Harrison, Harry

• Series: The Stainless Steel Rat
  • The Stainless Steel Rat (7 r)
  • The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge (6 r)
  • The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat (6 r)
  • A Stainless Steel Rat is Born (6 r)

    • Well-written series of novels/short story anthologies about the adventures of a shady character in an advanced SF world. A precursor to Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan and almost as enjoyable. Try one and see what you think...I haven't bought all of the books yet, but I will someday.

• The Turing Option (with Marvin Minsky) (8)

  • This book reads like Tom Clancy for sci-fi fans. The style of the book was extremely familiar and entertaining, with plenty of plot combined with intriguing (if speculative) science and thought-provoking characters and events. This is the kind of book that can inform the reader in an entertaining way about what's going on at the frontiers of AI much like Sagan's "Contact" does with SETI. The plot of the book involves a man who suffers severe brain damage and how his brain is rebuilt with the help of machine intelligence. He then carries on his research with his new "brain++" and make some remarkable discoveries. In the background is plenty of corporate espionage, which provides for a nice, tense backdrop. The book was so plausible that I actually found the last third somewhat disappointing because it seemed _too_ speculative. Still, I recommend this if you can find it. There's some additional material on AI written by Marvin Minsky on the Web that goes with this book. Any search engine can find it for you.

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