As always, Sawyer has taken a bold scientific concept and wrapped it up inside a fascinating story.
The idea behind MINDSCAN is one Sawyer will repeat in his 2013 novel
Red Planet Blues
: the transplantation of minds into artificial bodies. Perhaps many people approaching my age (60) will recall an age when many believed there was no way we could ever scan music, or art, with fidelity...are we really so far from an era in which memory and other functions of the human mind can be reproduced in synthetic form?
I'll leave the mechanics of the transfer to the author, but consider this: if you transfer a mind into an artificial form (giving you the chance to update it periodically), what you have is a human being's best chance at immortality.
What's great about "Mindscan" is that Sawyer's decision to downplay the science and concentrate upon the ethical nature of the transfer. The whole rationale for such a procedure--and the completion of it--take about five percent of the book. What's left is the "human" side of the process: how would people react to such a thing? How would your friends, your family, and others react to you?
THAT's what I love about Sawyer's books: he takes science and looks at the way it affects people. He has a way of making science both understanding and provocative, and his stories are always well explained and very believable. They're about IDEAS, and his real talent is creating a scenario that lets them play out in the most interesting manner. I haven't encountered a Sawyer novel I haven't loved.
Here, he creates two important characters who supply the novel with its best expression. The narrator is Jake Sullivan, a wealthy young man who has been living under a continual death sentence in that the blood vessels in his brain are extremely fragile and prone to bursting. If that's not horrible enough, the outcome will probably leave him--as it did his father--into a man who lives in a vegetative state, unable to interact with others for as long as his body survives. And there's Karen, too, an 80-ish woman who has created a "Harry Potter" like creation into a multi-million dollar inheritance, but her advanced age gives her everything but a future.
So, yes, they transfer. But it's what happens to them afterward that drives the novel. Once they are in their new forms--their synthetic, almost immortal forms--their romance takes off, and life seems to be looking up. Problem solved...right? But it's never that easy: not only do their former friends reject them in their new forms, but for Karen the problem is compounded legally: her son wants his inheritance, and his contention is legally sound...his mother is no longer "alive" and therefore he is pushing to have her estate go into probate, and be divided up as her will dictated.
And here, Sawyer excels, too: he is able to make the legal battle that follows be of the utmost interest and importance, a floor for the real debate this book creates: what is "LIFE"? Is a person whose consciousness transfers "alive"? Does she or he have rights? And isn't this what makes great sci-fi, after all: the investigation of life's great ideas?
There's more to MINDSCAN I haven't even touched on. Everyone undergoing this transfer process agrees beforehand that their still-surviving biological body and mind are to be sent to a splendid facility upon the dark side of the moon. It's usually not a very big issue, as most people who undergo this transfer are at their most "senior" stages of life, and their time left is typically brief. The moon facility sees to their every whim as best they can--and in the reduced gravity their aches and pains are usually greatly diminished.
But it's not enough for the "other" Jake--the "skin," as they're called. He has DECADES left, and he wants to battle the legality of THAT decision, too.
Luckily for us, this is another area in which Sawyer shines--like so many other authors who make legal battles their bread and butter, he really seems to enjoy the work. (Another of his books to do this is
Illegal Alien
--the story of a murder trial in which a visiting alien is on trial.) Sawyer genuinely seems to love the controversy, and his writing skill is more than a match for what is to follow. Like with a musician playing his instrument, Sawyer's interest seems to lie in letting the case find its most essential elements and letting them play out, taking us along for the ride. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that what I liked best was that the case did not wrap up nice and neatly, all in a pretty bow, but left us to see the most important aspects and decide for ourselves.
I loved MINDSCAN. Like his other great novels (
Calculating God
,
Flashforward
,
Rollback
,
Triggers
) he has a genuine talent and zeal for probing the most telling aspects of his subjects, and letting them take full form. I have read more than a half-dozen of his novels, and I am pleased to say many more await me...I can't wait to see what lies ahead.
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