Gaia's Web - Paperback

by Steve Proskauer (Author)

When Daryl McIntyre wins a $30 million dollar grant from the Turing Challenge Committee to make a bold advance in artificial intelligence and prevent environmental collapse, he has no idea his theory will transform humanity. Cataclysmic earthquakes, deadly storms, endless drought and rising seas are threatening to wipe out life on Earth. Daryl and his neuroscientist wife Samantha recruit mathematician Martin and hardware wizard George to help design AGA, a consciously creative computer program. AGA predicts universal extinction - unless the team can expand the human mind. The researchers race against time to save mankind by inducing millennia of evolution in a single week. Testing the transformation program on themselves exposes secrets that strain their relationships to the breaking point. Accelerated evolution succeeds in uniting humanity but casualties mount among those who resist. What price must mankind pay to save the biosphere? Some believe terrorists or aliens have pacified the human race for their own purposes, and the scientists fear AGA's power - but no one suspects the far greater force at work just beneath their feet. Gaia's Web features a witty computer program learning to be more human, a complex romantic quadrangle, and four subplots with colorful characters responding in different ways to forced evolution. Meet a cruel tyrant in famine stricken Bolkanistan and the loyal compatriot who must betray him, a bold US President and his unruly cabinet, a disenchanted Wall Street stockbroker on the brink of divorce who dreams of the sea, and three teenage friends in a separatist religious sect plotting to escape the clutches of a paranoid polygamous preacher. The story weaves developing crises in these diverse settings around the social, scientific and spiritual complications confronting the research team. Gaia's Web catapults mankind into the postcyber age beyond cellphones and computers, turning doomsday into utopia.

Author Biography

A natural storyteller steeped in the classic science fiction tradition of Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke, Steve Proskauer has walked many paths. Beginning as a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and pioneer in psychotherapy, he became an explorer of past lifetimes and altered states, a shamanic healer, a Zen monk - and always, a writer. Dr. Proskauer is author of two books on integrative psychiatry - Karmic Therapy (2007) and Big Heart Healing (2010) - as well as numerous scientific papers, articles and stories. He took first place in the Ultra IronPen writing competition at the 2011 Salt Lake Arts Festival. Steve lives in Salt Lake City with his wife and two cats. He was inspired to write Gaia's Web by the spirit of his late father, a visionary physicist and engineer who declared over sixty years ago that our civilization's disregard for the environment began with the invention of the flush toilet - out of sight, out of mind. Gaia's Web is the first novel in the Gaia series.