The Fear Index – Robert Harris

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The Fear Index is a sci-fi thriller—or maybe not so sci-fi. The plot revolves around the hedge fund algorithm developed by a brilliant former CERN physicist who runs a phenomenally successful hedge fund based in Geneva. Dr. Alex Hoffmann’s brainchild, VIXAL-4, scans astonishing amounts of Internet data including the “fear index,” a measure of the volatility of market fluctuations in response to fear trigger words in the media. The fear index is an excellent tool for predicting gains and losses in the market. The computer program is so advanced that it is a kind of artificial intelligence that continually becomes more efficient—you can see where this is going.

Anyway, an odd and near-deadly break-in at the Hoffmann gated estate results in Hoffmann’s head taking a serious bashing and an almost retired cop poking around in his personal and hedge fund business. Hoffmann saw the assailant and now he glimpses the man everywhere, and is afraid he may be going crazy. A first edition of a Darwin book arrives at his home although he claims not to have purchased it. In the book is an early photograph of a test subject that looks uncannily like the attacker. The Amsterdam bookseller’s records show Hoffmann emailed an order and transferred funds from a personal bank account he didn’t know he had in the Cayman Islands.

With a headful of stitches and a doctor’s futile admonition to remain in the hospital under observation for 24 hours, Hoffmann goes to the office with his partner, the charming and voluble public “face” of the firm, Hugo Quarry. The two partners are scheduled to present their latest software iteration to favored investors in hopes of raising a billion or so for increased investment. Gabrielle, Hoffman’s wife, collects pieces from her studio at home for the opening of her first gallery exhibit and worries about what is happening to her marriage and her life. When Hoffmann finally makes it to the champagne launch at the gallery, an anonymous buyer wires funds to acquire every single piece of Gabrielle’s work, unheard of and highly suspect for an emerging artist. She confronts Hoffmann, who denies it, and is furious.

And so it goes. Stranger and stranger occurrences pile up over the day as the market and the hedge fund both begin to act oddly. The fund unloads shares of an airline that looks healthy hours before a catastrophic plane crash that sends its stocks plummeting. The algorithm steadily erodes the “hedge” that protects the fund from devastating losses but the fund is making multiple millions of dollars and Quarry is loathe to override the computer system to decrease risk. Hoffmann takes off in search of his assailant and Gabrielle is confronted with shocking secrets about the man she has been married to for seven years.

The Fear Index is a very taut, anxiety-producing novel with a very accessible amount of detail about how investing and markets work. It operates in the land of the ethers—extremely high wealth, extremely high risk, way out there science and a boatload of people at various stops on the autism spectrum. You can read it in one sitting and you might because it is hard to put down. As the financial world spins out of control and Hoffmann grows ever more paranoid, the evil mastermind of the international threat becomes harder to pin down. Harris’s book is scary—you may not have personal billions at risk but, in the world of VIXAL-4, your whole world is at risk of implosion and there isn’t a single thing you could ever do to prevent it.     

The Fear Index   Robert Harris | Alfred A. Knopf   2012

The Lighthouse Land – Adrian McKinty

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The Lighthouse Land is a science fiction first-of-series by Adrian McKinty that is probably tagged as a YA novel. It’s not in the angst and sex tradition of formula Young Adult lit so it will work for younger children, too, and I enjoyed it—one of those ageless stories that are just great escapist reading.

Jamie O’Neill hasn’t spoken since the cancer specialists removed his left arm, saving his life, and his father decamped from Manhattan to the West Coast to live with his girlfriend. His mom moved the two of them to a ratty Harlem apartment with cheapo rent, spotty heat, a resident bully and holes in the ceiling, to make ends meet. Ends don’t often meet—the medical bills aren’t covered by insurance and dear old dad is a deadbeat with a new house and a new wife. So Jamie has nothing at all to say.

Then mom inherits a tiny island off the coast of Ireland with an ancient lighthouse, a half-submerged causeway to the mainland, a title and a modest trust. Jamie bids farewell to his elderly chess partner and good friend from the local library, Thaddeus, and the adventure begins. It’s a real adventure. Their new cottage is safe, solid and comfortable; the lighthouse is a thousand-year-old ruin that predates the Vikings; a friend from the regional high school is a math whiz and a cool guy; and Thaddeus has given Jamie a laptop that speaks typed conversations aloud so he can communicate better until he finds his voice again.

