Nanotime

The concept of Nanotime alone is worth this read. Processes which take place in analog time will need to be re-thought in a Nanotime world. We are simply unprepared for the speed-of-light changes with wich we try to cope with industrial revolution tools and thinking. I hope to hear more from this visionary soon.

I enjoyed this book. We are clearly headed for an age where all digital data will be optimized. I look forward to having a "peanut-sized" personal digital assistant which can access all the world's data, and help make sense of the situations at hand. The way the story weaves in value structures and the silicon codification of our "essence" is also nicely crafted.This book presents topics which each of us will deal with in our lifetimes. An important read.

In nanotime there are some interesting ideas about what the future may hold, even if they are not to be entirely believed, according to "What will be". :-) It was fun, and I liked. It is a good book.

Kudos to Bart Kosko for his first fiction endeavor with "Nanotime". Set in the near future where oil is scarce and the world is on the brink of World War III, John Grant is hunted for capture and incarceration by US and Israeli intelligence agents after discovering a new kind of molecule that can create an unlimited supply of hydrogen fuel from water. He is eventually recruited by the Israeli Mossad to fight against a Sufi terrorist named Hamrid Tabriz whos main act of brutality is to replace the brains of his victims with nanochips that command individuals to commit acts of economic terrorism and murder. One aspect of the story I liked was Grant's computerized version of John Stuart Mill (nicknamed "Jism") who assists Grant throughout the book and saves his life a few times as well. Nanotime is defintely a tour-de-force for Kosko. It clearly shows how much of an accomplished author Bart Kosko is and is definitely worth adding to your library. The plot for the story is believable not to mention the future Kosko depicts in his book and the story flows very well which kept my interest peaked throughout the entire time I read it and I had a very hard time putting this book down. Good read.

"Nanotime" by Bart Kosko (Avon Publishers, 1997) provides a gloomy but unfortunately reasonably realistic version of the future. Sure, this book is not the first dystopia but usually, one can laugh off the gloomy predictions based on a non-scientist writer's frequent mumbo-jumbo-type free and non-sensical use of scientific words. It is not so easy to dismiss gloomy predictions coming from a professional scientist who is actually trying to design all these gadgets that his heroes and anti-heroes use. It is all too easy for one crazy dictator to start a major war and murder millions. Sci fi? So far, yes, but, alas, only too realistic. However, gloomy does not necessary mean pessimistic: the main purpose of this book is not to scare but to warn: the 21 century will definitely bring forth technological progress as our 20th did, but this technological progress does not necessarily mean that people will be happier. Our century has shown that technological progress means an easier Big Brother-type control, that progress makes it easier for one crazy dictator of a poor country to launch a war. We should be aware of it. We should try to avoid negative consequences of progress, but we should also be realistically prepared for the negative consequences. This is what Bart Kosko does, he is not only designing the gadgets, he is also on a political mission, both in his newspaper and magazine article and in this book, a mission to warn and to avoid. And after all, as bloody and gloomy as the future gets, the book ends of the positive note: the hero, often defeated, managed to survived with new micro-chip-induced power of nanotime reasoning in his brain (thence the title); not all is lost, and maybe he will even get his girlfriend and child back, and maybe the world will still become - if not a paradise on Earth, but at least - a (slightly) better place. But it won't be easy. It is a very thought-provoking book, definitely worth reading. Vladik Kreinovich