Customer Reviews

The Terminal Experiment

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I'll admit my bias up front: I'm a solid Robert J. Sawyer fan. I got hooked with "Factoring Humanity," sailed right through "Flashforward," "Starplex," and "Calculating God," then stumbled a bit with "Illegal Alien." Then I read "The Terminal Experiment."

I do like this book. It had some good strong characters, and had the usual Sawyer multiplot setup. When a man develops a machine capable of viewing the soul's release after death, the world changes overnight. The philosophical ramifications of this device have its creator wondering about what happens to the soul once it has left the body, and he produces an AI experiment: he creates three copies of his own mind to exist in cyberspace: one with no memory of physical existance (to simulate life after death), one with no knowledge of aging or mortality (to simulate immortality), and one unmodified, as a sort of scientific "control."

Then, people with whom Hobson has 'personality conflicts' start showing up dead, and it seems that all three Hobson-AIs have escaped their cybernetic boxes. One of them is a killer.

Weaving multiple plots together is usually a forte of Sawyer, but in "The Terminal Experiment," it's not so tightly woven. The plots of the family troubles of Hobson, against the "soul-wave" device, and the murder mystery, don't always link together as tightly as they could. Still, I quite enjoyed his book, as always, and if nothing else, the philosophical debates of the three AIs, and what they represent, was a real thought-provoker.

If you're new to Sawyer, start with something else, such as "Flashforward" or "Factoring Humanity" or "Calculating God." If you've read him before, be prepared for a stylistically weaker plot, but a good read nonetheless.

'Nathan

I've spent most of my life reading science fiction; I've read almost everything written before 1980, and a huge chunk of what's come since then. What I've loved most about the genre -- after the guilty pleasures of space opera -- is its capacity to take the unanswerable questions and try to answer them. Too often, the questions we want to know the answers to -- what is the meaning of life? Why are we here? What happens to us after we die? -- are either unanswerable or fully realized in religion. So, for a science fiction writer to contemplate the nature of the soul and the afterlife, he runs two risks: one, that he will come up with ridiculous, unproveable answers, or two, that he will utterly infuriate one or more of the established religions. To Robert Sawyer's immense credit, he does neither. He constructs a fascinating premise: what if the soul could be proved to exist, and be proved to be heading somewhere after death? He then constructs another premise: he takes the protagonist's personality, and he makes three AI copies: one with no modifications, one that has all the bodily references deleted, and one with all the knowledge of aging and death deleted. That is his main story. The murder mystery that runs along side this plot is interesting, but it isn't the main point. Sawyer is asking the most important questions a human being can ask, and he's coming up with plausible answers. One of the paradoxes of science fiction is that its greatest books are religious in nature: "Stranger in a Strange Land" and "Dune" are two excellent examples. And while "The Terminal Experiment" isn't quite up to that level (what is?), it is a worthy younger brother to those older giants. The clear, lucid prose reminds me of Isaac Asimov's belief that nothing should get in the way of the story; the characters are not eccentrics, but everyday people, which serves Sawyer's purpose much better than coming up with oddballs that we might remember better. I enjoyed this book far more than any other sf novel in years, precisely because it brought me back to why I stayed in love with the genre after I grew up: it's the only literary form that still provides intellectual provocation.

Robert Sawyer has moved to the forefront of Canadian SF writers, largely on the basis of this book and StarPlex, both multi-nominated tales. Neither is up to the quality of the outstanding Far Seer trilogy, but that's hardly damning. What Terminal Experiment offers is a series of ideas wrapped up in Sawyer's second attempt at the SF mystery. The first was Golden Fleece and the 'mystery' quality of this book doesn't quite live up to that early effort, in a discipline that Isaac Asimov called the most difficult in the field. But all that's back story to this book.

Terminal Experiment features Peter Hobson, a scientist with a creationist bent, who invents a measuring device for souls. This puts him at the fork of a series of Hobson's choices that eventually lead to an AI-induced nightmare. His solution is pedestrian. The joy of the book is in the conundrums of existence that are raised. Describe your last meal at a restaurant with a friend or loved one. Did you describe the scene from the vantage point of your seat or did you assume the role of a third-party on-looker? It's a little tidbit, but the kind of item that prompts discussion after the fact. And what better legacy can a book have?

