The Terminal Experiment by Robert J. Sawyer

The Terminal Experiment by Robert J. Sawyer

This was wretched. I read it because it's about mind-uploading, and I am co-teaching a class on that... but I will not be teaching this book. Let me take the time to explain.

Originally published: 1994-95
Acquired: July 2021
Read: August 2021

The book has two concurrent ideas in play. One is that the main character, a designer of medical devices, is preoccupied with the idea that there's no definitive way of knowing when someone transitions between being alive and being dead. He invents an extremely discriminating device to map the brain, and using it on someone at the moment they die, detects what he dubs "the soulwave" leaving their body. This rocks the world: suddenly we know when people are alive and dead, we know what kind of life counts as alive and dead, and so on.  But once the device is invented and made public, this idea basically vanishes from the plot of the novel, and just becomes a background element; between chapters, we read news updates of how this is affecting society. But it never affects the story, it never even really affects our main character, who could have just easily been an inventor of a new type of soda pop, and the plot would have proceeded in exactly the same way. This seems to me to be one of the worst sorts of science fiction; it's a complete lack of imagination. Isaac Asimov says in Asimov on Science Fiction that in sociology-dominant sf, the author should come up with a society affected by a "what if—" and then "[t]he actual plot of the story, the suspense, the conflict, ought to arise—if this were a first-class story—out of the particular needs and frustrations of people in such a society" (p. 172). None of that is true here; Sawyer squanders his central idea. Interesting extrapolation in the background, but none in the foreground.

The other idea is that the main character sells his mind-scanning technology to an AI research firm. He asks if they can upload his consciousness into a computer... and they just do! Apparently all you have to do is scan the brain in order to have a working simulation of the brain. This seems like a huge leap to me. Like, being able to map where neurons are does not equate to being able to simulate how someone thinks! On top of this, the book acts like this is no big deal, and that no one will be interested in it! Even though the soulwave thing doesn't affect the plot at all, it does change the world. But the characters totally brush off the idea that anyone would even want to upload a brain. This surely has theological and philosophical repercussions even bigger than those of the soulwave. Where there was once one person, there are now four (they make three copies of the main character's brain). They call a press conference to announce the soulwave... but treat this advancement as if its old news. Again, it's a complete failure of imagination when it comes to worldbuilding. At one point they even go, "Oh, who would be interested in such technology anyway?" Like, everyone would!

The brain uploading stuff also reads as hugely improbable. Even though the technology was just invented, the AI researcher can just hit a couple buttons to rewrite the main character's personality. Of the three uploaded scans, one is edited to simulate how he would be if he was immortal, the other is edited to simulate how he would be without a physical self. And then all three selves can move themselves around because the original knows how directories work... I don't think that follows. Also, why don't they copy themselves if they are files? Somehow there's only one copy of each of the three versions. That a brain uploaded to a computer instantly becomes a super-hacker seems like something from a cheesy 1970s sci-fi film, not a supposedly serious 1990s near-future sf novel, but it's how the entire plot resolves; they stop the copy that goes evil by uploading the copy of a police officer's brain into the Internet to get him!

On top of all this, the prose reads like it was written by a tedious pedant. Utterly lifeless. This won the Nebula!?

(Not Sawyer's fault, but the way the book is dated by being written in the 1990s but set in 2011 is often hilarious. There's a bit that essentially goes, "He's taken over the entire Internet... AOL and CompuServe!" Well... maybe it is Sawyer's fault; his version of the future seems exactly like his present except that they have e-readers.)