Protektor

Behind its modest appearence and lack of originality lies a little gem. Don't expect great revelations, it's only entertainment with a subtle social background that reminds Ian Banks' 'culture' books. The plot is simple, and the characters almost cardboard, but everything works as a well greased engine. Very satisfactory.

600 years from now human civilisation, known to its contemporaries as the Protektorate, has spread throughout the Galaxy to encompass some 100,000 inhabited worlds. Citizens of the Protektorate enjoy biological immortality, eternal youth, and a level of wealth that affords them as much self-indulgent leisure time as they wish - employment of any sort is entirely voluntary. Humans no longer govern themselves, having long ago decided to turn that task over to incorruptible, highly efficient and completely benevolent artificial intelligences whose primary goal is to ensure the happiness and well being of its charges. Life is very safe, and very dull. Until, of course, something goes wrong. That's where people like Tom McCray, the narrator and eponymous hero of this novel, come in. McCray is a Protektorate troubleshooter, one of an elite body of humans tasked with investigating and resolving malfunctions in the vast computer networks that sustain the worlds of the Protektorate, everything from garbage disposal to power grids to aerial traffic control. The novel takes place on the pleasure planet Agorima, home to a little over one million hedonistic tourists and permanent residents, where minor glitches and failures in the governing computer network have led to an increasing occurrence of inexplicable accidents. When an aeriel vehicle, supposedly under computer control, drops out of the sky, crashing into the ground and killing its occupants, Tom McCray is dispatched from the Galactic centre, beginning an investigation to discover the cause. Accompanied by his android assistant, and recruiting a smart news reporter to assist him, he discovers that someone has inserted a deadly virus into Agorima's computer systems. If the virus is not purged within two days those computer systems will be corrupted to the point that systems vital to the survival of the residents of Agorima will begin to malfunction, leading to starvation and death on a planet-wide scale. Drawing up a short-list of five powerful and influential Agoriman individuals who are hostile to the Protektorate form of governance, hostile enough perhaps to attempt to destroy it totally, McCray and his companions must work quickly to locate the source of the virus and then destroy it, utilising the vast Protektorate-madated resources at their disposal, before it is too late... I quite enjoyed this book, the second of Charles Platts' novels which I have read, the other being the excellent and superior The Silicon Man. Platt does a fine job in constructing a believable future universe, although it is not one I would wish to visit for any length of time. The human civilisation he depicts is decadent, sluggish and rather torpid; all scientific progress has been halted by the governing artificial intelligences. They have been programmed by their human creators to be self-perpetuating, and since "dangerous" technologies like sentient machine intelligences and unrestricted nanotechnologies would threaten

This is one of the few books that presented a realistic extension of today's developments in computers and society into the distant future. It raised a lot of issues but was also a lot of action and fun. A computer hacker crime story on a global scale, I recommend it.