BOOK DESCRIPTIONS

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HEAVEN ENGINE(2004)

 

A future of designer humans, smart machines, protean technology. Our dwindled descendents exiled to space stations visit Cleansed Earth occasionally for gravity- and sensory-deprivation therapy. Human longevity, at last attained, ironically creates a Great Plague of Suicidal Despair, Disnovelling, born of the intruding longer prospect of Bloody Nature and of the impersonal hurtling Cosmic Vastitudes. Centwen, a resurrected twentieth century archetype joined by elites and archetypes from his and other centuries, learns from his tour guides, the superbot, Prodigy, and its human creator, Great Psychodor, about a last-chance project to create not a mythical but a secular, dynamic, intelligent heaven; and, if it succeeds, whether or not transformed humans and/or their intelligent machines can escape to it. The dramatic complication in this story about immortality is conveyed in the Acknowledgements: "My gratitude (goes to) John Updike who years ago in the aftermath of my reading Roger's Version kindly asked me a crucial question about the Longevitites with whom I was populating Heaven Engine: 'How do they keep from being infernally bored, as human consciousnesses would become in any infinitely prolonged situation?' His question crystallized my answer in Heaven Engine of the discovery of an indefinite, abstract storytelling." Marvin Minsky has written this cover endorsement of Heaven Engine: "A vast, important, and radical vision."

 

THE OLD WORLD (1988)

Detective Jack Freeman is challenged to imagine actionable scenarios by which to recognize and interpret in time the accumulating warning indications of a conspiracy by a revolutionary cadre which turns out to be a planned attack on a governing elite with co-opted commercial aircraft. Russell Jack Smith, former CIA Deputy Director for Intelligence and author of The Unknown CIA: My Three Decades with the Agency, endorsed this pre-9/11 novel with the following jacket blurb: "As a 25-year professional intelligence veteran, I marvel over the tight parallels between the fictional Mexican assassination plot and those I have seen clandestinely reported from other countries." Professor T. H. Greene, University of Southern California and author of Comparative Revolutionary Movements, wrote in 1988 of The Old World:"A masterful suspense drama set in a contemporary political context that is entirely credible--maybe tomorrow's headline."

 

 

TOWARD EFFECTIVE STRATEGIC ANALYSIS (1981)

 

This book seeks to bring to the U.S. national security establishment a modern theoretic framework for performing and continuously evaluating the art of strategic analysis, building on classic post mortems of intelligence and policy failures to fashion analytic remedies to help strategists alleviate surprise and to achieve policy adaptivity through a blend of computer science, insights from cognitive research, story narrative technique, artificial intelligence, institutional and organizational concepts, analytic procedure and system science. Thomas G. Belden, then Special Assistant for Warning and Crisis Operations to the Director, Central Intelligence, and a recipient of the National Intelligence Medal for post mortems of major U.S. foreign policy crises and intelligence failures, wrote of Toward Effective Strategic Analysis, "This book is essential to the role of human cognition and the means by which the machine becomes man's servant rather than his master." The American Political Science Review stated of the book, "Clarkson's major strengths are his treatment, drawn from many disciplines, of the myriad obstacles--­systemic, cognitive and epistemological--to effective strategic analysis (and) his discussion of distinguishing the novel from the routine in strategic analysis." Nearly a decade after the publication of the book, The Naval War College Review wrote of the continuing difficulty in U.S. strategizing, ''What-if brainstorming is not the solution to this. The solution arises from rigorous and methodical forecasting (as discussed) in Albert Clarkson's Toward Effective Strategic Analysis ... and in other works, including those of Soviet origin, over the last 15 years or so."

 

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