Read Terminal Experiment not for the mystery or even the near-future SF. Read it for the chance to talk about things you never imagined could be part of your life.

The vitriol displayed in some of the reviews of this book amazes me. While the writing style may not give Updike or Bellow anything to worry about, when compared to some of the so-called giants in this genre, like Asimov, Clarke, and Niven, it holds up quite well.

Yes, there are some lapses such as: about 5 too many Star Trek references; a tendency to take today's media figures and just age them, instead of creating new people; and a lead character that seems a little too much like someone you'd bump into at a sci-fi convention. But some of the criticisms on this page are pretty unfounded. Someone criticised the lack of differences in technology between today and 2011 Just how much do you expect life to change in 14 years? Is your life today hugely different than it was in 1983? I think its great that in this version of the future people aren't riding anti-grav cars on the way to the space elevator. And perhaps the most insulting critique of all is that the book doesn't pay enough attention to the U.S., Europe, Japan. Why, this book even has the audacity to present the idea that a major discovery could be made in Canada! Amazing! How insultingly U.S.-centric is it to demand that Canadian writers set their stories in the U.S.?

This book isn't great literature, but it is very good sci-fi. It is full of fascinating ideas, a propulsive narrative with its share of surprises, and an interesting focus on morality. Don't miss this book because of the cranky comments listed on this page. This one deserved the Nebula it won.

Ten reasons to avoid this book:

1) Clumsy, insipid prose.

2) Rubber science.

3) The world's most obvious murder mystery.

4) A whiny and dull protagonist. You'd want to smack him if you only gave a damn what happened to him.

5) Rob's Remedial Plotting 101: "Hmm. My opening is rather slow. I know! I'll take a random scene from the end of the book and tack it to the beginning. Yeah! Then three hundred pages of flashback. That oughta juice 'er up."

6) Simplistic plotting. The author has either not properly thought through all of the consequences, or is deliberately avoiding difficult issues.

7) Even more simplistic solutions...

8) ...which lead to sophmoric philosophy...

9) ...which leads to laughable "transcendent" ending.

10) Man. Must've have been a slow year at the Nebula awards.

Robert J Sawyer has never been an author to think small and he certainly didn't start in "The Terminal Experiment"! Soul-searching (literally) provocative discussions on the nature and the very definition of death, immortality, spirituality, morality, love, compassion, hatred, infidelity and more are what elevates Sawyer's novel from the realm of a mere hard sci-fi murder mystery into the class of a Nebula Award winner! He even goes so far as to touch upon the existence of a soul and its effect upon religious beliefs and global events.

Dr Peter Hobson, a successful businessman and bio-technology engineer, has created an EEG orders of magnitude more sensitive than all of the machines currently available. When he uses his scanner to detect an electrical field leaving the body after death, which he calls the "soul wave", he then collaborates with his best friend, an AI specialist, to create three computer simulations of his own brain - one modified to represent the spirit, or life after death; a second, modified to have no concept of death or aging, representing immortality; and the third left untouched as a scientific control. The self-determining simulations escape from the confines of the AI lab's computers into the world wide net and the murders begin. One of them is a murderer but the question, of course, is which one, why and how to stop it?

Sawyer's clever literary device of using snippets from newscasts and magazine or newspaper articles is not only entertaining but it places the issues he has chosen to address in his novel into a global context and hypothesizes on the effects that these types of discoveries would have on a worldwide scale ... at once thought provoking, amusing, sobering and educational!

On a complete aside, I was also grateful to Sawyer for using his story as an example of what Charles Dickens was trying to convey in his famous opening paragraph in "The Tale of Two Cities" - you know the one, "It was the best of times. It was the worst of times ...". Until Sawyer illustrated the idea using his own story, I was always foggy about this ambiguous juxtaposition of complete opposites. But Sawyer switched on the light bulb for me.

Highly recommended!

