A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor is a sequel to An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, which I reviewed last month. These books are similar but different, if you know what I mean. I very much enjoyed both of them, but I would never have gotten as much out of the sequel if I hadn’t read the first volume — so don’t skip it!

It’s hard to know what I can say here without committing spoilers. I’ll settle for a few quotations and a few random comments.

First of all, there are a couple of ways in which I am reminded of Isaac Asimov’s writing. The style is intentionally transparent, so the reader can ignore the style and go right through it to the content. Second, there are indirect references to Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics; for instance, Carl, the extraterrestrial robot, says at one point “I can’t kill anyone, I can’t violate the norms of your system.”Echoes here of Star Trek’s Prime Directive, perhaps?

“Carl lets people die all day and all night. But Carl cannot kill. And how they find the line between those things, I don’t know, but they can, and that is maybe the most terrifying thing about them.” And there are definitely echoes of Ready Player One, and of the movie made from it, but I can’t tell you how they’re connected without violating reviewers’ rules. Sorry about that.

As was also the case in An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, Green here provides many indirect allusions to current events. He usually does this quite subtly, so the allusions could well go right past you if you aren’t ready for them. One that’s not subtle is “Who gives the CEO of Twitter the right to say what can and can’t be said on that platform?” Speaking of which, the antagonist of both volumes, Peter Petrawicki, is clearly based on Elon Musk — clearly in my mind at any rate, though your mileage may vary.

A good point about podcasts:

Podcasts were nice because they lasted a long time. When you did a radio or TV interview, you had to squish every thought into five or ten minutes. Everything was talking points and nothing was nuance. Podcasts gave you time. You could think together with the host, and it felt natural.

And another allusion:

It only takes one person shooting their way into a nightclub to change the story. We gave everyone in America that power when we decided that basically anyone can buy an assault rifle. I don’t pretend to understand the motivations of these shooters, but ultimately it has to be at least a little bit about power, right? They’ve been convinced that having power is how you measure your worth, and they are sad or angry of, as is so often the case, both, and they see that there’s one way they can definitely change the world. They’ve seen a dozen other guys do the same thing, so why not them?

As one of the protagonists says, “Move fast and break things is great for a business, but not for society. Or the human mind.” Or a democracy, I might add,

Categories: Books