Quantum Night by Robert J Sawyer

"If your subconscious is repressing something, maybe you'll want to just accept that."

Ladies and Gentlemen, let me tell you, this avid reader has been counting down the days until her copy of Quantum Night arrived and she was not disappointed. Neurological science is a field that is in someways one of the last frontiers, well I say one of - they haven't exactly got everything figured out yet, of medical science and ripe pickings for some fantastic speculative fiction from the always engaging Robert Sawyer.

This reminded me somewhat of his WWW series in its explorations of consciousness, but this time from the angle of the psychopath. A long standing popular culture trope for insidious evil, Sawyer brings a far broader scientific perspective to bear and yet does not take off the lever on suspense, violence and that creepy feeling where you just have to turn the page, even if you are scared of what might come next.

Jim Marchuk makes for an intriguing and somewhat unreliable narrator, particularly given his haziness about the year 2001. That being said, I think this is one novel where for me to give too much of the plot away would do the reader a disservice. I urge you to grab a copy and enjoy a thriller which melds science and ethics with fast paced readability in the form of a well-constructed , must-read novel.

I particularly enjoy Sawyer's ability to construct networks of consciousness to potentially catastrophic effect. If the WWW series posited what it means to be human, Quantum Night might just uncover some of humanity's nastier aspects. Q1, Q2 or Q3? Read it and find out exactly what that question might mean.




5 out of 5 exes are p-zeds.