Customer Reviews

The Heaven Virus

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Imagine your fertile mind being downloaded onto a computer for all eternity and being able to enjoy all of the pleasures you loved in your previous earthly life ... and then something goes wrong. "The Heaven Virus" makes for some very lively reading and makes one wonder if Edgar Allan Poe is still actively at work in some incredible parallel universe.

Besides the lively narrative, Pickover has included some interesting philosophical discussions of issued raised along the way, a number of interesting digressions and anecdotes, plus quite a few very cool quotes from some surprising individuals. With the author's rich vocabulary, a colorful cast of characters, and lots of action, "The Heaven Virus" provides tremendous reading.

This is a tour de force of the imagination that explodes with revelations on a plethora of subjects. It operates on many levels: it's a technical solution for immortality, it's extreme science fiction, plausible yet wild, and it's just a darn good story that keeps you intrigued from the outset. Warning: it should be R-rated for some parts that are violent, but then again, the timid can just skip over those pages.

The Heaven Virus joins The Parrot's Theorem and Iceberg Risk on the short list of first-rate novels with deep mathematical cores. While Pickover has a lot to say about reality, time, religon, language, brains and minds, these ideas whirl randomly around the one constant in the story, mathematical truth.

I undertand other reviewers' comparisons to books such as Slaughterhouse-Five, The Metamorphosis, Alice in Wonderland and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, those convey the some of the style. For my part,
The Black Cloud is closer to the mark: using up-to-the-minute science to explore what it really means to be human, and how that might change in the near future.

Read it for the story, or the speculations, or the science; but read it.

"The Heaven Virus" elevates the themes of "Sex, Drugs, Einstein & Elves" and "A Beginner's Guide to Immortality" -- two of Pickover's most recent non-fiction books -- to a level that perhaps only a work of fiction can achieve. He has been able to say things in this novel that he was never able to reveal in his non-fiction books.

All of the sex that was nonexistent in "SDE&E" is in this novel in spades. And I think that he explores the theme of immortality more deeply in this effort than in "A Beginner's Guide to Immortality."

"The Heaven Virus" reminds me of one of Franz Kafka's classics. Things are not quite what they seem. And events become more ominous as we move along. It is also comparable to Philip K. Dick's paranoid style, with shades of Aldous Huxley.

The writing style is quite elegant and readily accessible to almost any reader, albeit Pickover's vocabulary occasionally soars into the stratosphere of the "obscurity index." His technical understanding of science, mathematics, and technology is exceptional, and this gives the narrative a unique edge.

There is, of course, a fly in the ointment of "The Heaven Virus." And I hesitate to use an insectoid reference, as you shall see once you read the novel, for it is filled with insectoid references. In that sense, it is very Kafkaesque!

Pickover manages to probe the depths of theology in the neo-reality of cyberspace -- as if seeking the Godhead of meaning in the denatured universe of consciousness uploaded into matter. It takes the concept of engineered reality ("The Matrix") into the realm of the afterlife.

Perhaps artificial reality is really just nature after all. Though we may strive to create absolute perfection, our human nature invests our creations with our humanity, and all its imperfections. What could be more hellish than a "Heaven Virus?" It makes immortality on a computer chip downright undesirable!

The basic premise behind the book, that the soul can be transferred between various computational devices (brain, computer, other dimensions, heaven?) is a very powerful idea. We would all like to believe that our life is not in vain, that we could somehow transcend this reality and yet still be the same individual. His descriptions of the environment are very detailed and the interactions between the characters seem real. If you want to read a book that lets you question reality, that makes you ask 'what if', then this book is for you.

By constructing personality from scratch, Cliff Pickover's "The Heaven Virus" provides a fascinating look at what it really means to be human. At the same time, this is no turgid science text--it's an exciting story that weaves adventure seamlessly in with its scientific premise.

I'm always a fan of sardonic humor, and Dr. Pickover comes through beautifully. A typical example (page 95) is:

"Nick looked at a nearby table of people with pencils behind their ears. Two of the people manipulated a wet, multifaceted object.
'Who are they?' Nick whispered.
'The high-IQ dead people are having a four-dimensional meal, or at least attempting to.'"

