The Kraken Project (Wyman Ford, #4)

by Douglas Preston

"NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is designing a probe which will be dropped into the Kraken Mare, one of the methane seas of Titan. There, it will embark on a journey of exploration. As the probe is being tested at Goddard, things go awry, and an explosion kills seven scientists. The AI program in the probe, a powerful, self-modifying AI called "Dorothy," flees into the Internet. Series character Wyman Ford is tapped by the president's science advisor to track down the software with the help of Dorothy's creator, Melissa Shepherd. As the two of them trace Dorothy in her wanderings in cyberspace, they realize Dorothy's horrific experiences in the wasteland of the Internet have changed her--utterly. But for the better . . . or worse? At the same time, they learn Dorothy is being pursued by a pair of Wall Street high-frequency traders, who want to turn her into an algorithmic-trading slave-bot. Pursued relentlessly by the traders, Dorothy jumps out of the Internet into a child's toy robot, to hide. Now the only person standing between the murderous algo traders and Dorothy is a lonely, twelve-year-old boy living on an isolated bay on the coast of northern California. But is Dorothy bent on doing good . . . or on wiping out the cancer of the human race?"--

• ISBN10: 0765317699
• ISBN13: 9780765317698
• Publish Date: 13 May 2014
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 10 April 2021
• Imprint: Forge
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 352
• 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.