Hello Everyone, Last night's meeting of the Science Fiction club featured a great discussion of Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. The general consensus was that although it started out a bit slowly, it turned into quite a page turner packed with ideas and a great plot. There were a few loose ends, though. Might a sequel be in the cards? The book we decided to do for December is: Mindscan by Robert J. Sawyer. He has written some great novels, many of them on Bookshare, and this one definitely sounds like another one. You can get it from Bookshare at: http://www.bookshare.org/web/SingleTitle.html?submittitleid=34713 The Bookshare synopsis reads as follows: Jake transfers his consciousness to an android body, finds love and all is good. Then his lover's son sues for money and Jake's body demands its personhood back. Here is a longer review from Booklist, taken from Amazon. Jake Sullivan watched his father, suffering from a rare condition, collapse and linger in a vegetative state, and he's incredibly paranoid because he inherited that condition. When mindscanning technology becomes available, he has himself scanned, which involves dispatching his biological body to the moon and assuming an android body. In possession of everything the biological Jake Sullivan had on Earth, android Jake finds love with Karen, who has also been mindscanned. Meanwhile, biological Jake discovers there is finally another, brand-new cure for his condition. Moreover, Karen's son sues her, declaring that his mother is dead, and android Karen has no right to deprive him of his considerable inheritance. Biological Jake, unable to leave the moon because of the contract he signed, becomes steadily more unstable, until finally, in a fit of paranoia, he takes hostages. Sawyer's treatment of identity issues--of what copying consciousness may mean and how consciousness is defined--finds expression in a good story that is a new meditation on an old sf theme, the meaning of being human. This sounds like a great novel with some serious themes, so I hope to see lots of people at the next meeting to talk about it. Evan