That's my kind of humor!

I especially appreciated how Dr. Pickover started the novel out by providing easy-to-understand context about how the story connects with current scientific knowledge.

There were many profound take-away messages from this book. Perhaps the most important, to me, was that our consciousness of what surrounds us is very much determined by our biological underpinnings. There--I said it--but not nearly as well as Cliff Pickover did!

The only other Cliff Pickover book that I own, the phenomenal "Sex, Drugs, Einstein, and Elves," was purchased as an impulse buy when I couldn't get a bead on what it was all about in the bookstore, but found it impossible to put down at the same time. That book is not written as a novel, and I thoroughly enjoyed its scatter-shot sampling, all in one volume, of topics as diverse as the true name of God, Thomas Jefferson's edited bible, the interpretation of hallucinations brought on by use of various psychoactive compounds, poetry written by computers, Proust, fugu, and so on and so on. If you haven't read the above book, I'm not exaggerating, and I'm only scratching the surface. Pickover writes, and apparently thinks, like a half-crazed mathematician-biochemist-poet ADD case, fresh off of a one-night stand with a very thick and more than just a little dangerous multilingual dictionary and completely unabashed at the thought of kissing and telling. As an intellectual smorgasbord, "Sex, Drugs, Einstein, and Elves" soars and never looks back, and it's a helluva ride.

And, having read the many references to his Neoreality series laced throughout that book, I had to wonder, "What do you suppose his fiction is like?" Based on Pickover's brief descriptions of the plots of each of the four Neoreality novels, I decided that "The Lobotomy Club" would be the best one for me to start with. However, I was frustrated to find that all four of these books are out of print, and that the used copies listed were a little pricey. When Amazon informed me that he had a new novel out on the market, very much in print and, from the description, very much a native of the same soil as "Sex, Drugs, Einstein, and Elves," I jumped at the chance.

I just finished "The Heaven Virus." What can I say; the man's an undisputed genius.

He just ain't a storyteller. Not by a long shot.

"The Heaven Virus" reads like a treatment of much of the same material that went into "Sex, Drugs, Einstein, and Elves," but rather than Pickover taking the reader on a whirlwind tour through his mind, he has the characters of his story take a walking tour through it instead. In short, Nick, the main character of the book, has recently died and been uploaded into a computer construct in order to enjoy an afterlife of infinitely diverse stimulation, within the confines of a virtual shopping mall of sorts. I say "of sorts" because, although the mall is referred to as such throughout the story, its physical nature is forever changing and it eventually ceases to resemble any kind of building. Nick is accompanied by Miranda and Avril, computer simulated companions for him to have rambling conversation with, fall in love with, and protect from the mall's dangers. Many other simulated constructs, some human, some humanoid, some entirely alien by human standards, filter in and out of the story as Nick and company make their way through the mall. Nick and his buds need to find an exit back into reality, or at least onto any other afterlife simulation that they can find access to. The mall, it seems, is unstable, infected with the virus from the book's title. Perceived reality in the simulation is in constant and wild flux, portions of the mall are disintegrating, and simulated post-dead life forms are being injured or "killed" by various monstrous animals that have begun to manifest themselves with increasing frequency. The already strange mall gets progressively stranger and stranger, as do the characters that Nick and co. meet along the way.

