“Alien contact, but no. Can't recall exactly but something upset me about the treatment of AI in this book.
“You know how Fred Hoyle's Black Cloud is a fantastic and interesting hard scifi book? This is nothing like that. It is a sloppy, boring, linear and shallow disaster that reeks of missed opportunities and dubious ideas about artificial intelligence and alien life. I can't imagine a less exciting portrayal of receiving intelligible communication from a different galaxy. Any sciency details (which I've enjoyed the most in Black Cloud) and descriptions of the nature of the code or how it is decrypted, how the computer works, details of the communication protocol, any deeper conversations with the computer -- all missing. There are so many missed opportunities everywhere that it literally hurts in my chest to think about it. Some Spoiler Alerts below: By far the biggest disappointment was Fred's portrayal of the artificially intelligent computer which seems anything but intelligent. It appears to experience emotions such as anger (seriously, Fred?), it consistently makes clearly suboptimal
