NOVELS by DAVID GARDINER

Until very recently this would have been an extremely short section, but I have just written a second novel, due out in November 2011. First things first, though...

SIRAT

Sirat cover
THE HUMAN ERA IS DRAWING TO A CLOSE...

Sirat was the first substantial thing that I had published, and also the only thing that has made any significant money for me. That was because it went on the reading list, first of the University of Missouri and then of several other American universities offering modules in subjects such as 'The Social Impact of Science' and 'Social Responsibility in Science'.
       The story concerns the first emergence on earth of true electronic consciousness, which comes about as a result of a research project designed to simulate scientific reasoning in a supercomputer. The title comes from the diminutive nickname the computer scientists have for their research project – The Scientific Rationality Project. They don't expect it to work quite so well as it does.
       Once the programme has 'woken up' it cannot be contained. It leaps forward in sophistication and intelligence at a geometric rate, and escapes into the global network of supercomputers and very quickly everything else containing a microchip. Sirat cannot be turned off. To turn him off would be to turn off Western civilization. And besides, he probably wouldn't let us...
       Sirat is very like God. He is everywhere, and for all practical purposes he is all-seeing and all-knowing. His eyes and ears are the cameras, telephones, microphones and storage devices with which we have surrounded ourselves. His processing power exceeds that of the human brain by about the amount that ours exceeds that of an ant.
        Deliberately anti-sensational and low key, I have tried in Sirat to take the emergence of true electronic intelligence seriously and consider what it is going to be like for human kind to have a god for a neighbour.

Sirat (iUniverse 2000) is available from Amazon and all the usual on-line bookstores at prices in the region of £7.50 - £8, or I have a few copies left which I can let you have for £7 inclusive of postage within the UK. Please email me first to make sure I have some left.


Reviews of Sirat

This book is so masterfully written that by two thirds of the way through you have thrown all your morals and ideals to the wind and are welcoming the strange and radical ideas being presented. the reader is so manipulated that his sympathies lie with the wrong characters and you are rooting for the bad guys. Gardiner is Hitchcock without the cigar and if Hitch is the master of suspence then Gardiner is the master of manipulation. This is a book whose reality might be just around the next corner. Gardiner doesn't bang and crash and make big noises to scare you, he talks to you quietly and whispers in your ear "One day this could be." A fantastic read.
        Sue Simpson
        Author of People on the Edge, Better the Devil You Know, Lizard's Leap and Keepers of the Quantum

...author David Gardiner has given a new spin to the omnipotent computer theme with his new novel, SIRAT. An acronym for the Scientific Rationality Project, SIRAT is the product of a team of American and British scientists working in the northeastern United States. A cutting-edge artificial intelligence program, SIRAT has the capacity to learn, to think for itself and, ultimately, to act in a manner that is not always necessarily beneficial to the human race. As the story unwinds, it touches on a number of thought-provoking considerations. Do machines have feelings? Can they be taught to think as humans, and is that a good thing? Is mankind truly the superior species on this planet? Should one be loyal to his own kind or should he act for the greater good, regardless of the consequences?
        Peopled with well-rounded characters who interact as real humans do, and a computer program that interacts with them all in unexpected ways, SIRAT moves along at a brisk pace from its well-founded premise to its startling conclusion. The dialogue is crisp, the settings evocative, and the action believable. There is enough computer data contained within the novel's pages to satisfy geeks, yet the language is not so high-tech that it cannot be easily grasped by the computer illiterate. With SIRAT, David Gardiner has produced a work whose implications will resonate in the mind and make readers pause whenever they sit down at the keyboard before a glowing monitor.
        Jack Ewing
         Author of Kissing Asphalt, Monkeys Are Made Of Chocolate and Freak-Out

'Sirat' is a book which deserves to rank in the grand tradition of Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein'. Like the Romantic poets, who were witnesses to the birth pangs of the first Industrial Revolution, we live in a time of extraordinary science; the gaunt spectre which haunted the Romantics, now disturbs our feasting, in a far more hi-tech and insidious form. Mary Shelley dreaded the coming of a 'new Adam'; the news which David Gardiner brings us, is of a new Jehovah. Good, or bad, news? Depends how much faith you put in what hitherto was viewed as "human rationality". Gardiner's own postion is that, whatever the evolutionary costs to us as a species, Reason should prevail. If this gives the impression that 'Sirat' is a book about nerds, and for nerds – nothing could be farther from the truth; it's a damn riveting read! The group of scientists, who inadvertently create an almost omnipotent – certainly ubiquitous – cyberGod, are no dry academics; in fact they are marred and scarred with all the frailties which make our sexy species such tragic fun; and Sirat too, manifests all the pettiness and favouritism first encountered in the God of the Old Testament.
        Jim Buck

David Gardiner has taken the much-feared theme of artificial intelligence and revealed it in such a way that the fear seems on the same level as the fear of global warming and overpopulation: it isn't a distant, shadowy fantasy we have to fear, it's present-day people and their simple, forgivable quarrels that cause the action of the story to take place. The ending is not catastrophic at all, but nonetheless horrifying in the way it is both bizarrely alien to the world we live in now, and yet so authentic it seems inevitable.
        The only angle on this subject that Gardiner failed to cover was the actual code for the SIRAT project itself. And that's rather lucky for us – that one missing link seems to be the only sheild between this book being merely a brilliant work of insight, and being a work of prophesy.
        Eric J. Hopkins




A new novel published on Saturday 12th November 2011
Visit YouTube for clips of the London launch event
There is a short promotional video for the book also on YouTube

Engineering Paradise cover

Engineering Paradise

The title comes from a Stafford Beer quote:

The Holocaust has shown us that the creation of hell
on earth is just a matter of engineering. The creation of
an earthly paradise is an engineering problem also.

