Ramez Naam

Until about six weeks ago, I had never heard of Ramez Naam. He's not a celebrity. At least not yet. He is an author, who at one time was a senior software development executive at Microsoft.

Ramez Naam

After I read a review of Naam's book, The Infinite Resource, I decided to  read it myself.  I've read a fair number of what I would call the 'Earth is in deep trouble and here's how we make it right' books. As these things go, Naam's book is designed to reassure.

After I started reading The Infinite Resource, I learned that Naam also had two new science fiction novels recently published. The first is Nexus, and the second, a sequel, is called Crux. Anyway, I felt compelled to read both. These two novels are balls to the wall; exciting, and thoroughly engaging.  I've already published blog entries reviewing each of Naam's three books. Clicking on the titles earlier in this paragraph will take the reader to those reviews.

So, now with a little time having passed since I read Ramez Naam's books, I've been able to reflect on what motivates him. Money is not likely what he's after.  I'm guessing he has a snoot full socked away from when he was at Microsoft.  His wealth is probably what allows him to pursue a public life as a successful and influential author.  I think he wants to be influential.  I think he wants to be a change agent of the highest order.   Without question, Ramez Naam is exceedingly well informed. His choices as a writer suggest that he wants to get his readers thinking about the dysfunctional world we know. He wants to reassure them that as unsettling as things look at the moment, there is plenty of reason for hope. He wants his readers to see things through optimistic eyes, just as he does. He believes progress starts with an informed and motivated citizenry.

Naam's two novels, Nexus and Crux are very entertaining. They are also grounded very effectively in a revelatory scenario that may foreshadow a conflict that could emerge before we are halfway through the 21st century. The dark human dynamics at work in Nexus and Crux are also very much in evidence in the sociology and politics of our own time.

Ramez Naam is on his way to becoming a literary force. That will be a very good thing.  If I had his ear, I would urge him to give much of his attention to writing fiction. He's very good at it. Moreover, I would encourage him vigorously to focus his writing on stories about the times we live in now. If he does that; if he engages his readers on the vexing challenges that are impacting our world right at this moment, he can become one of the world's great champions for a life-affirming, sustainable future;  a future that reveres the natural world, while putting the welfare of the many over that of a privileged few.

Here is a link to Ramez Naam's website...  http://rameznaam.com/

The Infinite Resource

So, I read a blurb about this book on the net, and I decided to read it. The Infinite Resource by Ramez Naam is non-fiction.   Naam is a very smart guy, who likely made a fortune when he was a top software developer at Microsoft. 

Ramez Naam is also the author of two science fiction novels,  Nexus and Crux,  both of which I have read and reported on in this blog.  The way this happened is, I got a copy of The Infinite Resource, started to read it, then learned about Nexus and Crux.  So, I set aside The Infinite Resource while I read both of Naam's science fiction offerings.  All that happened in the last few weeks because Naam's writing is very engaging.  I've already reviewed the two science fiction novels in earlier blogs. This one is focused on The Infinite Resource.

What one is struck by first is the intellectual rigor of The Infinite Resource. I've read a lot of non-fiction focused on the science, economics, and politics of the greatest challenges we face as a global  civilization in the 21st millennium. Many of these books paint a very gloomy picture of the mess we humans have made of things. 

Ramez Naam's assessment of the current state of humanity and the Earth does not pull any punches. He presents climate change, resource depletion, our dangerous dependence on fossil forms of energy, and other global scale challenges in very sobering terms. Overall, however, the tone of The Infinite Resource is optimistic. Naam is definitely a guy who sees the glass half full.

Using clear and credible examples of civilization scale challenges that we've already confronted successfully, Naam effectively makes the case that the resources,  the ability, and the will to develop worthy answers to our problems already exist.  I don't agree with everything he says, but on most things, we're on the same page. Naam's arguments about nuclear power and genetically modified foods were persuasive enough to moderate my previously held views, particularly in the area of food security.  I'm still a serious skeptic on nuclear power, but my mind is a bit more open. Naam makes a compelling case for a continuing role for nuclear power, particularly for new forms of fission power that can digest radioactive waste materials generated by older nuclear plants and turn them into a form that is far less deadly over the long term.

In the last chapter of The Infinite Resource,  Ramez Naam offers four takeaways for action we, as global citizens, must pursue if we are going to solve our greatest challenges. 

