Genesis

by Poul Anderson

Der Astronaut Christian Brannock hat miterlebt, wie der Mensch die künstliche Intelligenz immer weiter entwickelte - bis es schließlich möglich war, die menschliche Persönlichkeit in einen Computer zu speisen und ihm auf diese Weise eine Art Unsterblichkeit zu verleihen. Als er beauftragt wird, den Supercomputer Gaia zu überprüfen, der das Schicksal der Erde lenkt, stößt er jedoch auf Unvorstellbares ...

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, Audiobook, Collections, Hard Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction

317 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Pseudonym A. A. Craig, Michael Karageorge, Winston P. Sanders, P. A. Kingsley.

Poul William Anderson was an American science fiction author who began his career during one of the Golden Ages of the genre and continued to write and remain popular into the 21st century. Anderson also authored several works of fantasy, historical novels, and a prodigious number of short stories. He received numerous awards for his writing, including seven Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards.

Anderson received a degree in physics from the University of Minnesota in 1948. He married Karen Kruse in 1953. They had one daughter, Astrid, who is married to science fiction author Greg Bear. Anderson was the sixth President of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, taking office in 1972. He was a member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America, a loose-knit group of Heroic Fantasy authors founded in the 1960s, some of whose works were anthologized in Lin Carter's Flashing Swords! anthologies. He was a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. Robert A. Heinlein dedicated his 1985 novel The Cat Who Walks Through Walls to Anderson and eight of the other members of the Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy.[2][3]

Poul Anderson died of cancer on July 31, 2001, after a month in the hospital. Several of his novels were published posthumously.


Series:
* Time Patrol
* Psychotechnic League
* Trygve Yamamura
* Harvest of Stars
* King of Ys
* Last Viking
* Hoka
* Future history of the Polesotechnic League
* Flandry

Reviews

[Lyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poul Anderson published Genesis in the same year of his death, 2001.

Just as The Shootist was an appropriate swan song for the ailing John Wayne, Genesis is a fitting final book in the celebrated cannon of this great writer. A recurring theme in much of his work, especially in the last decade of his life was immortality and here, as in Harvest of Stars, a sentient human is uploaded into a computer and allowed to continue on into infinity.

Genesis also calls to mind Anderson’s excellent novel The Boat of a Million Years, particularly in its narrative style of connected vignettes following a chronological procession over hundreds of millions of years. Genesis revisits several other staple Anderson themes such as speculative science fiction, star travel, time travel, and alternative historic fiction.

The quality of this work was recognized by the committee awarding the John W. Campbell Memorial Award as this was the winner in 2001.

[Ron · Rating 3 out of 5]

“And the rest of the universe waiting.”

Prescient plot about galaxy-spanning supercomputer intelligences in a post-human future, first published in 1998, seems positively prescient. But the storytelling reads like The Silmarillion—not a complement—the core of a story he never developed.

“You imply the world has become too complex, too precarious, for mere humans to understand and control.” “It always was, wasn’t it?”

Not one of Anderson’s best. Lots of hand-waving and mythic vocabulary, but hardly enough story to grab reader’s attention for the first half. The book closes with conflict and romance (of a sort) and heroism, but it’s more told than shown.

“I gave life back to the race that gave life to us. They will make their own survival.”

[Soo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Notes:

Enjoyed the idea of the book but it was too short to really explore the main themes. More of a teaser of maybes than a fully formed story.

[Deb Omnivorous Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a very enjoyable read/listen from Blackstone audio, the narrator did a very good job of capturing the timber of Poul's writing but I think I might have enjoyed it more as a 'real' book than as an audio.

This gentle meandering investigation of the evolution of artificial intelligence is a story line that follows a loose plot, sometimes so loose you are not sure if they are separate stories though they all come together at the end.

When Christian Brannock goes into space, he starts as an engineer who works in simulated link with machines, later as the technology develops, at the end of his life he agrees to upload his intelligence into a computer and goes to the stars, helps pilot ships, establish colonies and eventually becomes a component in the huge, galactic size intelligences of the future.

