Books by Coppley, Jackson

Coppley, Jackson. The Code Hunters. Chevy Chase, MD: Contour Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1-09-107011-0.

A team of expert cavers exploring a challenging cave in New Mexico in search of a possible connection to Carlsbad Caverns tumble into a chamber deep underground containing something which just shouldn't be there: a huge slab of metal, like titanium, twenty-four feet square and eight inches thick, set into the rock of the cave, bearing markings which resemble the pits and lands on an optical storage disc. No evidence for human presence in the cave prior to the discoverers is found, and dating confirms that the slab is at least ten thousand years old. There is no way an object that large could be brought through the cramped and twisting passages of the cave to the chamber where it was found.

Wealthy adventurer Nicholas Foxe, with degrees in archaeology and cryptography, gets wind of the discovery and pulls strings to get access to the cave, putting together a research program to try to understand the origin of the slab and decode its enigmatic inscription. But as news of the discovery reaches others, they begin to pursue their own priorities. A New Mexico senator sends his on-the-make assistant to find out what is going on and see how it might be exploited to his advantage. An ex-Army special forces operator makes stealthy plans. An MIT string theorist with a wide range of interests begins exploring unorthodox ideas about how the inscriptions might be encoded. A televangelist facing hard times sees the Tablet as the way back to the top of the heap. A wealthy Texan sees the potential in the slab for wealth beyond his abundant dreams of avarice. As the adventure unfolds, we encounter a panoply of fascinating characters: a World Health Organization scientist, an Italian violin maker with an eccentric theory of language and his autistic daughter, and a “just the facts” police inspector. As clues are teased from the enigma, we visit exotic locations and experience harrowing adventure, finally grasping the significance of a discovery that bears on the very origin of modern humans.

About now, you might be thinking “This sounds like a Dan Brown novel”, and in a sense you'd be right. But this is the kind of story Dan Brown would craft if he were a lot better author than he is: whereas Dan Brown books have become stereotypes of cardboard characters and fill-in-the-blanks plots with pseudo-scientific bafflegab stirred into the mix (see my review of Origin [May 2018]), this is a gripping tale filled with complex, quirky characters, unexpected plot twists, beautifully sketched locales, and a growing sense of wonder as the significance of the discovery is grasped. If anybody in Hollywood had any sense (yes, I know…) they would make this into a movie instead of doing another tedious Dan Brown sequel. This is subtitled “A Nicholas Foxe Adventure”: I sincerely hope there will be more to come.

The author kindly let me read a pre-publication manuscript of this novel. The Kindle edition is free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

April 2019 

Coppley, Jackson. Leaving Lisa. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2016. ISBN 978-1-5348-5971-5.

Jason Chamberlain had it all. At age fifty, the company he had founded had prospered so that when he sold out, he'd never have to work again in his life. He and Lisa, his wife and the love of his life, lived in a mansion in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Lisa continued to work as a research scientist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), studying the psychology of grief, loss, and reconciliation. Their relationship with their grown daughter was strained, but whose isn't in these crazy times?

All of this ended in a moment when Lisa was killed in a car crash which Jason survived. He had lost his love, and blamed himself. His life was suddenly empty.

Some time after the funeral, he takes up an invitation to visit one of Lisa's colleagues at NIH, who explains to Jason that Lisa had been a participant in a study in which all of the accumulated digital archives of her life—writings, photos, videos, sound recordings—would be uploaded to a computer and, using machine learning algorithms, indexed and made accessible so that people could ask questions and have them answered, based upon the database, as Lisa would have, in her voice. The database is accessible from a device which resembles a smartphone, but requires network connectivity to the main computer for complicated queries.

Jason is initially repelled by the idea, but after some time returns to NIH and collects the device and begins to converse with it. Lisa doesn't just want to chat. She instructs Jason to embark upon a quest to spread her ashes in three places which were important to her and their lives together: Costa Rica, Vietnam, and Tuscany in Italy. The Lisa-box will accompany Jason on his travels and, in its own artificially intelligent way, share his experiences.

