3.5 stars. This is one of those books where the story is clearly just a vehicle for the underlying philosophical discussion, but I enjoyed the underlying philosophy, so that was okay.

The Zetetic Institute and its maxims were interesting, and the decision duel construct was great. The Prisoner's Dilemma was well illustrated rather than info-dumped. The portrayal of software developers as heroic protagonists was unusual and well done; I enjoyed that and the portrayal of the project manager as a functional equivalent to the general of a small Information-Age-equivalent "army." Admittedly, my bias as a programmer and rookie project manager is showing here. :)

I'd actually be interested in seeing a sequel that placed the Zetetic Institute in today's more complex world of varied threats from various actors. This book is oriented entirely toward the two-actor setting of the Cold war, which is a much simpler problem.

The two-superpower setting is obviously dated; that didn't bother me as much as the exclusive language. The book did have several strong women characters who were important to the plot, but the entire rest of the book talked about "men" instead of people. 1988 is a bit too late to get a pass for that. Also, every one of the women ended up neatly paired off with a man, except the one who started paired and ended up widowed. Oy. (The man who started paired and was widowed by the end of chapter 1 ends up paired with one of the other women.)

The book's blurb touts the discussion of "smart weapons," and it was interesting to compare the scenes of programmers watching video feeds from self-directed weapons that they could not pilot with today's descriptions of remotely-piloted drones. ( )

In some sense, the Cold War setting of this story was already dated within a year of its publication, however, from some old notes, here were some of my reactions on reading this in 1989.

This is one of those how-we-could-make-the-world-a-better-place novels, but this one has enough detail to make it more credible than most. Stiegler doesn't fall into the trap of assuming only engineers can run the world or that decisions can be made on purely rational grounds. However, I think Stiegler doesn't take into account the moral, idealogical, ethical, and religious rationales for action enough. Often two courses can be entirely rational -- if you start out with two sets of values. Stiegler seems to explicitly think American democratic, capitalistic ideas are the way to go. I may agree, but the above point is still valid.

Stiegler has some valueable things to say on how to extract and arrange knowledge out of the raw data of the Information Age. Fortunately, his invented Zeticism is not naive enough to think it can eliminate bias and irrationality -- just help people recognize their shortcomings. One of the more interseting things in this novel is the conversion (a deliberate choice of words since this is a missionary novel) of irrational characters (Bill Hardie, newsman; Charles Somerset, Pentagon arms procuror; Delilah Lottspeich, programmer; Wilcox, tobacco magnate) into rational ones, or, at least, more rational. Hardie and Somerset in particular are seen as smart men successfully pursuing their own ends in their niches of distorted reality. They prove valueable assets when revelation is forced on them.

By and large, Stiegler is subtle in making his points -- compared to other missionary novels. No hectoring speeches. Stiegler has some important things to say; I particularly liked his points about the ineffectiveness of military industrial complex and his solutions to the problem.

I found the David's Sling weapons system fascinating. Sometimes called "rods from God", they are giant, orbiting spears that can be directed to fall on a nation's nuclear forces and wipe them out even at hardened sites -- all without radioactive fallout.

I also liked Stiegler's comments on networking and its implications for democracy and economics including "just in time inventory control.

Unfortunately, like most near future extrapolations, the closeness of the story's setting invites heightened scrutiny of its plausbility. It may have dated already with Gorbachev's policies and the Soviets pulling out of Afghanistan. Stiegler ignores upcoming environmental concerns (pollution, greenhouse warming), America's weakening power, and that the world of the future is likely to involve more power blocs than the US and USSR (like Europe and China/Japan). Still, as near future books go, it's a compelling extrapolation even though it lacks consideration of some key things. Stiegler's characters are not cardboard cutouts but they aren't particularly compelling either.

And, now in 2012, I note that, if nothing else, this novel might lay claim to being the first sf novel to feature the idea of "hypertexting" aka HTML aka an everday web link. ( )

ZB7