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    Mindscan
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    Mindscan
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    Mindscan
    Ebook441 pages6 hours

    Mindscan

    By Robert J. Sawyer

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Hugo Award-winning author Robert J. Sawyer is back with Mindscan, a pulse-pounding, mind-expanding standalone novel, rich with his signature philosophical and ethical speculations, all grounded in cutting-edge science.

    Jake Sullivan has cheated death: he's discarded his doomed biological body and copied his consciousness into an android form. The new Jake soon finds love, something that eluded him when he was encased in flesh: he falls for the android version of Karen, a woman rediscovering all the joys of life now that she's no longer constrained by a worn-out body either.

    But suddenly Karen's son sues her, claiming that by uploading into an immortal body, she has done him out of his inheritance. Even worse, the original version of Jake, consigned to die on the far side of the moon, has taken hostages there, demanding the return of his rights of personhood. In the courtroom and on the lunar surface, the future of uploaded humanity hangs in the balance.

    Mindscan is vintage Sawyer -- a feast for the mind and the heart.

    At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateMar 10, 2005
    ISBN9781429914697
    Unavailable
    Mindscan
    Author

    Robert J. Sawyer

    Robert J. Sawyer is the author of Flashforward, winner of the Aurora Award and the basis for the hit ABC television series. He is also the author of the WWW series—Wake, Watch and Wonder—Hominids, Calculating God, Mindscan, and many other books. He has won the Hugo, Nebula and John W. Campbell Memorial awards—making him one of only seven writers in history to win all three of science-fiction’s top awards for best novel. He was born in Ottawa and lives in Mississauga, Ontario.

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    Reviews for Mindscan

    4/5

    160 ratings7 reviews

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    • 2/5
      The basic idea of the story about people who decide to have their minds uploaded into fabricated durable bodies is good. The complications that happen were interesting. The story was told in a rather dry fashion and I didn't care for that. I felt that most of the book was pretty empty. The other Sawyer books I've read have been a bit heavy on philosophy, but this one seemed overly so. I did read it all, so I can't say that it was bad, but to me it was not good either.
    • 4/5
      Second read through this book. Surprinsingly did not remember as much as I thought I would. Interesting story about what defines consciousness. The second half felt more like a trial procedural than sci-fi.
    • 2/5
      There is an unspoken contract between writer and reader. Everybody knows it but nobody talks about it, because we all instinctively know it and recognize it. The writer promises us well-crafted entertainment and in return we let the author sneak in a few personal views. As long as that’s not too much on the surface. Many writers have made use of that. Heck in the latest Stephen King, The Institute, you can read anti-Trumpism through some of the pages, but he has read the contract and he balances it out with some pro-Trump sentiments and of course plenty of thrills and entertainment.Robert J. Sawyer has not read the contract and if he has, he willfully ignores it. We’re barraged by pages and pages of what the author wants us to think about person-hood, identity and property. This is done by pages and pages of what the author must think is infallible logic all dressed up as a court case. Below that overt litany of views lies a more subtle message: look at how smart I am. At the end I wasn’t just sick of the novel, I was sick and tired of Robert J. Sawyer. Never has an author made me not want to read any of his other works. Not even to verify if this novel is a one-off. At the very end I didn’t care about the characters, they are as two-dimensional as the robot body they inhabit. The most interesting character in the entire book is the main character’s old girlfriend and we never hear from her again. What I did care about was the strangely gaping plot hole that would have annihilated the entire novel, which brings us to the shaky plot.The main character pays to have his mind copied into a physical structure that will make the robotic copy identical to the original with the perk that it lives forever. That leaves the problem that there are now two identities, two things that can claim to be the same person. Would a company that provides these services not have thought about all the problems that could arise with that scenario? Apparently not. It never crossed any of the executives’ mind to perhaps have the original person create a specific living will in which the ‘copy’ is made the primary or sole beneficiary. Or even an airtight contract which presages all the thorny ‘philosophical’ questions brought up in the novel. In fact, throughout the lawsuit, this novel is about, nobody from the evil corporation is questioned, consulted or even mentioned. But that’s not important, because what is important is all massive amounts of thinking done by Robert J. Sawyer. That’s what this book is really about, Robert J. Sawyer.
    • 4/5
      Don't read the blurb on the book flap. It has a big spoiler in it.
    • 3/5
      Interesting story with just a bit too many contrived circumstances. Fans of other books by Sawyer will enjoy this one too.
    • 4/5
      Didn't think I was going to like this at first but then got sucked into the very different story line. Will read more by this author. Would recommend it.
    • 5/5
      Mindscan is the latest from Mississauga author Robert J. Sawyer, and continues with his tradition of using cutting-edge science to deal with contemporary moral issues.Telling the story of a near-future where a process is discovered that can 'scan' a person's brain and download a perfect copy of it into an artificial body. The artificial body then takes over the person's life, and the 'shed skin' of the original person is sent off to a retirement community on the far side of the moon.As always, Sawyer writes a tale here that uses science to further its plot and resolve some of the central issues of the book; however, at the same time, he does it in a way that remains accessible to people who aren't fans of science fiction. Much in the same way that George R.R. Martin is said to "write fantasy for people who aren't fantasy fans", Sawyer writes for the mainstream reader as much as he does for the science fiction fan.