Quantum Night

Quantum Night
By Robert Sawyer

Quantum Night is stuffed with thought. To be more specific, it is stuffed with the stuff of thought.

In the year 2020 Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi is about to become Canada’s prime minister (as head of the NDP!) and Jim Marchuk is a psychology professor at the University of Manitoba whose researches into psychopathy are going to lead him to discover dark secrets that were erased from his memory twenty years earlier by way of some unethical experiments.

As Marchuk digs into his missing past he teams up with other scientists unlocking the mysteries of human consciousness, finding them to be grounded in a vast, entangled caste system of quantum mental states. As it turns out, the zombie apocalypse may be closer than we think.

It’s all heady stuff, and the story has to work hard to fit in a lot of technical exposition (there are also eight pages of further reading attached as an appendix). But Sawyer is experienced in making complex ideas accessible and the story here moves briskly through a series of unexpected twists while challenging us to think about the deeper nature of who we really are.