Robert J.
Sawyer
1995
Awards:
Nebula
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –
The Terminal Experiment reads quickly and easily, like a
fast-paced thriller, zipping you effortlessly through the plot. It also has a
fantastic initial premise.
Unfortunately,
although the plot starts off following a tantalizingly interesting opening idea,
it switches course about halfway through and plunges off into a much less
interesting, almost completely separate story line for the remainder of the
book. It ends up seeming like two independent stories stuck together with a
minimum of connective tissue in the middle and at the end. And the writing can
also sometimes be, well, juvenile.
The main
character, Peter Hobson, is a brilliant Toronto-based biomedical engineer. At
the beginning of the story he is in grad school and is asked to assist with an
organ harvest from the victim of a traffic accident. From the donor’s body’s
reactions, Peter thinks that the donor might still have been technically alive
when they began the harvesting operation.
This gets Peter
thinking. After he gets his doctorate, he invents a kind of a super EEG machine
that will detect the instant a person is actually, really dead—no brain activity at all.
The thing
is that when his machine reads a person’s brain activity at the moment of their
death, it consistently records a powerful last electric impulse that travels from
the center of the person’s brain out to the person’s temple where it leaves the
head, still intact. It turns out that Peter has accidentally scientifically
proven the existence of the human soul.
This, of
course, changes the way everyone looks at everything. It gets especially
interesting when other scientists using Peter’s machine are able to discover
that (a) cows don't have a soul but chimpanzees do, and (b) the soul enters a
fetus sometime between the 9th and 10th weeks of pregnancy (which makes both
sides of the choice debate unhappy).
This is all
great as a cool, thought-provoking plot line. But just as it really gets going,
the story veers in a different direction. During a dinnertime discussion only
tangentially related to the soul wave, Peter and his friend Sarkar, a brilliant
software engineer, decide to do an experiment with artificial intelligence to
figure out what it’s like to be dead and what it’s like to be immortal.
Using an
invention of Sarkar’s, they create three identical copies of Peter’s brain
patterns. One is identical to Peter (a control); one has had all impulses
removed that are related to the physical body (this one is supposed to be the
dead one); and one has had all fears about aging removed (this one is supposed
to be the immortal one).
Then everything
goes to hell in a handcart when the three Peter simulations escape out onto the
internet and one of them arranges to have Peter’s wife’s former lover killed.
The Toronto police start zeroing in on Peter and it becomes a race against time
to see if Peter and Sarkar can identify and shut down the errant sim before either
(a) they are both arrested or (b) the bad sim kills again.
If the book
had just ended after the first half—hopefully after coming to some creative
resolution of the soul wave story—it would have been great. The questions it
raises are intriguing enough in their own right. But the second half of the
book, the sim murder mystery, is awkward and much less interesting. It’s all a
bit far-fetched as a scientific experiment to start with and the sims
themselves are personally irritating. Plus, it is all centered around Sarkar’s invention
while Peter’s invention has fallen, essentially forgotten, by the wayside.
The other
problem is that the writing, while easy to read and fast-moving, also sometimes
feels klunkily immature. The emails that the bad sim sends to set up the hit on
the wife’s lover are particularly goofy; they read like a teenager wrote them
trying to sound like an adult. The news stories about the soul wave discovery
that Sawyer sprinkles throughout the text don’t sound like stories serious
reporters would actually write; they have too much witty joking around.
The dialogue
of peripheral characters doesn’t always ring true to their professions. At one
point, for example, a police detective asks a medical examiner about an autopsy,
and the medical examiner says, “the gym teacher who combed his hair over?” it
just klunked. I would think an M.E. would say, “the heart attack?” or “the car
accident?” to identify a case, but not whether a guy had a comb-over. It seemed
not only unrealistic but also needlessly mean.
And one final
annoying thing is that Peter is constantly ogling and fantasizing gratuitously
about every woman he comes across. The physical appearance of each luscious female
character is described meticulously, while all we know of Peter is that he has
a bald spot. (And we know nothing physically about his male friend Sarkar; all we
know is that he is a devout Muslim and likes Star Trek and Agatha Christie.)
This book is so fast and so fun, you could
easily read all of it in one longish day at the beach. Or in one late night (to
early morning) of uninterrupted indulgence. It’s a satisfying guilty pleasure,
like a special double episode of your favorite awkward but lovable cult sci-fi
TV series.
Unfortunately,
although the plot starts off following a tantalizingly interesting opening idea,
it switches course about halfway through and plunges off into a much less
interesting, almost completely separate story line for the remainder of the
book. It ends up seeming like two independent stories stuck together with a
minimum of connective tissue in the middle and at the end. And the writing can
also sometimes be, well, juvenile.
The Apocalypse Codex is a story told by Bob Howard, who is a field
agent for the British intelligence services. Except instead of being a nice,
normal spy for something like MI-5 or MI-6, Bob is an agent for the Laundry,
the agency that protects the United Kingdom (and, often, the rest of humanity
as well) from demons, zombies, evil entities from parallel dimensions, and
other soul-sucking creatures. 