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Das vertauschte Ich
Unsterblichkeit... aber für jedermann? Nur besonders verdienten Staatsbürgern wird das Weiterleben nach dem Tode zugestanden: hochkarätigen Wissenschaftlern, wichtigen Industriekapitänen und anderen, die sich auf irgendeine Weise um die Weltförderation verdient gemacht haben. Auch der Wissenschaftler Bradley Kempton gehört zu diesem auserwählten Kreis. Als er eines Tages umgebracht wird, fragt sich sein Sohn Carl, wer ein Interesse am Ableben seines Vaters haben kann. -- Bradley Kempton wird "restauriert". Als er in einem Hospital wieder zu sich kommt, kann er sich an nichts erinnern. Carl sorgt sich, denn sein Vater ist wie ausgewechselt. Und dann kommt ihm ein schrecklicher Verdacht: Der Mann, der sich als Bradley Kempton ausgibt, der Mann, mit dem er nun unter einem Dach wohnt, ist nicht sein Vater...
Jerry Sohl hat mit diesem Roman eine spannende Kombination aus Krimi und Science Fiction geschrieben - ein unterhaltsames Lesevergnügen mit interessantem Konzept.
Jerry Sohl hat mit diesem Roman eine spannende Kombination aus Krimi und Science Fiction geschrieben - ein unterhaltsames Lesevergnügen mit interessantem Konzept.
- GenresScience Fiction
141 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1954
39 people want to read
About the author
Jerry Sohl
88 books9 followersGerald Allan Sohl Sr. (December 2, 1913 - November 4, 2002) was a scriptwriter for The Twilight Zone (as a ghostwriter for Charles Beaumont), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Outer Limits, Star Trek and other shows . He also wrote novels, feature film scripts, and the nonfiction works Underhanded Chess and Underhanded Bridge in 1973.
His 1955 Point Ultimate is a piece of Cold War invasion literature: in 1999, a faraway future history at the time of writing, the US lies under a cruel Soviet occupation, reinforced by a deadly artificial disease which makes conquered Americans dependent on the conquerors for the injections which keep them alive. But a dashing Illinois farm boy breaks out in revolt, killing a degenerate soviet governor and his "Commie" American collaborators. Eventually, he becomes a leading member of a very formidable resistance organization which is capable of breaking at will into the occupiers' security headquarters and springing prisoners out, and which had already established a clandestine space program under the Soviets' noses and established a sizeable colony on Mars.
In the far more low-key The Time Dissolver (1957) Sohl tells the story of a man and a woman who wake up one morning to find that, inexplicably, they had lost all memory of the past eleven years including any memory of how they ever came to meet and become married to each other, and who embark on a quest to find what happened and to trace back these eleven lost years. Aside from the science fiction aspects, the book captures the atmosphere of late 1950s America.
His 1955 Point Ultimate is a piece of Cold War invasion literature: in 1999, a faraway future history at the time of writing, the US lies under a cruel Soviet occupation, reinforced by a deadly artificial disease which makes conquered Americans dependent on the conquerors for the injections which keep them alive. But a dashing Illinois farm boy breaks out in revolt, killing a degenerate soviet governor and his "Commie" American collaborators. Eventually, he becomes a leading member of a very formidable resistance organization which is capable of breaking at will into the occupiers' security headquarters and springing prisoners out, and which had already established a clandestine space program under the Soviets' noses and established a sizeable colony on Mars.
In the far more low-key The Time Dissolver (1957) Sohl tells the story of a man and a woman who wake up one morning to find that, inexplicably, they had lost all memory of the past eleven years including any memory of how they ever came to meet and become married to each other, and who embark on a quest to find what happened and to trace back these eleven lost years. Aside from the science fiction aspects, the book captures the atmosphere of late 1950s America.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
September 14, 2014
Actually a real good page turner. When it was written in 1954 I'm sure the writer thought 2045 would be filled with moon bases, flying cars, and a Jetson like lifestyle. However, with 2045 being a scant 31 years from now, I doubt if anything as substantial as a moon base will even be considered as a viable use of government or private funds. I'm sure the iPhone 40 will be well on it's way and people will still sit silent in groups of their friends not saying a damn thing while glued to the device, Americans will still prefer a Hemi Cuda with a flat tire to some twitchy flying car t-boning an Airbus A380, and world peace will still be nothing more than something brainless Miss USA hopefuls obligatorily say is something they wish for.