Meanwhile we follow other, smaller parts of humanity until, an unimaginable amount of time later the super-mind's of the galaxy become concerned that the mind, Gaia who is overseeing Earth in it's death throes has become erratic. A super-mind is despatched to investigate and Christian Brannock once again has a chance at individuation.

I enjoyed this speculative fiction, there were several individual stories I would have liked closure on - several social developments I would have loved to hear more about, but Poul was going for an overview of time. I would very much have liked to see more speculation on how the incorporation of so many human minds into Gaia ended up making her so unstable! I assume that was the cause of her irrationality and her choices but it is implied rather than spelled out. While the majority of the book is gently paced, the end is exciting and speeds up considerably. I would recommend it to people interesting in classic science fiction.

[Buck · Rating 1 out of 5]

Disappointed.

Not a particularly long novel, Genesis might have been better had it been shorter. The shorterness in itself would have been an improvement. Anderson spends way too much time in description, explanation, and story building. In the early parts of the book, much time is spent getting to know the characters and their motivations in a rivalrous clan society, with which the main characters never have any interaction. This culture has absolutly no bearing on the plot, what there is of one, that is, and plays absolutely no role later in the book. It's as if we took a little vacation to some out-of-the-way monarchy and later rejoined our hero on his way to the end of the book, instead of spending that time getting to know him a little better. The premise has great promise, but Anderson leaves that fruit on the tree. As I trudged through the words, as I neared the end of the book, I was looking forward to, hoping for, a strong finish. The story does improve towards the end but finally it just sort of peters out. I wish we could have gotten there without having to slog through all that middle part. This should have been a short story. It is a failed novel.

[Tim Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a genre noted for epic scope and lengthy timelines _Genesis_ by Poul Anderson really stands out. A billion years passes in the course of the novel though as one might imagine the reader does not follow along all or even most of what transpires in this setting's history.

Reminding me in some ways of another excellent novel of his, _Starfarers_, Anderson handles the huge sweep of time in the book in several ways. For many of the individuals involved, they are traveling near the speed of light and relativistic effects mean that a few years for them translates into tens of thousands of years for the outside universe.

A second way the author deals with such vast timelines is a plot device he used also in _Starfarers_; vignettes. In both books, Anderson would illustrate how human culture and history has progressed over huge amounts of time with what were basically short stories, portraits of humanity at a given place and time along the novel's continuum and as in _Starfarers_ tied in with the one of the novel's main themes.

There was a third way the billion-year time frame was handled. Unlike in _Starfarers_ most of the main characters aren't human, they were either originally human and had their memory and personality uploaded into a machine consciousness or were artificial intelligences to start with. In this setting, actual physical human beings are too fragile and too expensive to travel the stars themselves, and instead uploaded humans and artificial intelligences make the journey instead (a similar concept used in the excellent trilogy by Sean Williams and Shane Dix that began with the novel _Echoes of Earth_).

Though the novel begins in the relative near future, the main character being the astronaut Christian Brannock, busy with exploring the planet Mercury and an early pioneer of working in close partnership with a robotic artificial intelligence, the majority of the novel takes place in the far future, the results of such pioneers as Brannock and others. After a series of vignettes that show the progression of human history on Earth with the rise of increasingly powerful (and dominant) artificial intelligences, most of the novel is set in the far, far future. The artificial intelligence that controls Earth, named Gaia, has been strangely silent in the vast community of artificial intelligences that spans the entire galaxy and one of these artificial intelligences dispatches an emissary along with a downloaded human consciousness - the original Christian Brannock, one of the first people ever uploaded - to explore what is going in the birthplace of all galactic civilization. Additionally, it would seem that the Earth's biosphere is failing and the galactic network of intelligences wants to know what Gaia proposes to do about that, though again, Gaia is nearly silent on the matter. What will the emissary (named Wayfarer) and Brannock find? What was Gaia hiding? Does Gaia have some sort of sinister plan or is it just something the galactic community cannot understand unless one of its own sees for itself?

