Status
Available
Call number
Publication
HarperPrism (New York, 1995). 1st edition, 1st printing. 352 pages. $5.50.
Description
Biography & Autobiography. Nonfiction. HTML: In burnished, exquisite prose, Browning describes her feelings of being set adrift until she gradually transforms her helter-skelter days into a deliberate, contemplative way of life." -The Boston Globe In late 2007, Dominique Browning, the editor-in-chief of Conde Nast's House & Garden, was informed that the magazine had folded-and she was out of a job. Suddenly divested of the income and sense of purpose that had driven her for most of her adult life, Browning panicked. But freed of the incessant pressure to multi-task and perform, she unexpectedly discovered a more meaningful way to live. Browning's witty and thoughtful memoir has already touched a chord with reviewers and readers alike. While untold millions are feeling the stress of modern life, Slow Love eloquently reminds us to appreciate what we have-a timely message that we all need to hear..… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member Hamburgerclan
This book is practically advertised as a mystery. "Dr. Peter Hobson... has created three electronic simulations of his own personality. ... But now all three of them have escaped from Hobson's computer... and one of them is a killer." Now I have a soft spot for science fiction mysteries ever since
--J.
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I read Asimov's Mysteries in days of yore. (Note to self: pull that one off the shelf for a re-read.) Problem is, the mystery of The Terminal Experiment isn't all that hard to figure out. The science fiction part, on the other hand is excellent. Dr. Hobson's impetus for creating his simulations is his scientific discovery of the human soul. Mr. Sawyer does an excellent job of showing the consequences of this discovery while also telling the tale of troubles between Hobson and his wife. (Which provides motives for the killing spree.) The tale evolves, all the while looking at the concept of death and life after death. Another excellent tale, securing Mr. Sawyer's position as one of my favorite scince fiction authors. I've got to reserve some more room for his books on my shelf.--J.
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LibraryThing member wifilibrarian
A murder mystery, a contemplation about immortality, life after-death, morality, and how technology will be intertwined with moral issues in the very near future. It was dated as it was written in 1995, and set in 2011. We aren't technologically ahead as the author would want us to be. I enjoyed it.
LibraryThing member jmourgos
The Terminal Experiment
I have yet to read a bad Robert J. Sawyer tale! True, I have not read a lot of them – the WWW trilogy, Flashforward, Mindscan – yet the flavor of these later stories pretty much began with his first Nebula award-winning novel, The Terminal Experiment.
As the author
First Impressions: I was impressed with Peter Hobson, a man who had it all – a great wife Cathy, who he dated since school, a great job and a best friend – a Hindu scientist whom he dearly trusted – and whose world comes crashing down!
No spoilers here, but Peter’s scientific mind works to solve a major personal crisis – he first of all discovers through his research what appears to be the human soul – he creates a device called the Soul Wave Monitor that can spot it near the moment of death.
What’s cool about this is Sawyer’s involvement in seeing how a world would respond to a scientific proof of the human soul, the religious and personal implications are amazing.
What’s disappointing is that the author did not play this up very much. It fell to a subplot! His focus was on the personalities of Peter Hobson – who has his brain copied and downloaded! These personalities escape into the World Wide Web with disastrous consequences!
Also the story is very “Canadian-centric.” I spent some little time looking up the places and events of Toronto during the story!
Bottom Line: You can see remnants of this kind of Web tale in his later WWW trilogy. Here, we see a peak of “our” future through the eyes of 1990s science (I like the idea of printing out your newspaper at a newsstand and his prediction of electronic readers), the moral implications of his soul detector and wraps up the story nicely in the never-ending saga of affairs of the heart, jealousies and tragedies as he searches for an answer to his life as it crashes around him!
Not Sawyer’s best novel, but an easy read that will get you thinking. Recommended.
I have yet to read a bad Robert J. Sawyer tale! True, I have not read a lot of them – the WWW trilogy, Flashforward, Mindscan – yet the flavor of these later stories pretty much began with his first Nebula award-winning novel, The Terminal Experiment.
As the author
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explained in his preface, he wrote this in the 1990s during the infancy of the Internet and the World Wide Web and did not want to update the story, yet this does not majorly affect the relevancy of the story nor the cool entertainment value! First Impressions: I was impressed with Peter Hobson, a man who had it all – a great wife Cathy, who he dated since school, a great job and a best friend – a Hindu scientist whom he dearly trusted – and whose world comes crashing down!
No spoilers here, but Peter’s scientific mind works to solve a major personal crisis – he first of all discovers through his research what appears to be the human soul – he creates a device called the Soul Wave Monitor that can spot it near the moment of death.
What’s cool about this is Sawyer’s involvement in seeing how a world would respond to a scientific proof of the human soul, the religious and personal implications are amazing.
What’s disappointing is that the author did not play this up very much. It fell to a subplot! His focus was on the personalities of Peter Hobson – who has his brain copied and downloaded! These personalities escape into the World Wide Web with disastrous consequences!
Also the story is very “Canadian-centric.” I spent some little time looking up the places and events of Toronto during the story!
Bottom Line: You can see remnants of this kind of Web tale in his later WWW trilogy. Here, we see a peak of “our” future through the eyes of 1990s science (I like the idea of printing out your newspaper at a newsstand and his prediction of electronic readers), the moral implications of his soul detector and wraps up the story nicely in the never-ending saga of affairs of the heart, jealousies and tragedies as he searches for an answer to his life as it crashes around him!
Not Sawyer’s best novel, but an easy read that will get you thinking. Recommended.
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LibraryThing member TheCrow2
After a scientist discovers the 'soul' leaving the body at the time of death and while investigating this he creates multiple electronic simulations of himself, the things beginning to go awry...
LibraryThing member Stevil2001
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.
The book has two concurrent ideas in play. One is that the main character, a designer of medical devices, is preoccupied with
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.)
The book has two concurrent ideas in play. One is that the main character, a designer of medical devices, is preoccupied with
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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.)
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Awards
Hugo Award (Nominee — Novel — 1996)
Nebula Award (Nominee — Novel — 1995)
Prix Aurora Award (Winner — 1996)
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1995
Physical description
352 p.; 4.19 inches
ISBN
0061053104 / 9780061053108