If I were to say that TERMINAL EXPERIMENT is typical of Robert J. Sawyer, I could not be paying it a higher compliment. You see, Sawyer (who won the Nebula award for this novel) gives me exactly what I want from sci-fi: heady, provocative concepts framed within a believable plotline. I’m not worried about literary turns of phrases or heart-thumping action scenes. No, in fact, the writers I like so much in this genre – Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Robert C. Wilson, Joe Haldeman, as well as many others – are quite usually writers who work with great concepts and continually prod and provoke those topics for what they can tell us. Yes, they do at the same time often have a framework of something thrilling happening, like the police angle in this one. But what I really like best is the fact that they constantly provide me with something – or many things – I never knew.
So, yes, the more salient topic here is of course the murder aspect: if you’ve read the book’s promotional blurb you know the plot concerns itself with a computer program that in essence comes “alive” and is quite literally killing flesh-and-blood characters out there in the real world. And yes, I’m aware this topic has been out there already; the book was published 20 years ago. But like a great sporting event you’ve seen before, the book handles its certainly “trope-ic” topic in a way that is innovative and fresh and lets us see its concept in a new and stimulating light.
For instance, the artificial intelligence(s) is not the initial focus of central character Peter Hobson: when he is a young medical grad student he has the opportunity to fulfill credit hours by observing a doctor and his team harvesting organs from a motorcycle crash victim’s dead body. Hobson’s early enthusiasm for the procedure is given a horrible shock when he observes the victim’s body go through very life-like -seizures, and afterward the post grad comes up with the idea of creating a neural net not unlike a shower cap that will map the brain’s activity of dying patients. It is through this procedure that he begins to notice a recurrent phenomenon: a small amount of electrical energy seems to “escape” the body and travel onward.
It is because of this phenomenon that Hobson decides to investigate whether there is indeed an afterlife, and wonders if he can mimic it by creating three copies of his brain by cleverly removing certain aspects from two of them: the first will represents life after death; the second, an immortal mind; and finally, the third will be a “control,” or unaltered copy. And yes, one copy seems to be guilty of murder… first one, then two, and then, well….
For me, the suspense is merely a by-product of a great topic; it’s not why I read Sawyer. No, he “sells” his book from the first words on. Though THE TERMINAL EXPERIMENT is certainly suspenseful, I don’t feel Sawyer is necessarily merely hoping we will nail-bite our fingers while sitting up all night to read the next page. No, I believe it’s more that TERMINAL is asking us to look at what it is that makes up the human soul, to wonder if there is indeed a “life” thereafter… and, in fact, whether there might be a God. While many might argue that this is not a proper topic for sci-fi – that in fact, this is a better topic for religious books like THE SHACK (by William P. Young) – it’s not one he shies away from: in fact, a decade later this is a KEY factor in Sawyer’s excellent novel CALCULATING GOD (which was nominated for a Hugo award).
Though TERMINAL’s topic is really the soul, it’s handled with Sawyer’s typically wry and clever approach. It’s not just through Hobson’s life that we see things develop...for instance, the story frequently steps back and let us see the topic through a variety of clips from the media. For instance:
“The suicide rates on Native reserves in the United States in Canada, and in the three largest ghettos in the US, were at a five-year high this past month. One suicide note, from Los Angeles, typified a recurrent theme: ‘Something beyond this life exists. It can’t be worse than being here.’”
In essence, Sawyer does what those other great sci-fi authors do: he writes well enough to let his provocative ideas sell the story. In fact, the author drives us to do what we must do with ALL literature, particularly sci-fi, and that is to suspend our disbelief by taking frankly difficult topics and building them step by step. We accept what we are reading because the authors let characters behave like people do, and by melding science fiction with the actions of everyday people and proceeding onward. I have read almost Sawyer’s entire collection and can hardly wait for his next.
A little factoid I’ll throw in here for those who care: I was in near seventh heaven when Hobson relates to us that he is beginning to enjoy what was for him a new author: mystery writer Robert B. Parker’s SPENSER series…which is one of my favorites. Sadly, Mr. Parker passed on a short while ago, though his character(s) live on through other author’s penning new books. I can only hope Robert J. Sawyer is here for decades to come.
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Top reviews from other countries
Scott Reine
This is why science fiction is one of Canada's greatest exports.
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on September 30, 2013Philippe Julien
Awesome, better than the FlashForward book
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on November 22, 2014