A major theme explored in the novel is the nature of free will. As the machine intelligences through the course of a billion years become more powerful, intelligent, capable, and responsible for more and more details of life on Earth, is that a good thing for all concerned? Is the prevention of suffering, chaos, and evil always in the best interest of humanity? To get the good in humanity - friendship, charity, artistry, courage, leadership, love - does one have to allow for the bad - suffering, selfishness, greed, cowardice, and tyranny? The machine intelligences have achieved a great deal, a truly impressive body of knowledge and a civilization that is already spreading to nearby galaxies, but what have they lost in this pursuit?

As is it hard to have a novel where the protagonists have knowledge far above and beyond any human is capable of, usefully the novel is presented largely through the eyes of the various human characters. In the far future setting the main characters are the intelligence and personality of Christian Brannock and a downloaded intelligence that Gaia provides to interact with him, a woman by the name of Laurinda Ashcroft.

[Tomislav · Rating 2 out of 5]

Science Fiction *and* Fantasy Grand Master Poul Anderson’s writing career lasted from the 1940s through his death in 2001, and I started reading him in my teens. Always he was known not so much for scientific/technological complexity or literary prowess, as for the telling of engaging adventures. Sadly, Genesis, one of his last novels, in my opinion founders in that regard. It was awarded the 2001 John Campbell Award, perhaps more as career recognition than on the merits of itself.

The novel is divided into two parts. Part One is a disjointed narrative that skips across millions of years, following two particular humans who were translated into cybernetic copies before their death. One is 20th century Christian Brannock, who yearned to explore the stars, and his post-human version does so. 22nd century Laurinda Ashcroft represents those humans who preferred to stay on Earth, culturally adapting to the declining environment. As I mentioned, this section spans millions of years, and each of their personalities are totally subsumed into the Galactic Brain within a few pages of introduction.

Part Two is set at least 100 million years into the future, that is a geologically future Earth. One strain of the post-human galactic brain is Wayfarer who chooses to return to Earth, following a deeply buried impulse of Christian’s. There, they encounter Gaia, the other strain of post-human galactic brain. It seems Gaia could be concealing some sort of project from Wayfarer, but they agree to reconstitute a Christian and a Laurinda to investigate within emulated worlds that Gaia has been running. At the same time, Wayfarer clandestinely reconstitutes an android Brannock onto the real Earth to find out what Gaia is hiding. I enjoyed the experimental alternate histories that Christian and Laurinda briefly visit, reminiscent of some of Poul Anderson’s time travel novels, but that story line comprises only a small part of the novel. For me, that was seriously outweighed by clumsy transitions, all the other catch-and-release characters, and extended superlative descriptions of the Galactic Brain.

If this is your first dive into Poul Anderson, I would sooner recommend some of his earlier works, such as The High Crusade, Guardians of Time, Trader to the Stars, or Tau Zero.

[Joey · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's some really interesting stuff here, as the novel explores the singularity of human and machine, predicting the rise of a galactic consciousness, and touches on what it means to be human and the way human civilizations develop. If the execution of the narrative was as impressive as those thematic ideas, this would be a truly great book, but, in the end it leaves a good bit to be desired. I have two major complaints here:

1) The narrative structure is way too clunky. Just as the novel starts humming, it breaks off into a series of vignettes showing the development of human culture thousands of years into our future. This might not be a problem if these sections were written better, but they're largely boring and derivative.

2) The main female character comes from hundreds of years in our future, and is one of the brightest minds of her time. She's also fawning and insufferable and about as strong a woman as one of Captain Kirk's galactic concubines. I don't think every book with a female character has to make some sort of feminist statement, but damn.

All in all, though, Genesis is good enough to support its exploration of ideas, even if it sometimes drops the ball.

[Sic Transit Gloria · Rating 1 out of 5]

Terribly, terribly slow and boring. Characters and settings were introduced multiple times, only to be discarded. I was never actually sure when the introduction was supposed to be finished and when the main plot began. It probably began around page 140, because I quit around that point out of boredom.

[mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

I tend to be more forgiving of hard SciFi storytelling foibles than other genres and with that in mind, this was...fine? I'm glad I spent the time reading Genesis but I would not generally recommend it.

Which is a shame.

