Central Booking

Rarely when reading a book do I have the urge to hurl the book against a wall. I resisted that urge countless times with The Truth Machine, giving in only when I had finally finished reading it. And man, did it feel good.

Written in 1995 by James Halperin, The Truth Machine starts off in the early 1990s and climaxes in the middle of the 21st century. Its underlying plot is a fairly conventional one; the book is mainly an exercise in near future prognostication. I'm used to reading sci-fi books that make outlandish and inaccurate predictions about the future, but I think The Truth Machine takes the cake. Supposedly the author interviewed a lot of really smart people about what was going to happen in the coming decades, which just goes to show how much smart people know.

His predictions veer wildly off track almost immediately, to the point of being humorously absurd. To give you an idea: In 2003 Al Gore is President, most people drive electric cars, oil is selling for $4 a barrel, the war in Bosnia is still going on, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are not. Things get more and more absurd as the years go by.

The central idea of the book is the construction of a glorified lie detector, the "truth machine." The truth machine comes into being through a series of contrivances reminiscent of the founding of Apple Computers, the creation of the Human Genome Project and the establishment of the X-Prize. Never in human history has any project been undertaken in this way, because none of it makes any freaking sense. It makes no sense that the guy spearheading the project is a computer programmer, and it makes no sense that a company that has been given funding to pursue one very specific goal (building the truth machine) would first spend several years doing stuff that is completely unrelated to that goal in order to raise more money. The author manages to communicate his ignorance of corporate finance, computer programming, scientific research, and pretty much every other field he touches on.

He doesn't deal in any significant way with the resistance that would face the introduction of a perfect lie detector into all areas of society, nor with the negative psychological or sociological consequences that it would cause. At one point a character mentions that maybe people have become overly dependent on the truth machine, and that perhaps the part of the human brain that deals with uncertainty has atrophied as a result. Eureka! I thought. An actual interesting idea, 300 something pages into the book. Unfortunately the author goes nowhere with the idea. This book is the worst kind of escapist utopian fiction: It doesn't challenge us to think about the consequences of technological advances; all it shows us are the endless benefits of scientific progress.

Oh sure, there's the moral conflict involving the main character, but that's just the barest of excuses for a lot of gushing about world government and gyrocopters. And even that plot has a saccharine happy ending.

One of the cover blurbs compares this book to Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, and I can only assume that the author deliberately modeled the saga of Pete Armstrong on the tale of Howard Roarke. Unfortunately where Ayn Rand subtly and mercilessly drove her characters to heroic and yet tragic consequences, Halperin's characters just slog along through one trivial difficulty after another until the whole thing mercilessly and anticlimactically ends.

The Publishers Weekly blurb on Amazon reads in part:

His prose is at best workmanlike, and his plotting and character development tend toward the simplistic. Nearly all of his major characters, from millionaire-genius protagonist Pete Armstrong on down, seem to be either the smartest, the richest, the most respected or the most influential people in the world. The traditional qualities of fiction are apparently of only secondary interest to the author, however. As a futurist, Halperin seems primarily concerned with suggesting innovations and then working out their implications over half a century.

And as I've noted, even as a futurist Halperin is laughably inadequate.

The Truth Machine is a mildly interesting murder mystery drowning in giant sickening globs of technology porn.

Sorry, Snuppy, I didn't care for it.