completely, although his consciousness remains a part of the system. Aleph responds by abandoning its role in regulating Halo City’s environment, which can’t support the population indefinitely in lieu of Aleph’s oversight. Gonzales and the others need to resolve the stand-off and come to full understanding of Aleph’s dilemma, the true nature of the interface collective, and Chapman and Aleph’s shared destiny, before Halo City dies from the inside out.Halo is a pretty quick read. Its 214 pages are pretty anorexic by today’s standards, and it has more of the feel of a beefier, bulkier version of one of its two predecessors. Without splitting the hairs of when a novelette begets a novella or a novella begets a novel, I’d say that this is definately a novel that reads like a really long short story. Very much a product of its era, the book is showing its age by now, but it’s still a great read if you pine for eighties and nineties cyberpunk. It’s not a high action book, and shouldn’t be approached as one. The focus of the story is on the interconnection of the human mind with the machine mind, and the trade-off between Aleph and its growing collective. Altered consciousness is also a big part of the theme, be it the glaring contrast between Chapman’s comatose body outside the virtual space and his restored vitality within it, or the trippiness experienced by Gonzales as he penetrates deeper into the backstage culture (and fungiculture) of the interface collective. Death, birth, and rebirth frequently shade the tale – Gonzales’s near-miss at his own mortality over Myanmar, the techno-womb of his fluid-filled interface egg, the emergence of fresh consciousness in Gonzales’s and Traynor’s virtual assistants, Chapman’s death and rebirth linked to Aleph’s need to redefine itself as something more than it was created to be. Halo may be a quick read with a thin spine, but it’s neither shallow nor underdeveloped. I can’t say why Maddox stopped writing fiction, but having enjoyed the small body of work that he did generate, I can say that for whatever reason he put his pen down, print science fiction is the worse off for it. Halo, together with its predecessor stories or on its own, is a sliver of classic cyberpunk worth savoring.

I found Halo to be an excellent extrapolation of the way an AI could kinda evolve out of a complex set of computer systems, and thought it dealt really well the kind of growing pains that this might entail.It also pre-saged a notion I'd encountered before - that when an AI did come forth, people might worship it as they might a god.. and that the best way to detect it might be to look for such cult-like behaviour.The playful nature of AI, Aleph also reminds me of the Rabbit character in Rainbow's End.This, and the fact that was by'n'large non-distopian in subject makes me file it under post-cyberpunk. But it does share the same love affair with pseudo-Zen philosophy that inhabits Neuromancer and Metrophage.

Halo is a great cyberpunk novel. Though it's not as ambitious as Neuromancer, as egotistic as Snow Crash, or as neomythic as Schismatrix, it's quite good in its own right. Maddox's writing is vivid and exquisite. His characters are somewhat 3-dimensional although none are the antihero of most cyberpunk.Of course, characters are just a method of getting across philosophical ideas. Maddox delves deeply into two major philosophies, one, what makes intelligence, and the other, the buddhist concept that self is irrelevant but that we're all subjective expressions of one commonality. He talks about the ethics of artificial intelligence, and our responsibility to AIs we create.Maddox's Halo is the flip side of Gibson's Neuromancer. Maddox shows the potential that exists from cooperation, the potential of non-hostile AIs, and the potential of simulacra as alternate realities.Though not necessarily a good book for sheer entertainment, I'd highly recommend it to anyone interested in reading a deep philosophical work.

This book had all the makings to be something good but falls tragically short. Not funny not interesting and it barely kept me interested enough to read it. It had some good concepts of AI but never got in depth enough with them and the characters were lackluster and boring. Read this if you absolutly have nothing better to read.

The structure and style of Tom Maddox's prose make this an intriguing read. In addition, the fast-moving plot keeps you reading, and the philosophical references expand your brain. I liked this book a lot. It's not the standard fare, but it's definitely thought-provoking. If you want your eyebrows raised and your staus quo disturbed, if you're tired of the same old same old, this is a book for you.

This book is incredible. The character of Mikhail Gonzales is very easy to like. The scenes involving the zen theories of Toshi are the standout sections in my mind (the chapter "Your Buddha Nature" is the best). It's a cleaner type of fiction than, say, Gibson. Not gritty around the edges, but it is very smart, enjoyable reading. Try to take your time.