There were some really interesting concepts (the Galaxy Brain, our "heroes" being subsumed by their respective AIs, Gaia, the Earth node of the Galaxy Brain, running simulations of humanity) but the execution was just not there. Even for hard SciFi the story was disjointed and Anderson spent way to many pages building the story and not enough telling the story. In fact, thinking back, the "story" was more a backdrop for the SciFi. It was there, but the editor could have just as easily stripped the story and been left with an essay about the Galaxy Brains and how they communicated (mythically, of course, as Anderson reminded us every other paragraph!).

I think a large part of my disappoint(?) comes from a glimpse we have of Anderson actually telling a story in the middle of the book. For one, maybe two chapters, we have a really interesting and enjoyable glimpse into a society which had, as far as I could tell, no bearing on the story and was never heard from again. I assume it was meant to show us Gaia in action before we really start to learn about her (mythically anthropomorphized, of course) but it read like that chapter was pulled from a different manuscript and inserted into the middle of this book.

[Daniel Kukwa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my first dip into the writing of Poul Anderson, and the result is...odd. The first act is fascinating and implies a complicated yet epic journey of personal and technological growth. But the second act turns into a long, rambling, pseudo-historical fantasy, which didn't hold my attention at all. By the time the AI's re-enter the picture, it's almost too late to rescue the novel...almost. They go some way to capturing the spent potential of the opening act, but even here there is a lyrical approach to the material that threatens to drive me bats. The positive outweighs the negative, but it's been a long time since I've read a book that simultaneously captivates me AND pushes me away.

[Joe Bruno · Rating 2 out of 5]

This had great promise, a the mind of a man uploaded into a artificial intelligence sent to the stars. Somehow though, it broke down into a series of disjointed stories and I lost the thread of the thing. It seems a shame too, I read a lot of Poul Anderson years ago. But this one just didn't do it for me.

[Stuart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic ideas, but a bit clunky in terms of format. Anderson explores what the end result of evolution may be and the idea that we could literally be constructing our own gods to guide our destinies.

The story is told from the perspective of Christian Brannock, an avatar of a man whose mind was uploaded into a computer and sent off to explore the stars. As time progresses, more and more people choose to upload their minds. Some go to the stars, others remain in the central computer being used to guide the development of society on Earth. After eons, a vast net of computer minds develop across the galaxy. Those minds grow curious about the fate of humanity on Earth and send an aspect of themselves back to rapport with the central computer, which now calls itself Gaia.

Brannock's aspect is reintegrated from the computer mind and sent to probe the fate of his kin. This leads the computer minds and Brannock to question Gaia's choices. It also calls into question whether they are even fit to judge "her" choices.

The ideas explored are broad in scope: evolution of man and technology, the role of gods and the question of what a god truly is, the forms and morality of benevolence, the vastness of time. All weighty subjects. Brannock is well defined as a character, but Laurinda Ashcroft, the avatar sent by Gaia to meet with him, is a bit sketchy. The book early on does a credible job of making us understand what it could be like to be uploaded into a larger computer mind, but then spends far too long reiterating the point. The reiterations become more scientific and more detailed, but that only seemed to make it become less and less believable. A little less would have gone a long way. The book also does not give its final conclusion. This is okay for me, but others may find it a bit of an abrupt ending.

All in all I recommend the book. It will give you much to think on.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are lots of really big ideas in this book about human nature, the future of machine intelligences, interspecies morality, should sentient beings be husbanded like domesticated animals. The ending is a little unsatisfactory, but on the whole a very enjoyable book and very tightly written, like science fiction classics of old that clocked in at under 90,000 words, unlike to 600 page behemoths that have become so common.

[Gregory M Todd · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well ,you can’t judge a book by its cover. The cover was good.

[Brett George · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5*

This book needed to be either shorter or longer. The second half of the book is well within the bounds of a 4 star book, but it gets to the end very awkwardly.

The worldbuilding in Genesis is clunky, you have to really pay attention to even understand where you're supposed to be. Anderson glides in and out of complex ideas and simple interactions with relative ease, but at the cost of taking a lot of details at their shallow surface levels.

The ideas in this book are so complex and interesting, but the story does not add to those ideas. On the contrary, Anderson's imaginative technology, games, and speech are relatively fun to dive into.

