MINDSCAN Review

MINDSCAN is Sawyer's latest installment in a sort of thematic trilogy on the nature of consciousness. The other two being THE TERMINAL EXPERIMENT and FACTORING HUMANITY. Sawyer does yeoman's work in exploring some of the ethical dilemmas presented by the march of science. Other writers, most notably John Varley and Robert K. Morgan, have played with the other end of the spectrum where mind recording has vastly altered society. Sawyer in this consciousness novel is concerned with the transition from our purely biological view of personhood to a future one which could come into play with a few scientific breakthroughs, where the thoughts of a natural person are implanted into an artificial body. He manages to contrive a scenario on which to hang his story; that of a man with a terminal illness opting to be uploaded into a machine only to be cured shortly thereafter. The biological man, having surrendered his rights to his android double, now wants to get his life back. The novel hinges on the resolution of this ethical problem. MINDSCAN is typical of Sawyer in that it is strongly plotted. Sadly, his plotting has come to dominate his work as of late. His earlier superior THE TERMINAL EXPERIMENT has not only a tight plot but sympathetic characters to engage the reader. In that novel Sawyer explored the effects of society of an undisputable discovery of the human soul. It too involves multiple copies of human consciousness into the machine realm.

In MINDSCAN I never got beyond a purely cognitive attachment to the story and the ideas being presented. THE TERMINAL EXPERIMENT on the other hand engaged me on a different level. I had a sense of fun playing with the ideas, whereas MINDSCAN feels more academic. If Sawyer was trying to evoke antipathy for his android protagonist then he succeeded. I can't say I enjoyed the feeling however. I will give Sawyer kudos for delivering both a hard science science-fiction story and tackling some of the ethical questions brought to the fore by man's relentless attempts to play in God's sandbox. Read both these novels. But read MINDSCAN before THE TERMINAL EXPERIMENT if you prefer saving the best for last. I could say that this is Sawyer's best novel since THE TERMINAL EXPERIMENT. His in-between efforts fall into the formulaic category. They are all “hard science” novels, but lack the spark of life present in THE TERMINAL EXPERIMENT. Strangely I would have liked MINDSCAN more if I hadn't been expecting another aware of Sawyer’s high potential. I was disappointed that MINDSCAN didn't live up to its predecessor. I need to re-read it to determine if my memory matches my opinion.