ot too long from now, the world is a harsher place, with cultural decay and anarchy spreading around the globe. Nonetheless, scientific inquiry goes on, specifically at the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan. This is where Dr. Jonathan Briggs is pursuing his studies in charting the activities of the human brain—transforming the cascade of hidden thoughts to luminous vector maps. The goal of Briggs' studies is simple: He intends to shatter the current paradigm that brands the existence of "mind" a fiction, claiming that all human "consciousness" is merely a chemical and electrical sideshow. He wants to restore an analogue soul to mankind's heritage, bring back the ghost in the machine.
Under his generally accommodating boss, Elizabeth Froelich, Briggs beavers away industriously, his personal life nonexistent. He even manages to soldier on in the face of disapproval and censorship from his peers. But then he chances to fall in love with one of his subjects, the video-game designer Allyn Reed. The attraction is instant and mutual, seeming to hint at ancient roots transcending time and place, and Allyn and Jonathan soon embark on an intense affair. But their love is doomed to end shortly in tragedy when Allyn is shot in an act of random violence.
This murder sends Briggs over the edge for a while. The only thread he can grasp is Allyn's belief in reincarnation, expressed previously when Briggs showed her some puzzling results from his survey—results that seemed to show an old, dying subject had been reborn as a young one. An encounter with New Age mystics at an outdoor fair convinces the scientist to slant his research in this direction.
Using Allyn's fortune, a surprising inheritance, Briggs works like a man obsessed. He alienates friends, co-workers and rivals in his frantic pursuit of more hard data, a second instance of reincarnation to make the first seem not so anomalous. When the police detective in charge of finding Allyn's murderer begins to fixate on Briggs as a suspect, the researcher's life becomes immensely complicated. In the race among exhaustion, arrest, treachery, bankruptcy and further proof of reincarnation, which runner will come in first? Or will they all converge neck and neck at the mortal finish line?
A thriller with star-crossed characters
Writing with streamlined, grab-ass prose and both mimetic and speculative flair, Michael Kube-McDowell fashions an intriguing blend of hard science fiction—a la the backstage researcher revelations of Gregory Benford in such books as Timescape (1980)—and the mystical fantasies found in such timeslip romances as Jack Finney's Time and Again (1970), Max Ehrlich's The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1974) and Richard Matheson's Bid Time Return (1975). The hybrid result is a book that applies the piercing lens of scientific inquiry to questions generally left to yogis and Wiccans, channelers and priests. Both the science and the fantasy angles benefit from such an intermingling, and Kube-McDowell deserves credit for his bravado and the panache with which he carries off this fusion. Not since Nancy Kress' Brain Rose (1990) has such a balancing act come off so successfully.
Kube-McDowell manages to make the brief but white-hot romance between Jonathan and Allyn a strong enough motivation for all of the scientist's subsequent manic behavior. Everyone from the grad student assistants to Elizabeth Froelich (a woman with numerous secrets) to the policeman Detective Anderson come off as well-rounded personages. The dialogue is crisp and entertaining, although the occasional sentence strikes one as overwrought. (I sincerely doubt that anyone would characterize a seductress by saying aloud, "She was maiden ne plus ultra.") And the plot twists are surprising and believable. The near-future society sketched out by Kube-McDowell elegantly supports his main thrust and exerts an influence on the plot in interesting ways. Our author does not neglect to speculate on matters outside the mainline of his thesis.
The book I was most reminded of when reading this novel was Robert Heinlein's The Door Into Summer (1957), another tale of star-crossed, persecuted lovers and the technology that facilitates their union. The somewhat despairing ending of Kube-McDowell's book belies Heinlein's earlier optimism, however, and while one might wish for a more upbeat conclusion, Kube-McDowell's version hews authentically to his own vision.
