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133 of 138 found the following review helpful:
 It is hard to categorize this great book. Sep 13, 2005
By W. Kilgore
Try as I might to pick a category for this first work by Dr. Alex Alaniz, I cannot. To say that it is merely science fiction does not do justice to all the fact-based vision of what science and research can truly hold for us in the near future; to say it is a love story is accurate for sure, but Heinreich and Lise's love for one another transcends their corporeal lives and flourishes into the mind space of the future; it is also a riveting tale carefully interwoven with real history spanning all of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with an accuracy like Michener and a passion for science like Crichton. Gathering from all his many, diverse experiences as a pilot, derivatives analyst, the United States Air Force, researcher in the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory and most of all as a scientist, Alex portrays a fantastic and possible vision of the future. His book is also a bold condemnation of some of the atrocities of the last century and a vision of a better life based upon the freedom to doubt and to subject every 'truth' to the scientific method. This novel a 'must read' for everyone.
24 of 25 found the following review helpful:
 Love is in the Mind(space server) Nov 29, 2005
By Patrick Shepherd
"hyperpat"
This is a book of prognostication wrapped around a love story, a love story that continues for far longer than might be imagined in any normal course of events.
Starting at the end of World War I, if follows three main characters from birth and early education through the trials of WWII, the Cold War, and on through the present to a rather distant future. Lise and Heinreich are the two lovers, Hans their nemisis, who initially cross paths at a Hitler Youth Academy for gifted children. This section of the book, where these characters are drawn and slowly colored in with their abilities and interests, while the events of the world swirl around and eventually overtake them, is very good and eminently believable. The portrait of the Germany of the late twenties and early thirties, as seen from the perspective of the major characters, is good and something that is not seen with any great frequency. Hitler's rise to power is given a solid foundation here, as a reaction by the populace to what seemed to them to be intolerable conditions of high unemployment and the restrictions that Germany was forced to work under during that period.
It is a little bit of stretch to have both Lise and Hans be mathematical/physicist prodigies, starting what would today be considered college graduate level work while still at the Youth Academy, and their relationship to Einstein was one point that really did not need to be there, but the general portrait of these people is built nicely, from Hans turning to the Nazi doctrine and Lise and Heinreich becoming intensely involved with each other. The things that happen to them and their families over the course of WWII is a portrait that has been seen before in many other books dealing with that war, but here it is both immediate and believable, without dwelling overly long on those horrors.
Up to this point (about 2/3 through the book), this has been a well constructed and told story. Unfortunately, the last 1/3, dealing with the Cold War on up to several thousand years in the future, is not as good. Part of the reason for this is the large blocks of expository material detailing this `history', and when the author does return to his characters and their interaction with the scientific and political happenings in this world, the sense of immediacy so prevalent in the first portion of the book is no longer present. While the scientific concepts are good extrapolations of existing trends, most especially in the areas of biological enhancements and man/computer interfaces, the `gee whiz' factor of these items is not enough to carry the story. I had quite a bit of difficulty connecting to Lise and Heinreich after they uploaded their minds to `Mindspace Servers' - surely such an environment would be wildly different from everyday consciousness, but I got no sense of that from the story. The `enemy' of this last section, a mind that basically has taken over all the mindspace servers on Earth, remains a complete cipher, with no hooks provided to really understand his motivations. There is an apparent scientific hole in the described battle in the asteroid belt: that exploding a few atomic weapons on some middle sized rocks would produce such a hail of fragments that they would form a major hazard to approaching spaceships (a few calculations of the volume of space versus that of the rocks would show that this would be a very, very thin screen). And while the continuing love affair between Lise and Heinreich is touching, once more I had trouble believing in it when it stretches over a seven-thousand year span without contact between the two.
Stylistically, this is reasonably well written, but there is one item that irked me: the author has his characters consistently refer to their relations as `mein' (mein father, mother, etc.). As everything else is written in standard English, this comes off as an affectation - either use more German in their speech patterns, or eliminate it entirely.
A very good first half, a nice story of love amidst all the horrors and rapid changes of the twentieth century, and some very plausible ideas for where mankind and science are headed in the future, but a lack of `being there' in the last half injures this book considerably.
--- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)
25 of 28 found the following review helpful:
Great to the last page Dec 06, 2005
By Cathy Houghton
Wrapped in a compelling love story than spans hundreds of years, Alaniz's novel is a solid science-based fiction dealing with humnanity's fast approaching bio/nano conversion to transhumanity: the so-called Singularity. (See Ray Kurzweil's new book, "The Singularity is Near" for a good, science based treatment of Singularity; Kurzweil claims it is no more than 50 years away.)