Kurt Larson of Information Society once said, "It is both difficult and fruitless for us to put effort into trying to be weird." Pickover spends his whole book doing just that; trying so hard to be weird and weirder still on the next page, that he (with seeming glee) throws away whatever grasp he may have once had on the narrative. It's a good thing that he doesn't waste any time developing much back story or character depth for Nick; main character or not, Nick's character is just about completely insignificant to the story. He exists solely as a viewpoint and as the muscle to swing the scimitar and keep our post-dead pilgrims from becoming fish food. Early in the novel, he does have one relatable reaction to the notion of having been uploaded into an afterlife simulation. Not remembering his time spent dying in a hospital bed, he is initially unconvinced of his own passing, and treats the mall like a cage to be escaped from, doing his obsessive best to attempt to crack the impenetrable glass of the doors. I think most people will rattle the bars of any cage that they find themselves in, even a pleasant one. But then, his simulated girlfriend throws a fit because he's more interested in breaking out than exploring his new reality with her, and suddenly Nick abandons any desire that he ever had to test the confines of the simulation and runs apologetically to her side. From that point on, Nick neatly severs himself from any concerns of his pre-death life and just becomes the set of legs that Pickover utilizes to carry readers across his vast psychedelic canvas. Even those moments where he's fighting for his life or being intimate with his travelling companions merely serve as vehicles for adding still more bizarre layers to the onion. The scenery has completely consumed the characters moving through it well before the book is half over, and even though Nick and friends eventually do escape the collapsing mall simulation, (the thin plot ending with a completely deux ex machine wrap-up) they never escape Pickover's need for conceptual overload and psychedelic razzmatazz.

I really don't think that Pickover wrote this book to tell us an entertaining story so much as he did to dazzle us with language, imagery, and, sad to say, his own high-handed genius. He loves Latin scientific names of insects and high mathematical concepts, and if you're going to hack through his mental thicket, you'd better at least tolerate them, too. But even his need to maintain an arcane strain becomes downright repetitive: at times, his prose reads like it was written mad-lib style, or by pulling chips out of a bag that are inscribed with his personal favorite words or phrases like "fractals," "DMT," "Loretto staircases," "Mandlebrot set," etc., and then shoehorning the selection into the sentence in question. Humorist Patrick F. McManus used to write about Watchagot stew, a hunting camp dish made by throwing whatever food everybody had into a big pot and then cooking it until it resembled stew. Pickover's book is a mental Watchagot stew of all of his favorite ingredients, and it's beautiful to look at and imagine for about a hundred pages or so. But in just about 350 pages of trying, it never really becomes a cohesive tale populated by meaningful or relatable characters that the reader is compelled to care about. It's like looking at the graphic depictions of the mathematical sets that Pickover keeps writing about - it's psychedelic, trippy, beautiful, and it conveys the illusion of depth, but it's a visual, not a narrative.

I plan on someday purchasing more of Pickover's non-fiction. I don't think I'll pursue his fiction anymore. He's a cutting edge dreamer and a first-rate psychonaut, but not a great bard.

I tend to go back and re-read this book at times. Part of the reason, I believe, is the detail that Pickover uses in his prose. What I like about "The Mall" are the rich descriptions of the place that his protagonist, Nick Tesla, begins to inhabit, when he is uploaded to a very special microchip, "The Afterlife Chip." He sojourns through the "mall" and likely, way beyond it, in a search for safety (there are dangers!) and through changing, definitions of what is real.

The premise of the book is excellent (when you die your consciousness can be uploaded to a chip running a simulation of a world where you can continue your existence). The story is a kind of Alice in Cyber Wonderland. The fearless adventurers are off on a quest, meeting all kinds of strange beings along the way. The story starts off well enough. And even later, there are interesting points.

Some minor issues: First, there is virtually no character development, particularly with the main character. Second, one would think he'd have some existential issues finding himself dead in a simulated world, but no, he just carries on as if nothing had happened. Third, the different beings they encounter start seeming arbitrary and uninteresting. Perhaps they would work better in a graphic novel or movie.

But the real problem shows itself when suddenly we find an entire page of facts about why the number 5 is interesting. This has absolutely nothing to do with the story being told. I thought that the author had lost his mind. And then the book is just packed with trivia. Facts that the author must find interesting, but are totally irrelevant to the story. We are told how many muscles a cat's ear has, and who wrote the lyrics to Silent Night, and on and on. And then there is the endless naming of various mathematical objects, which again play no role in the story.

The author is in great need of an editor. What could have been a great novel was simply trashed. The book was a great disappointment.