Hacking the overmind

John Sundman's nanotech thriller is a tribute to geekly passions -- and a warning of imminent disaster.

By Andrew Leonard

Feb 21, 2001 | "Acts of the Apostles" is a nanotech science-fiction thriller packed with everything you would expect a hardcore geek to like. Nanotechnology -- the design of molecule-sized machines -- may still be the stuff of future fantasy, but the references to software code, silicon chips and DNA that run through this novel reek of realness. It's just what you would hope for from an author who spent nine years working for Sun Microsystems: a book with geek heroes and heroines, written by a geek, and concerned with geek passions.

But it's also a book infused with a sensibility that you don't normally expect a "hard science fiction" novel to have: real emotions, real heartbreak and a real sense of the craziness at the core of the human condition. So-called "hard SF" -- a subgenre of science fiction that strives to get its facts and figures as correct as possible -- usually isn't very good at depicting real people. "Acts of the Apostles," a first-time novel by an amateur writer, may be a bit buggy at times, but it still achieves a rare thing: It makes you care both about the code and the characters.

And, for a reviewer, the book even goes one step further: It makes you care about the author, John Sundman. I first heard about "Acts of the Apostles" from a likely source -- Slashdot, where, back in May 2000, the book was given a hefty plug by Slashdot co-founder "Hemos." But at the time I just downloaded the first couple of chapters, glanced through a few pages and then, after becoming distracted by something else, never went back.

Cut to January 2001. The author, Sundman, e-mails me to personally promote his self-published novel. After sending along a hard-copy printed version (say what you will about the online world, but it's still a LOT easier to read a book on paper than on a monitor), Sundman kept the pressure on with follow-up e-mails, follow-up phone calls, daily updates on the progress of a Web site devoted to the book, and bits and driblets of his own harrowing life story. He simply would not be denied.

First novels are often drawn from the lives of their authors. Sundman spent time in Senegal as a member of the Peace Corps -- so does the protagonist of "Acts of the Apostles." Sundman was shunted into a dead-end job doing a worthless project after a power struggle at Sun -- and so was his protagonist, at a company called Digital Microsystems. Sundman sacrificed swaths of his life to finish his novel; he put his wife and family through hell, he put his career on hold, he reneged on work commitments. And so, too, does hero Nick Aubrey lose all connection with normal responsibilities as he seeks to stop a mad plot to turn all of humanity into unthinking slaves of a Borg-ian overmind.

One of the popular images of the hacker at work is of a programmer who gives up everything for the pursuit of the code -- staying up all night, ignoring personal hygiene or human relations, caring only about getting the code to work. That, in fact, is the opening scene of "Acts of the Apostles" and that, it seems, is how Sundman went about writing his novel. It's a point worth noting: A significant subset of the programmer community is convinced that you can only be a hacker if you work with code. But as "Acts of the Apostles" proves, it's not so easy to circumscribe the ambit of hacking. Hacking is about passion, and passion can be directed at anything.

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