Book Review: The Terminal Experiment

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.)