[Sean11 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This may be my favorite work of Poul Anderson - certainly, the best of his later years. The visionary scope of this novel represents the furthest he ever ventured, and it results in an utterly unique, captivating read. Every sentence glistens here.

In this respect, I also simply can't understand the low rating of this novel. I'd recommend the initial review from Publishers Weekly, that I believe got it right - after all, what could be more bold than reformulating the creation myth of the Bible through the perspective of Artificial Intelligence 1 billion years in the future - that idea alone deserve recognition.

https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780...

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fantastic thought experiment of some of the ways a post-singularity society would play out. To what degree would humanity rely on a superintelligent AI to intervene and make decisions like a god? In a post-scarcity world in which people essentially liver forever, what keeps them occupied and motivated? How do our thoughts and actions change when we start thinking on the timescales of thousands or millions of years?

The problem is that the book doesn't really have much of a plot or real characters, just short sketches with stodgy dialogue to frame the larger questions. Interesting, but not very entertaining.

[Margarita Gacía · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dos entidades artificiales, que antes fueron humanos, se encuentran en la Tierra, millones de años después de la extinción de su especie. El cerebro central, conectado al planeta parece que tiene su propia forma de hacer las cosas, sin seguir los cánones de otros nodos, desperdigados por la galaxia. ¿Cuál será el secreto que esconde?
Tiene un principio muy interesante, lástima que se pierda por en medio y no aguante la intriga tanto como debiera.
Aún así, quien tuvo, retuvo. Mediocre novela de un buen autor.

[Tina Olah · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOVED this book, so many big ideas and a story that takes place on an absolutely massive scale and timeline. The plot jumped around between viewpoints and moments in history quite a bit, and even genres (saying any more would spoil things) though I personally liked that. I would have no complaints if the book were an extra 100-200 pages long to expand on things though! My only real issue was that the ending felt kind of underwhelming/anticlimatic though everything else was awesome!

[Robo_Tomo · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author tends to over explain concepts which are not particularly significant but thankfully leaves the central message /dilemma open to interpretation. An interesting meditation on human free will and the forward march of artificial intelligence. The scope and scale is staggering. A book I will be thinking about for a long time.

[John JJJJJJJJ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Artificial intelligence has developed to the point where human intelligence can be downloaded into a computer, achieving a kind of hybrid immortality. A billion years later, astronaut Christian Brannock must prevent something terrible from happening to Earth.

Well, not bad, but Poul Anderson has accustomed us to better.

[Craig · Rating 1 out of 5]

Disappointed. Too many side-bar stories, info, factoids not seemingly relevant to main story line. Some interesting ideas, but they didn't seem fleshed out enough to fit the story line very well. Time to move on to some of Mr. Anderson's other works which are of higher acclaim from what I hear.

[Matt (Science Fiction Reads) · Rating 1 out of 5]

Can't say I've ever experienced this before, the final 30 pages of my copy are the previous 30 pages reprinted... I guess the lesson here is don't push through to the end of a book you weren't enjoying in the first place lol.

[Bo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not an easy read, as many other reviews have pointed out, the scene changes in the book makes for a confusing story, which with some cleanup could have been much easier to follow. However, there were many enjoyable parts throughout the book. 2 stars.

[Alberto Campuzano · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was pure drudgery reading this book. Boring, and so much unnecessary flowery language and abnormal sentence structure. This is my first (and probably last) Poul Anderson book. Did he always write like this?

[Aaron · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read a while ago before I had GoodReads. Tried to re-read in 2025 and it just didn’t take. DNF and quit around page 75. I’ll give it 2 stars as I know I read it before and didn’t think horrific if unremarkable.

[Keith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Audiobook.
The book has some interesting ideas but the story kept bogging down. It probably would have worked better as a novella or short story.

[Dave White · Rating 1 out of 5]

I rarely give up on a book.
This is one though that I just could not complete.
The start was good but the middle just bogged down and I did not have enough invested in these characters to continue.

[Long Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s the age old ‘nature vs nurture’ debate set on a cosmic scale with machine gods arguing the outcome of mankind. The writing is a little disjointed but the story is good.