Review: Ramez Naam’s “Apex”
by Miles Raymer
Ramex Naam’s Nexus Arc has become wildly popular since I read the first installment back in early 2013. I’ve enjoyed this series and would recommend it to pretty much anyone interested in near-future scifi, but I have to admit that Apex was a rather lukewarm finale.
While Naam has created a vibrant speculative landscape full of tantalizing and terrifying futuretech, he has also failed to temper his obnoxious penchant for dull, sloppy prose. I wouldn’t have thought it possible that the third book in a successful series could contain worse writing than the previous two, but Naam proved me wrong. Apex is a choppy, terse narrative that also becomes bloated with its own linguistic heft. The book contains even more cliches, needless repetition, and superficially “profound” moments than Nexus and Crux combined (it doesn’t help that Apex is considerably longer than both previous novels).
An additional frustration is that Naam expands his story far beyond the initial core characters that carried him through the first two books. These mid-21st-century cardboard cutouts were never the most engaging bunch, but Naam did a serviceable job of developing them into relatable and somewhat believable individuals. While Apex does reveal their final journeys, those stories are diluted by a deluge of new characters, many of whom do nothing more than serve plot-based ends to keep the narrative moving––rather slowly. Naam tries desperately to make these new characters sympathetic and interesting, but his efforts largely fall flat. The result is that Naam takes his story to the next level of “epicness” by sacrificing the page-counts of the people we’ve actually come to give a shit about. Not a good move. This might not be a problem for all readers, but it tainted my emotional connection with the story, even to the point of dulling the impact when one of the series’s main characters bit the dust.
My final critique before I get to the good stuff (and there is good stuff) is that there are a lot of scenes in this book that would be more at home in a Michael Bay movie than in an intelligent scifi book. Lots of futuristic war machines, drones, covert ops, explosions, etc. These scenes are relevant to the overall story, but get dragged out to the point of ridiculousness. Most of the battles/protests represent a preoccupation with turbo-changed intensity rather than authentic character or plot development. And, worst of all, they’re just plain boring after a while.
The good news is that, despite is flaws, Apex delivers on the topics that made the first two Nexus Arc books so engaging, and even pushes the series’s boundaries in some welcome ways. Naam stays committed to teasing out the possible boons and hazards that could stem from the global introduction of Nexus technology, and definitely sends what is in my opinion a thoughtful, compassionate message about how to confront trans- and posthuman developments. As with Nexus and Crux, the near future world presented in Apex is both rapturous and terrifying.
There are two story elements where Apex really shines: (1) Naam’s fascinating and creative depictions of posthuman consciousness, and (2) a more complex portrait of world governments than was presented earlier in the series. Apex deals with two different (and somewhat opposed) forms of posthumanity––unified, ego-driven posthumanity and distributed, selfless posthumanity. Both styles of enhanced consciousness are legitimate in their own right, and both demonstrate important ideas about the possible futures of conscious experience and action.
Singular (and at least partially insane) posthumanity:
The foam, below her. The quantum foam. Planck space. The substrate of reality. She can sense it now. She can feel it. She can see it though she lacks eyes, see it like she can see the very code that makes her up.
It is fractal. A radiant chaotic webwork undergirding reality. Impossibly bright lines of insane energy densities against a luminously black background. Yet the closer she stares at the black the more she realizes that it is not black, it is full of even more impossibly bright lines at finer and finer scales, repeating the intricate chaotic vein-like pattern at every level, again and again and again.
Forever.
And then her perspective reverses, and she realizes it is not the lines she should be staring at but the gaps between them, for the gaps are full of bubbles, bubbles in the quantum foam, and every bubble is a universe being born, a parallel universe. The quantum cluster she runs on is giving birth to these universes continuously, creating them with every calculation, spreading itself into them to perform its work at such miraculous rates…
She can see into these other universes now, and in each of them she sees the same face reflected back at her. My face. Me.
Su-Yong Shu.
Tortured. Ascendant. Trapped. Free. Dying in nuclear fire. A goddess ruling over a world transformed. A thousand possibilities. A million. A billion. More. An infinite set of universes radiating away from her, all accessible through the entangled permutations of the quantum processors that make up the physical layer of her brain. (94-5)
Collective posthumanity (enabled by large numbers of Nexus-linked minds):
A meta-brain, organic, functional, real, operating in the ways Su-Yong had been built to simulate, offering correction for the errors in her simulation code that had built up, that had compounded, that had driven her insane over time.
A peace, a stability, formed of a base so broad, a base of not one brain, not one life, not one perspective, but thousands, complementing one another, embracing one another, encircling and intertwining with one another.
A compassion. A compassion so deep, so heart-felt, a mind that knew this woman had suffered, that had seen glimpses of her torture. A compassion for all beings, for all minds, for all creatures who thought or felt, for her in particular, who’d felt so much for so long in so much agony.