Paul Weiss

Sawyer has made a bold, and generally successful, attempt to raise the genre of speculative fiction above the 'space opera' level. Merging a wealth of science and technical publications with a philosophical drama, he's launched a fresh approach to sf prose. The story relates the life of Peter Hobson, who becomes a specialist in brain signal detection after witnessing a corpse reacting to an organ transplant operation. His research discloses that the brain indeed possesses something that seems to transcend death. Pursuing that issue, he records his own brain signals, creating three identities. Meanwhile, Hobson's a lovely, devoted, wife betrays him with a creep, devastating him. The result is mysterious deaths, a world reaction to his discovery and some heavy discussion on human values.

The debate over human consciousness, whether it exists, whether it's unique in the animal kingdom and whether it has a long term essence, remains ongoing and intense. Works on evolution and sociobiology are permeated with the question of whether our ability to communicate ideas reflects the existence of a spiritual element in humanity. Ever since early humans could perceive the idea of death the question of 'what happens after' has dominated our thinking. Sawyer makes a good effort to deal with the first part of the question: yes, there's something there, and it's not limited to humans. As to the afterlife, Sawyer raises the question, then leaves it for a later book or someone else to decide.

The many comments below about Sawyer's characters reflect the maturity of his prose style. Readers looking for simplistic people and predictable action are not pandered to in this book. He introduces a devout Muslim AI engineer, surely a novel idea in speculative fiction, and a graduate chemist unable to shed her childhood disappointments. Current concepts of family stress, with separations, sex, and parental tensions all become major features in this story. While the characters here are mildly wooden [especially in comparison with Sawyer's later books], their models are real enough. Sawyer simply had too much philosophy and technology to present in too few pages. The lady copper, in particular, is a pretty fast thinker, given the novelty of the circumstances.

The philosophy redeems any faults in this book. We need to recognize where evolution has brought us. Sawyer touches that issue lightly, bringing the story to a level rarely encountered. We are left uncertain as to whether the concept of the soul is meaningful. That will leave some readers unsatisfied, but that's a major part of Sawyer's appeal. He will raise the questions, you must come up with some of the answer.

What a let-down. After reading Flashforward (also by Sawyer) and enjoying it sufficiently to look for more by the author, I happened upon Terminal Experiment. I have now had my fill of Sawyer for the forseeable future. Sawyer can't seem to decide what this book is about: mushy theistic philosopy, an affair between the protagonist's wife and her co-worker, a murder mystery, or an AI experiment (of the possibilities, the last at least had potential for an interesting plot). Unfortunately, Sawyer meanders aimlessly through all of the above story lines without addressing any one of them in an interesting way. Combine this with stilted plot, a whiny protagonist, and an uninteresting supporting cast, and you don't have much. Hard to believe this won a Nebula. It might be worth reading if you find it in the pocket of the seat in front of you on the airplane, but this book is certainly not worth buying.

When Science Fiction is at its best, the technology is so accurate that only small extensions make it "fiction" instead of "fact". That is definitely the case with the Artificial Intelligence technology utilized in this book. We may not be at the point of actually creating fully thinking simulations, but so MUCH of the technology is right, it is no suspension of belief by the reader to believe that this has been achieved in what is effectively a current day setting. It is truly evident that Sawyer consulted with the experts in the field.

When SF is doing its best, it uses the fictional world to deal with important issues. That is also handled adeptly in this book. The Terminal Experiment not only deftly discusses social issues such as abortion and infidelity, but also the "biggies" such as life, death, and the meaning of it all. Even the sidebars indicating media and commerce's reactions to the main character's discovery, which could have really been hokey if not done well, are fun rather than a distraction.

A+ for good SF; A+ for SF "doing good"; Sawyer immediately became one of my favorite authors on the reading of this book alone.

I read this book and thoroughly enjoyed it. It is rightly classed as science fiction because it deals with potential new technologies, how they may be used, how they may affect society (although a bit of discussion beyond Net messages would have been better) and how the "monsters" created by Robert Sawyer's main character get out of control. Don't be put off by the absence of interplanetary wars and lots of wonderful new technologies to ponder. The setting and extrapolation of current trends is quite realistic, and welcome at a time when we are facing the need to debate issues which challenge our ages old vision of humanity. Concerns expressed by other reviewers regarding the number of references to Star Trek and use of aging talkshow hosts are petty. This is classic science fiction because we could open a newspaper tomorrow and read about exactly the sort of research Robert Sawyer discusses. I'll be seeking out other titles by this author.