[bookshare-discuss] Next Meeting of the Science Fiction Club Thursday December 11, 2008
- From: "EVAN REESE" <mentat3@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, <bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, <scifi@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2008 23:04:00 -0500
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
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