A joy. A wild, multifarious, explosive, riot of joy, of moments, of glimpses, of experiences, of not just thousands of minds, but of now tens of thousands, of now hundreds of thousands of minds, as more touched them, as the core reached out to more minds, brought them together into joyous union, assisted by vast data centers of machinery that routed and filtered and coordinated connections, linked minds, sifted offered thoughts, identified love and bliss and passion and curiosity and delight and amplified them, selected for them, brought them here, through this link, through and around Kade, directly to this woman who needed them so badly.
Who needed to remember joy.
Who needed to see the good in humanity before she went to war with them. (552)
These passages nicely capture two extremes of posthuman experience: radically self-centered but almost infinitely powerful, and radically selfless and also almost infinitely powerful. It’s the apocalypse meets the rapture of the nerds. And while the reality of posthuman experience (should it ever arrive) will no doubt be vastly more complex, unpredictable, and possibly ineffable than Naam’s illustrations, his glimpses of techno-enlightenment are nevertheless insightful and fun. The implications for radically improved future projection––and therefore radically improved capacities for assessing and responding to global problems––are significant. Naam also toys with the intriguing question of whether different instantiations (copies) of the same posthuman consciousness could have different ethical outlooks and modes of perception.
The critical point, Naam emphasizes, is that humans can never safely play the jailor once the posthuman era has begun: “If you treat posthumans as slaves, if you torture them, if you make them prisoners…You’ll drive them to want revenge. You’ll make them paranoid and angry. You may drive them insane. You’ll create the war that none of us can win” (409). In a futurist milieu where opinions vary about whether various types of AI (AGI, ASI, whole brain emulations, etc.) would have significant moral status, Naam’s narrative imaginatively argues for the rights of all types of experiencing minds. His perspective is as ethically commendable as it is existentially prudent.
My main complaint about Crux was that Naam’s portrait of the US government seemed oversimplified, favoring the typical libertarian assertion that government isn’t good for anything other than bungling important issues and stifling freedom of expression. I’m happy to report that Apex contains a much more variegated view in which both the US and Chinese governments contain individuals with various values and goals that conflict in their efforts to come up with workable responses to Nexus technology. Naam doesn’t go so far as to lionize government officials (which would come off as disingenuous given the current political climate), but he leaves plenty of room for dissent, showing how governments struggle with their better and worse selves. Best of all, we’re left with a sense that while representative government can’t single-handedly solve the problems of the future, there is a positive leading role it can play when transparency, ethics, and scientifically-informed opinions win the day.
If you’ve already invested the time to read Naam’s first two novels, definitely give Apex a chance. There’s enough here to entertain, bemuse, delight, and inspire almost any reader. If you’re considering starting the Nexus Arc from the beginning, take heed: it might be worth it if you really dig cutting-edge scifi, but you’ll have to slog through a considerable amount of verbal flotsam and jetsam. I enjoyed this trilogy, but I’m also glad it’s over. Fortunately, a brand new Neal Stephenson novel is sitting on my desk––the perfect remedy for an enervated literary palate.
Rating: 6/10
the thing I appreciate about these reviews is if you take the time to read them despite their length, you not only get a good sense of the book (even though I haven’t read it), but also get a feel for whether this is a book you’d want to read or not. given all the stuff there is out there to read, that’s a gift.
Thanks Dad! I’ll do my best to keep it up!
I tend to agree with the review above. Having just finished the second book, Crux, I’m wondering if the third is worth bothering with.
The reason is that Crux seemed to lurch from one drawn-out fight scene to another, all written very cinematically to give potential scriptwriters an easier time (sorry Ramez, but the mechanism shows),but ultimately rather predictable. They start to merge into one after a while.
That said, I’ve enjoyed the series so far particularly for the issues and technological, political and social issues it raises but ultimately I didn’t find it as deeply satisfying as, say, the best of Iain M Banks’ Culture novels.
I’d also agree that the US-centric, negative attitude towards government (I’m a Brit btw) is a bit wearing.
So for me, it’s 3.5 out of 5.
Hi Manek. Thanks very much for this comment, and for reading my review!
If you’re on the fence about reading Apex, I recommend you pass. The book was significantly inferior to both its predecessors, and there’s nothing in it that you can’t learn from browsing a few reviews and/or synopses. Save your reading time for better books, like a Culture novel (Iain M. Banks is also one of my top SciFi authors!).
Again, thanks for reading.
Haha, looking back over the original review, I realize that the above comment flatly contradicts my conclusion. All I can say is that the time between then and now has helped me reflect on just how much I disliked Apex, to the point where I’d no longer recommend it unless the reader was completely beguiled by the series.