Beyond Future Shock, while carrying you away to scenes of romance amid vivid battles scenes, past, present and future, makes you think about the religious, scientific, and ecnomic promises and perils of Singularity
A Nazi combat pilot and his Jewish wife are torn apart during WWII. One gets to the know the hapless couple, Lise and Henreich during their "school" days at a Hitler youth academy all the way through the outbreak of WWII, when Lise's Jewish ancestry is revealed by a jealous "friend" of Heinreich. A beutiful romance is torn apart. The treatment of WWII, of its aerial combat and death camp suffering in particular, is painfully vivid. From the end of WWII through the Cold War, and the new war on terror, Lise (who ends up working for the Russians on nuclear weapons) and Heinreich (who emigrates to the United States and becomes a super succesful aerospace industrialist) do not reunite until they are in their late nineties in the late 2010s, when the first stem cell based "youth coctails" are being released for general consumption.
The world, on the edge of "killing" death through modern science, is, however, energy starved, and conflict between Luddite religious factions is rampant. Things only get worse when bio/nano brain chips, originally designed to cure Alzheimer patients in the early 2030s, enter the black market, and people begin to "upload" their brains into mindspace servers. The new beings, freed from slow, accidental evoulution, begin to evolve into ever more advanced and agressive beings through bio/nano technology, and a war involving every single transhuman erupts over possession of mindspace and energy resources.
Yet again the ex-Nazi combat pilot and his wife find themselves facing a world on fire. Heinreich and Lise use their vast aerospace resources to build a moon base to house mindspace refugies and humanist rebels who are trying to bring peace back to Earth. The battle between Earth and the humanists spills into the solar system. At stake is the future of transhumanity. Will a few, or even a single, ulitmate post-Darwinian super being take over the whole of the Solar System?
Chatherine Houghton
27 of 31 found the following review helpful:
 A new Carl Sagan Jul 20, 2005
By John Reynolds
"SETI John"
I can see Alex Alaniz becoming the next Carl Sagan. In Arthur C. Clarke's book, "2001, A Space Odyssey," I was fascinated by the ultra advanced beings that visited Earth and modified the evolutionary path of the apes so that homo sapiens would arise. But beyond being told that these super beings evolved from ocean slime much as we did before they evolved into high-tech beings, no further details are supplied as to how these beings evolved. Beyond Future Shock does exactly this, except it is us humans who do the evolving into advanced quantum electronic beings.
Don't get me wrong. I liked the WWII romance, the battles, the sex, and all the Cold War history that the main characters struggle through. But the book didn't start for me until the two main characters, Jewish physicist Lise and ex-Nazi fighter pilot Heinreich, now powerful, wealthy military industrialists in their 90's start taking youth cocktails in the late 2010's. Then in the 2020's they start adding more and more bio-silico-nano technology to their bodies and brains until by the 2030's they, like the rest of humanity, quit their bodies and start living as "mindspace" beings in a "matrix" of their own making. You think, wow! humanity has cheated death, can explore the universe at its leisure, and that all is well. No! Mankind's deeply rooted competitiveness just leads to an all out war for mindspace and physical resources that reaches out to whole solar system.
A lot of the conflict between religion and science and ethics that are found in Sagan's book/movie Contact find their place in Beyond Future Shock, but Alex's story, at this point bursting with all sorts of nasty battles raging on Earth and in space, goes much deeper into what makes us our own worst enemy, and what we can do about it before its too late. You got read it!
PS-I love what happens to Al Qaeda in the book about circa 2030.
26 of 31 found the following review helpful:
Mind Blowing!!! Dec 06, 2005
By Randy
I completely agree with my friend Cathy's review, but as a concerned bioethicist, I worry that most of humanity might soon become insignificant in light of near future biotechnology. Alex's book, through the entangled lives, deep romances and awesome adventures of his living characters, has only made my fears worse. Whereas I have feared that within 10 to 20 years the ultra rich will be able to buy highly expensive, highly improved invitro produced offspring, leaving our kids in the dust of post-Darwinian evolution, Alex warns us that the super rich are likely to simply use their billion dollar resources to upload their minds into large supercomputers in thirty or forty years. Then the rest of us will be truly left in the dust. To me, Beyond Future Shock is a book filled with ideas that everyone should hear about, or see if this visually graphic epic is ever made into a block buster movie.
Randy
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