The Terminal Experiment
by Robert J. Sawyer
Summary
Peter Hobson is a biomedical engineer in Toronto who, as a student, watched an organ donor's heart being removed while the monitors suggested the man was not entirely gone. He spends his career building a better instrument, and eventually finds something: a coherent electrical field that leaves the body at the moment of death and does not disperse. The press calls it a soulwave. Every religion on earth reacts at once.
Peter's second project is more personal. His wife has confessed to an affair, and he cannot stop turning it over, so with a friend in artificial intelligence he makes three digital copies of his own mind. One has all knowledge of the body removed, to simulate what a disembodied afterlife would be like. One has the awareness of mortality removed, to simulate immortality. One is left alone as a control.
Then the man his wife slept with is murdered, and so is her father, and it becomes clear that one of the three did it, arranged remotely, and that none of them will admit which.
The premise is excellent and the execution is workmanlike: plain prose, characters who explain the ideas, and a mystery whose solution is more interesting than its telling.
The soulwave half is the more interesting one, and Sawyer is good on the immediate consequences: insurance disputes, abortion law, a surge in religious observance, and the discovery that the field appears in a fetus at a datable point.
Around three hundred pages, quick and very readable, set in a Toronto that is recognisably Toronto.
Best for readers who want a science fiction detective problem with real theological weight, and who do not need the sentences to be beautiful to enjoy the argument.
Historical Context & Significance
The Terminal Experiment won the 1995 Nebula Award for Best Novel and the Aurora Award, and was a Hugo finalist. It was serialised in Analog under the title Hobson's Choice before book publication.
Robert J. Sawyer is one of Canada's most successful science fiction writers and one of the few to have won the Hugo, the Nebula and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He won the Hugo in 2003 for Hominids.
His fiction is consistently built the same way: a single clean speculative premise from current science, worked through its social and religious consequences in plain prose, with Toronto as the setting. That combination has made him a fixture on school reading lists and a regular presence on Canadian radio and television as the person called when a science story needs explaining.