Avogadro Corp by William Hertling
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I read William Hertling’s Avogadro Corp in a single sitting. It is a short, enjoyable but flawed book. It has much to offer for those who are interested in AI, the Singularity and in technology in general.
The book is set in Portland in the present day and describes the incidental creation of an Artificial Intelligence and it’s subsequent fallout. Avogadro Corp in this book is clearly based on Google. A team lead by the two main protagonists David and Mike create an email analysis tool to help users craft emails to maximise the probability of success of their intended communication.
The concept in itself is interesting and plausible. In the first quarter of the book the author describes fairly accurately how a large software company like Avogadro Corp may function. David and Mike lead the development team of the tool, called ELOPe. The description of office politics and the tussle over resource allocation is amusing and fairly accurate. Mr. Hertling works for a large software corporation and his experience shines through here.
The plot moves along at a good pace, but there are some problems with the premise. The AI in question deals with email, yet it somehow manages to influence world politics, launch anti aircraft missiles and buy and equip oil tankers within a matter of weeks. I find it difficult to believe that a large company like Avogadro corp would be managed in such a way that people just shrug and carry on when millions of dollars worth of purchases are made, or big contracts are signed. Email is all pervasive and powerful, but this was a leap too far. These things could make sense if the timeline of the book was set over a couple of years. However the main events in the book happen over a period of two months or so making it difficult to suspend disbelief. All of the above issues are forgivable since they do advance the plot and did not detract me from enjoying the book.
As the plot progresses, more characters are added, and things become a little problematic. The character of Gene who helps David and Mike trying to deal with the fallout of their software going “live” is a poor composition of the most hackneyed character types: the grizzled and grumpy old man muttering about “kids these days”, the hardboiled detective who heroically pulls together diverse plot strands with a legal pad and a highlighter, and of course he keeps a bottle of bourbon in his bottom drawer. Gene appears whenever the plot needs a little push. I found a lot sections featuring him quite irritating and I ended up skimming them wanting to get back to the matter at hand.
The things that bothered me the most were small and incidental plot details. Near the start of the book, David decides to change the code of the ELOPe overnight and releases it to production. Mike, then spends a couple of days trying to figure out why the ELOPe behaves differently. In most software houses, every change would be committed to a source control system before being released out into the wild. This system is often the first port of call when trying to figure out what went wrong and what was changed. Mike, who is supposed to be the technical lead, does not do this and spends a couple of days agonising over log files that do not show him anything. There are similar small details that are jarring when reading the book.
None of the characters have a distinct voice except the walking stereotype that is Gene. David, one of the main characters, is also problematic. He is supposed to be a brilliant programmer and project manager working for the world’s biggest web services company yet he does not know what social engineering is. There is a passage where David, Mike and David’s wife Christine are talking and Christine suddenly goes into a lecture on social engineering. There are many similar passages where the author goes from “show mode” to “tell mode”. Characters walk on, say something that moves the plot forward, and then disappear – only to pop up later.
I realize I may come across as overly critical of Avogadro Corp. Yet, I enjoyed it enough to finish it in one sitting. The story starts well and it pushed all the right buttons for me. It could have been much better if the author addressed some of the issues around character development, pacing and thought through some of the plot details. This is Mr. Hertling’s first book and at a price of under $3 on the Amazon Kindle store, a lot of the issues I mention above can be forgiven. I will read the next books in the series with interest.