Jason embarks upon his voyages, rediscovering in depth what their life together meant to them, how other cultures deal with loss, grief, and healing, and that closing the book on one phase of his life may be opening another. Lisa is with him as these events begin to heal and equip him for what is to come. The last few pages will leave you moist eyed.

In 2005, Rudy Rucker published The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, in which he introduced the “lifebox” as the digital encoding of a person's life, able to answer questions from their viewpoint and life experiences as Lisa does here. When I read Rudy's manuscript, I thought the concept of a lifebox was pure fantasy, and I told him as much. Now, not only am I not so sure, but in fact I believe that something approximating a lifebox will be possible before the end of the decade I've come to refer to as the “Roaring Twenties”. This engrossing and moving novel is a human story of our near future (to paraphrase the title of another of the author's books) in which the memory of the departed may be more than photo albums and letters.

The Kindle edition is free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers. The author kindly allowed me to read this book in manuscript form.

July 2016 

Coppley, Jackson. The Ocean Raiders. Chevy Chase, MD: Contour Press, 2020. ISBN 979-8-6443-4371-3.

Nicholas Foxe is back! After the rip-roaring adventure and world-changing revelations of The Code Hunters (April 2019), the wealthy adventurer with degrees in archaeology and cryptography arrives in Venice to visit an ambitious project by billionaire Nevin Dowd to save the city from inundation by the sea, but mostly to visit Christine Blake, who he hadn't seen for years since an affair in Paris and who is now handling public relations for Dowd's project. What he anticipates to be a pleasant interlude becomes deadly serious when an attempt on his life is made immediately upon his arrival in Venice. Narrowly escaping, and trying to discover the motive, he learns that Dowd's team has discovered an underwater structure that appears to have been built by the same mysterious ancients who left the Tablet and the Omni, from which Nick's associates are trying to extract its knowledge. As Nick investigates further, it becomes clear a ruthless adversary is seeking the secrets of the ancients and willing to kill to obtain them. But who, and what is the secret?

This is another superb adventure/thriller in which you'll be as mystified as the protagonist by the identity of the villain until almost the very end. There is a large cast of intriguing and beautifully portrayed characters, and the story takes us to interesting locations which are magnificently sketched. Action abounds, and the conclusion is thoroughly satisfying, while leaving abundant room for further adventures. You, like I, will wish you had a friend like Guido Bartoli. The novel can be read stand-alone, but you'll enjoy it more if you've first read The Code Hunters, as you'll know the back-story of the characters and events which set this adventure into motion.

The author kindly let me read a pre-publication manuscript of this novel. The Kindle edition is free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

June 2020 

Coppley, Jackson. Tales From Our Near Future. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2014. ISBN 978-1-4961-2851-5.

I am increasingly convinced that the 2020s will be a very interesting decade. As computing power continues its inexorable exponential growth (and there is no reason to believe this growth will abate, except in the aftermath of economic and/or societal collapse), more and more things which seemed absurd just a few years before will become commonplace—consider self-driving cars. This slim book (142 pages in the print edition) collects three unrelated stories set in this era. In each, the author envisions a “soft take-off” scenario rather than the sudden onset of a technological singularity which rapidly renders the world incomprehensible.

These are all “puzzle stories” in the tradition of Isaac Asimov's early short stories. You'll enjoy them best if you just immerse yourself in the world the characters inhabit, get to know them, and then discover what is really going on, which may not be at all what it appears on the surface. By the nature of puzzle stories, almost anything I say about them would be a spoiler, so I'll refrain from getting into details other than asking, “What would it be like to know everything?”, which is the premise of the first story, stated on its first page.

Two of the three stories contain explicit sexual scenes and are not suitable for younger readers. This book was recommended (scroll down a few paragraphs) by Jerry Pournelle.

June 2014