1. Fix our markets to properly account for the value of the commons
2. Invest in R&D to fund long-range innovation
3. Embrace the technologies that stand poised to improve lives while bettering our planet, even when these ideas seem alien
4. Empower each of the billions of minds on this planet, to turn them into assets that can produce new ideas that benefit all of us

I like Naam's takeaways. If we followed his prescription, things would surely start to look a whole lot better.

The Infinite Resource is engagingly written and, by all appearances, impeccably researched.  It's an unambiguous warning, punctuated with hope and reassurance. I do wish the book had gone a bit further in identifying a course of action.  But I understand why it didn't.  Naam's target audience is not people like me, who are already with him. This book was written for the persuadable 40% of Americans who remain on the fence but are aware enough to know that humanity is in need of a serious course adjustment.

 Five Stars for Ramez Naam's book, The Infinite Resource.



 

Badass Neuro Shit - Part Deux

A few days ago,  I wrote a blog entry about a novel I just read titled, Nexus. It is the first novel written by a very gifted writer named, Ramez Naam.  I found that story so compelling that I went out and got a copy of the recently published sequel to Nexus, which is titled Crux.   This morning (three days later), I finished reading Crux. At 500 pages, Crux is a daunting read. But, having been drawn into the world Ramez Naam has created, I found myself unable to put the book down.

Nexus and Crux are set in the near future, the year 2040. The world Ramez Naam creates is based on real science, seriously advanced from where we are at the moment, but eminently plausible given what we already know.

If anything, Crux is even more of a wild ride than Nexus.  At the core of this relentless action adventure is a struggle between humanity as we know it, and the emergence of a new augmented reality; post-humans with strength, intelligence, resilience, capabilities far beyond the mortal limitations of the homo sapiens species that has dominated the Earth and the biosphere for the last 250,000 years.

In the future Ramez Naam as created, the ascendance of post-human intelligence is taken as a mortal threat to the cultural status quo. The established powers that be are determined to strictly limit access to advanced neural, nano, and human augmentation technologies,  except where they can use these technologies to stifle descent and manipulate history for their own benefit.

If anything, Crux is even better that it's predecessor, Nexus. The writing is crisp, lean, thoroughly engaging.   The action is gripping. The characters terrific. The abuse of power is like a dark spector driving the plot forward in both of these stories.  As with Nexus, there is much in Crux that one can see at work beneath the everyday headlines of our current era.

Crux is much more than just an entertaining read.  For that reason, like Ramez Naam's first novel, Nexus, the sequel Crux, gets five stars from this reader.  If you like science fiction, Crux is  a must read.

Badass Neuro Shit

So, I just finished reading Nexus,  a new (2013)  sci-fi novel, the first by former Microsoft executive Ramez Naam.

Here is the tease from the back cover flap...

In the near future, the experimental nano-drug nexus can cause humans to link together, mind to mind.  There are some who want to improve it. There are some who want to eradicate it. And there are others who want to exploit it.

When a young scientist is caught improving Nexus, he's thrust way over his head into a world of danger and international espionage, for there is far more at stake than anyone realizes.

Crisp, intelligent writing, delivered in highly engaging fashion.  Nexus is the badass neuro shit the story is built around. If you believe what futurists like Ray Kurzweil say,  the kind of neural connectivity fostered by Naam's fictional nano-drug, Nexus could become a reality, perhaps around the year 2040 as postulated in this story. The ramifications are mindboggling. That is precisely the point presented very effectively in this entertaining yarn.

Nexus is  Ramez Naam's first novel.  It's a very auspicious beginning.  While the story takes place about 25 years in the future,   the morality questions at play are not new. In fact, the good versus evil ambiguity at work in Nexus is very much at play on the global political stage we know today.  The most obvious similarity is in the feckless 'War on Drugs' that has devastated American society since Richard Nixon was President.

The fictional scenario Ramez Naam presents in Nexus could become a very unsettling part of the cultural landscape within a few decades. If so, will this brand of augmented reality become accessible exclusively to a privileged few or be something available openly for the benefit of society as a whole?  Will it make the world better or worse? Ramez Naam's Nexus offers useful insight into those questions, while holding the reader's attention with a relentless succession of twists and turns, punctuated by lots of pulse-pounding action.

Five stars for Nexus by Ramez Naam.