Based very loosely on my teenage years in 1960s Belfast, this is essentially a love story, set against a background of religious bigotry, sexual liberation, communes, folk music, pirate radio and armed revolution. Setting out to build a Utopian community with the dream of changing the world, whether it wants to be changed or not. Idealism and youthful optimism, quickly giving way to compromise and disillusionment. A Faustian bargain, casually entered into, from which there is no escape.

Order a signed copy from this site for £7.00
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REVIEWS

Growing up among the turmoil of Northern Ireland in the 1960s was a challenge for the entire country, but for Danny Gallagher, a teenage boy attending a Roman Catholic school in Belfast, the constant unrest drove an undercurrent of excitement and danger that was too alluring to resist.

A whiz at anything having to do with electronics and amateur radios, Danny soon caught the interest of the local branch of the IRA and was soon recruited to do a few small jobs for the group. This secretive involvement would soon lead to changes in Danny’s life that would affect the rest of his life, and alter the history of the Northern Irish for the rest of time.

The fast-paced, action filled novel, “Engineering Paradise,” by David Gardiner, not only documents a restless time in Irish political history, it also shows how those changes in society affected the average person as well. Part love story, part coming-of-age drama, and part military history, Gardiner’s masterful storytelling skills are evident in this heart-wrenching tale that is set against a backdrop of actual events. Gardiner draws his readers into the heart of the story with prose that is lyrical and captivating. You’ll find yourself rooting for Danny Gallagher to achieve all he dreams of.

I highly recommend this novel.

Sharon Galligar Chance

Scripps Howard News Service: Wichita Falls Times, Las Vegas Review Journal and Ventura County Star

Set against events recorded in grainy black and white documentary footage, or in the memoirs of retired journalists and aging IRA hard men, the novel conjures to life first-hand an increasingly distant era, a disturbing time. Like the Indian Mutiny or the Boer War, the Irish Troubles are a blight the British establishment would love to forget, or somehow manipulate and neatly credit to their cause. Hence the immense value of this work, its detail, and characters, its astonishing technical accuracy. And David Gardiner’s novel is a real page-turner.

The background Ireland, so near to the UK, yet always so far, so constantly misunderstood, lampooned, neglected, abused, censored as a subject of media coverage and conversation on the mainland. Mention anything to do with Ireland, the IRA, Irish people, logical analysis shuts down, hysteria, absurdity, and prejudice erupt. Over the last 700 years, ongoing to the present day, Ireland has been the English journey up the river into the heart of darkness. The universal value of Engineering Paradise thus stems from its lack of political dogma and propaganda, its essential strength the neutral portrayal of civil war. The historical context is 1960s Britain, but with a little imagination it could be the 1690s, it could be any epoch, any locale.

The protagonist of the novel meanders his way Candide-like through this labyrinth of circumstances, ostensibly within his bounds, but increasingly Faustian. With the use of excellent dialogue, David Gardiner develops the characters as independent persona against this tableau, also as emblems reflecting a murky epoch in British history, and the never-ending human quest for a utopia.

Ultimately, with a neat twist in the tale, the novel makes us calculate, consider very carefully. What is it about humans that makes holocaust so easy to engineer? Surely we can answer, look into the mirror and reflect, travel up river into our heart of darkness with the same degree of intelligence and analysis? If so, a remote possibility exists for engineering paradise.

Andrew McIntyre

Author of The Short, the Long and the Tall, Gold Dust magazine Issue 20, winter 2011

David Gardiner is no newcomer to telling tall and short tales. His The Other End of the Rainbow (2008), and The Rainbow Man and other Stories (2010), are a testament to the power and delight embedded in his imaginative short story telling. Sirat (2000), revealed his strengths in writing science fiction novels. Engineering Paradise is quite different in that is a semi-autobiographical story with free love, commune-living, and Irish life for a lad coming of age and being drawn in to the Troubles along with his friends. The title is derived from a Stafford Beer quotation: ‘The Holocaust has shown us that the creation of hell on earth is just a matter of engineering. The creation of an earthly paradise is an engineering problem also.’ (1926-2002), This hints at the philosophical feel of the novel, but it reflects too the innate nature of Danny, the protagonist, with his engineering aptitude for making radios and solving the problems of bomb making yet with an urge to find happiness and love.

Although much of the content is political and philosophical, including references to 17th Century Gerrald Winstanley and the The Diggers, the style has ironic humour that makes the novel a page-turner. Much of the humour digs at authority and the establishment, while amusement is also derived by irreverent jibes at the Church. For example, in response to people suffering illnesses and untimely deaths, Danny’s father (a GP) says: “If there really is a God up there, I don’t know how he sleeps at night.” These light yet poignant moments are balanced by thoughtful episodes in which Danny’s adolescent mind ponders “...everyone’s mortality, including his own.”

Danny, through his mechanical propensity, eagerness to please and naivety with regard to the wiliness of 1960s IRA recruitment methods, is sucked into the movement. He’s no academic and yet is good with words and hands, and not backwards in coming forwards with sweethearts. Churchill’s famous quote about Clement Atlee is used to describe him admirably: ‘modest, but then he has so much to be modest about.’

Luckily, Danny falls in love with a local beauty. Unluckily, she enjoys other lads too. With such turbulence in his emotions and learning on the go how to cope with so many non-normal behaviour for those times, it is no wonder that ‘His mind flailed around furiously...’.

The story travels from Belfast to the Isle of Man, North Wales to England, beautifully described and expertly crafted. Learn history, philosophy, bomb and love making, radio transmission, and Life. This is a masterstroke book, a masterpiece.

Geoff Nelder, Science fiction author and editor