Hugo Reading Progress

2024 Hugo Awards Progress
11 items read/watched / 57 (19.30%)

12 May 2021

Review: Heads by Greg Bear

Originally published: 1991
Read: February 2021

Heads by Greg Bear

I read this novella because of the premise: some lunar colonists come into possession of a bunch of cryogenically-preserved heads, from an Alcor-like foundation. Can they figure out a way to read the memories of those colonists? I've been reading sf stories about life extension technologies for a class I'm guying to teach. Well, this book has very little to say about its actual premise, as it mostly focuses on largely uninteresting and seemingly over-simplistic politics on the Moon. There's also some Scientology satire; maybe this would have felt fresher in 1991, but thirty years on it's pretty dull stuff. The revelation about why the Scientologists don't want the heads revived is blindingly obvious, but takes the protagonists a hundred pages to catch up to the reader on. I guess this is set in the same milieu as Bear's Moving Mars, but that was a much better book.

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