Nanotime (Book)

Back of the book

William Gibson meets Tom Clancy in this brilliant and chilling cyberthriller--an adventure set in the multimedia world of the near future where oil is running out, wars are smart, and intelligent software agents may be your only friends--from Bart Kosko, author of Fuzzy Thinking and renowned expert in fuzzy logic and machine intelligence.

The countdown to World War III begins when a chiphead terrorist bombs a Saudi oilfield in Dhahran...

The year is 2030. The world has almost doubled in population and no one can escape the prying eyes of the State. Population and generation bombs have exploded, governments have gone bankrupt, the old political parties have collapsed, and entrepeneurs race to find alternative fuels to replace scarce and expensive oil. Supercomputers are smaller and cheaper than sugar cubes but they too still need energy to run.

John Grant wants to save the Earth from its addiction to oil and get rich in the process. He has patented a revolutionary new molecule that can split water and produce an almost limitless supply of the cheap fuel hydrogen. But he cannot do it alone--and many groups do not want him to do it at all. The Americans think Grant is a traitor. He cannot trust his Israeli backers. And his greatest enemy has a thousand faces.

Sufi mystic Hamid Tabriz is a genius mathematician and master terrorist. Tabriz has learned how to encode his mind in a chip and replace a person's brain with that chip. This yields devout followers and ideal assassins. Now Tabriz wants Grant's patent and his mind. Grant quickly learns that his sole friend is the software ghost of philosopher John Stuart Mill.

The terrorist bombing compels Saudi Arabia to launch a volley of smart cruise missiles against an Israeli desalination plant--the same plant that tests Grant's molecule. Israel prepares its response while its enemies prepare their counter-response and its allies soon rush into the war that is already simmering today. Grant finds that he must defend the increasingly chaotic world but do so from a disembodied place far beyond the confines of space and time...in nanotime.

Exciting, suspenseful, provocative, and meticulously researched, Bart Kosko's NANOTIME is an extraordinary extrapolation--a shocking vision of our cyberfuture by one of the visionaries who is presently shaping it.