Rollback
Robert J. Sawyer

Appropriately named. Although alien contact happens, the book is focused on its side-effect — Don’s reaction when he is rejuvenated to his youth (rolled back), but the procedure fails for his wife (the one needed to decode the alien message). Well-written, but it didn’t compel or inspire me.

I got a brief flash of wonder when Sarah started mentioning the grid, the 3D nature of the message, but was disappointed when that dead-ended. Also, I tend to get impatient with the humanity of the aliens in alien-contact stories. Take this paragraph:

"Math and physics are the same everywhere in the universe. There’s no need to contact an alien race to find out if they agree that one plus three equals four, that seven is a prime number, that the value of pi is 3.14159, et cetera. None of those things are matters of local circumstance, or opinion."

Personally, I find our mathematical system to be the most arbitrary invention of the human race. I mean, numbers? Counting? Those ideas are purely abstract, and thus specific to the human mind.

Take counting. Say you have children named John, Jack, and Jane. Three children. Say John’s an adult. You have three people. Say you have an apple and an orange. One apple, one orange. Or… two fruit. How about John and an apple? One John, one apple… or two things.

Counting works in its purest form when things are identical. But nothing real and concrete is identical. So you can’t count any higher than one unless you divide things into broad categories. That ability to categorize, that is what may be unique to the human mind. Perhaps an alien doesn’t see two pencils… perhaps it sees a pencil with a blunt end and a pencil with a bite mark, and they are so impossibly different to its mind that counting would make no sense.

And so on, beyond counting to everything we hold to be true about math. Or, you know, life in general. My favorite fictional alien was part of Douglas Adams’ ruling council in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy… it was a peculiar shade of the color blue.

Anyway, Rollback had some interesting ideas — I liked the pixellated-world one — but I kind of wanted to be awed, and it didn’t happen.