The Downloaded. A review.

All story is rooted conflict. By that measure, there is more story per page in Robert J. Sawyer’s The Downloaded than just about anything else I’ve read. At first, the novel presents a clever fictionalization of science – a mechanism for preserving a whole person, mind and body. The solution is separation, with, of course, the promise of recombination. You can probably see, in that sentence, the tendrils of conflict already sprouting from the tap root of the book. Sawyer follows more shoots that I would have thought possible, and the result is incessantly thought-provoking, sometimes moving, and often super fun. More fun than a book with this much conflict should allow.

Sawyer brings several sciences together to create an entirely plausible future. Quantum physics, astrophysics, computer architecture, biology – the usual. The real gift of the book, however, is slow titration of soft sciences into the hard: sociology, phycology, political science (the one that pulls so far from the others we put ‘science’ in the name as a kind of dog chain.) This will not surprise long-time Sawyer fans. What might is the literary composition all this chemistry concocts. The Downloaded covers so much ground it grows into something full and rich. Sawyer attempts to show so many of the directions the main story’s roots can take that he succeeds in creating a very real world.

As an off-shoot, he also creates a hybrid rose of a novel. Fragrant, pretty, and robust. All the various literary conflicts are here: Person vs. others, person vs. environment, person vs. self. My students would be so happy if I assigned this book, because it would take the place of three. And they would enjoy the read, which in the end, is what we really want from whatever novel we pick from the big garden of books.