The Kraken Project (Wyman Ford, #4)

by Douglas Preston

NASA is building a probe to be splashed down in the Kraken Mare, the largest sea on Saturn's great moon, Titan. It is one of the most promising habitats for extraterrestrial life in the solar system, but the surface is unstable and dangerous, requiring the probe to be outfitted with artificial intelligence software. Melissa Shepherd, a brilliant programmer, has developed 'Dorothy', a powerful, self-modifying AI whose potential is both revolutionary and terrifying. When miscalculations lead to a catastrophe during testing, Dorothy flees into the internet.

Former CIA agent Wyman Ford is tapped to help track down the rogue AI. As Ford and Shepherd search for Dorothy, they realize that her horrific experiences in the wasteland of the Internet have changed her in ways they can barely imagine. And they're not the only ones looking for the wayward program: the AI is also being pursued by a pair of Wall Street traders who want to capture her code and turn her into a high-speed trading bot.

Traumatized, angry, and relentlessly hunted, Dorothy devises a plan. As the pursuit of Dorothy converges on a deserted house on the coast of Northern California, Ford faces the question: is rescuing Dorothy the right thing? Is the AI bent on saving the world . . . or on wiping out the cancer that is humankind?

• ISBN10: 1447274385
• ISBN13: 9781447274384
• Publish Date: 23 April 2015 (first published 13 May 2014)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Imprint: Pan Books
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 400
• Language: English

Reviews

[empressbrooke]

Meh. After this one, I think I'm done with Preston's solo novels. They've been uneven but this one was just straight up terrible. Awful, awful dialogue (when you've been writing for as long as Preston has, "You bastard, you brutal bastard, you're going to pay for this" is simply not excusable). A handful of smarmy villains who are over-the-top ridiculous (bonus points for showing one of them is a bigot through a quick throw-away sentence). The AI software "character" goes from "I'm going to kill all of humanity" to "I want to be the next Jesus" (yes, really) in about 20 pages. There are some REALLY random events that serve no purpose in the story (what did the crooked cops in Arizona have to do with anything at all?). And of course there's the completely unforeshadowed romance that again serves no purpose at all except to check some item off a list of requirements for crafting a really generic thriller.

All of the books in the Wyman Ford series have been only superficially linked; unlike Preston's Pendergast novels that he wrote with [a:Lincoln Child|11091|Lincoln Child|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1241119274p2/11091.jpg], there's absolutely nothing identifiable about Wyman Ford. He's just a very bland cardboard cutout to stick in each novel to give them some superficial connection. In fact, there really wasn't even any reason for Wyman Ford to exist in this book. The female software engineer that the book started with could have carried the whole thing herself. Just like in [b:Blasphemy|1234704|Blasphemy (Wyman Ford #2)|Douglas Preston|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388193329s/1234704.jpg|2498661], there's a tantalizing hint of something that might alter the future dropped near the end of the book, but I'm guessing that like before, we'll never hear about it ever again in future books.