All would be well in this new adventure, until the boys discover a secret room at the top of the lighthouse tower with a strange golden device that might be the fabled magical Salmon—and it is, of course, and it is also a port key that opens a wormhole to another planet in a galaxy with two moons and a civilization in peril. Jamie, the future Laird of Muck Island, is a descendent of the Ui Neills, the last of the Irish kings. On a clandestine visit to the distant land, he discovers that the daughter of a local leader has been waiting in a lighthouse on a coastal island for the legendary Ui Niells to return to help her people deflect a raid from barbarians who arrive in massive ships made of glaciers.

The Lighthouse Land is a great quest with all the requisite strategic planning, hopeless lack of battle technology to defeat the invaders, kids on their own facing down enormous peril, the beginnings of a love interest, time running out (not to mention the inexplicable battery on the wormhole-creating Salmon), outrageous attempts to frighten and defeat the iceship marauders, and a few strange tokens of an endangered world with odd animals and appealing, human-like people. Jamie and his friend Ramsay are in as much danger as the people they are trying to save. More to come in this saga—it’s a trilogy—and I suspect the second and third books will be as entertaining to read.       

The Lighthouse Land (Lighthouse Trilogy)    Adrian McKinty | Amulet Books   2007

Embassytown – China Mieville

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Embassytown by China Miéville is a real mindbender. I’ve read other works of his and found it possible to slip inside his challenging constructions fairly quickly. Not this time. Embassytown is science fiction at the edge of the known universe. All the trappings of the genre are there—but shaken, shifted and synthesized into something so original that it requires new maps.

Avice Benner Cho is a human raised in a protected colony on a planet at the far reaches of explored space. She lives in a futuristic civilization in which children are raised in pods by surrogate parents, time is measured in kilohours, the space between planets is known as the immer and odd-looking indigenous creatures, the Hosts, allow the human outpost. They are advanced, sentient, hoofed and winged life forms who communicate with their guests through specially-engineered humans, identical clone pairs called ambassadors. The aliens—strange word as Arieka is their planet after all—are Ariekei and their communication is unique. They can only speak the truth—there is no concept of falsehood or ability to lie in their intelligence or culture. Avice can’t speak their language—called Language in the book—but she is a part of it. As a child she was made into a simile, a bit of grammar that allows the Ariekei and the ambassadors to converse.

Language, how it shapes a civilization and how it can be subverted, is the center of the story. The ambassadors are two speakers who function as one to mimic the Ariekei idiom, which is set in tiny, italicized typography as a word over a word in the text. They speak doublespeak, literally and symbolically. Betrayal triggers the unraveling of relations and there are layers of betrayal that go far beyond language.

Avice leaves Arieka and travels for years throughout space but eventually returns to Embassytown, just as it is on the cusp of cataclysmic change. She has to sift through competing loyalties to her husband, her lovers, her native culture, authority that is untrustworthy, aliens who are more like her than she can imagine. There is a cascading series of calamities that brings Embassytown and its environs to the brink of annihilation—and Avice is the key to eventual salvation or devastation.

The novel is a surprisingly gripping read. I say surprisingly because Miéville is so deeply enmeshed in this world that the language he creates to describe it to us is abstruse, the concept is bewildering and events refuse to sort themselves out neatly. You surrender your ticket and hang on for dear life because you can’t see where the plot is going, although it’s a great ride. This was a tough book to read in a day—many of the terms are invented and resist deciphering. The future society portrayed has moved beyond conventional assumptions of gender-determined behavior so social interaction is not predictable. There are no shortcuts, no comfortable context from which to draw clues. My strategy was to glide over the incomprehensible bits, searching for the overall sense of the story, and let meaning reveal itself as it would. That worked pretty well. It was mesmerizing to follow a story that zigged just when it might have zagged and never allowed me to hazard a guess about what would happen next. Honestly, I was kept busy enough trying to figure out what was happening in the scene I was reading.

There are more accessible Miéville books but, while Embassytown is not for the easily daunted or the faint of heart, I liked it. I would recommend to it intelligent friends who enjoy engaging with a work of literature from time to time. Engage: to cross weapons; to enter into conflict; to attract and hold fast.

Embassytown   China Miéville | Del Rey  2011