Standing Wave

Description

From Publishers Weekly In this mind-bending follow-up to Lightpaths, Hendrix sets existential philosophy on a collision course with quantum physics, presenting a 21st-century world in which the line between artificial intelligence and consciousness, between information and matter, has become so teased that the universe is about to have a space-time identity crisis. A host of characters are searching for a cyberspace murderer and seeking to understand recent mysterious cosmological occurrences. Hendrix extrapolates current social, political, and environmental conditions seamlessly into this future, but his discussions of scientific theory will many readers circling dangerously close to their own "information density singularity." Dialogue consists mainly of characters trying to explain the inexplicable: "The noosphere is becoming involuted into what Teilhard called a Hyperpersonal Consciousness... Matter and consciousness will reach the terminal phase of their convergent integration and become one." It also doesn't help that events and concepts are often explained long after initial references to them have befuddled readers. Still, Hendrix's postulation that "Everything happens twice?first as theology, then as technology" is compelling and worth the struggle to keep up with him. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review Deeply felt (no doubt), cautious, and philosophical, STANDING WAVE is also rich, fearless, and ultimately powerful. Critic F.R. Leavis once said, "what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them." The noise that can be heard [on reading STANDING WAVE] is that of past texts reshuffling themselves into a new order. -- Nova Express, Fall/Winter 1999