March 24, 2020
The setting is Los Angeles in 2045 and scientists have discovered how to store a person’s memories and transfer them to another body after death. Jerry Sohl, author of The Altered Ego, was a prolific scriptwriter for The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and other tv shows of that era. So here we get a lean, plot driven novelette that can be entertaining when looked at through the proper lens.
Bradley Kempton is the genius leader of a corporation that produces optical systems for spaceships. Kempton gets murdered and brought back to life but his son Carl quickly realizes that his father is not the old self he used to be. Carl and his hot girlfriend Marilla start to investigate why and learn that a subordinate employee named John Hardesty had died a month earlier; the corporate scientists who record and preserve people’s memories had implanted Hardesty’s mind into Kempton’s body before resuscitating it.
At first, The Altered Ego reads like a detective novel in a science-fiction setting. Carl seeks out hard data on John Hardesty while Marilla shadows the newly restored man. Both learn that Hardesty indulges in the seamy side of Los Angeles. Like Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, the story opens with a mystery that is solved almost immediately but the early solution leads to the uncovering of a conspiracy. Sohl’s conspiracy, however, is one of international and intergalactic proportions. It is the pursuit of the how and why of the plot that draws the protagonists along a path of quick and sharp plot twists.
As Carl learns more about the conspiracy, he crosses the paths of the men responsible for it. He winds up in a psychiatric hospital, only to discover his father, the real Brandon Kempton, is imprisoned there too. However, his father’s memories had been implanted into the brain and body of a psychopathic killer. The big revelation is why Brandon Kepmton’s mind was preserved for the sake of the criminal cabal.
That is where the best parts of the book end. The chase scene and the climactic confrontation are formulaic and cliched. The story ends the way you might expect a movie of the 1950s to end which should be no surprise considering who Jerry Sohl was in real life. The final chapter is especially bad; a detective explains everything that happened in a typical mystery story fashion. But all he really does is run through the events of the previous chapter; assuming you actually read that chapter before going on to the last chapter, you have to wonder why the author thought this was necessary. Maybe Sohl thought it was too fast paced for you to comprehend or you are horribly deficient in memory. Maybe he thought there was a need for closure. Maybe he was contracted to write a certain number of pages and used the final monologue as filler. Or maybe he just ended it that was because Sohl insisted on slavishly following the murder mystery formula, paint-by-numbers style. Even worse, the final lines of the story are especially cheesy. You might be left with a better impression in the end if you skip the last chapter entirely.
The Altered Ego can be criticized for a number of other shortcomings. It is a plot driven book so character development is only taken to the point where the personality traits make each person fit the role they are meant to play in the story. It is thematically shallow. The switch between John Hardesty and Brandon Kempton could be an effective, if unoriginal, exploration of the doppelganger motif. Marilla could represent the strive for women’s equality in the world of fiction. John Hardesty’s attempt at seducing Marilla, his faux-son’s girlfriend, looks like a reversal of the Oedipal Complex. The conspiracy could be a useful metaphor for Cold War politics and the science of the sanitarium could be a reference to the CIA’s MK-Ultra mind control program. But these themes are only hinted at and never explored. Sohl’s novelette appears formulaic and cartoonish. But if you like cartoons, that is perfectly alright.
The Altered Ego has its faults. Really, it is intended to be read for entertainment more than anything. If you read it that way it fulfills that purpose and is, honestly, fun to read if you do not take it too seriously.
https://grimhistory.blogspot.com/
Bradley Kempton is the genius leader of a corporation that produces optical systems for spaceships. Kempton gets murdered and brought back to life but his son Carl quickly realizes that his father is not the old self he used to be. Carl and his hot girlfriend Marilla start to investigate why and learn that a subordinate employee named John Hardesty had died a month earlier; the corporate scientists who record and preserve people’s memories had implanted Hardesty’s mind into Kempton’s body before resuscitating it.
At first, The Altered Ego reads like a detective novel in a science-fiction setting. Carl seeks out hard data on John Hardesty while Marilla shadows the newly restored man. Both learn that Hardesty indulges in the seamy side of Los Angeles. Like Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, the story opens with a mystery that is solved almost immediately but the early solution leads to the uncovering of a conspiracy. Sohl’s conspiracy, however, is one of international and intergalactic proportions. It is the pursuit of the how and why of the plot that draws the protagonists along a path of quick and sharp plot twists.
As Carl learns more about the conspiracy, he crosses the paths of the men responsible for it. He winds up in a psychiatric hospital, only to discover his father, the real Brandon Kempton, is imprisoned there too. However, his father’s memories had been implanted into the brain and body of a psychopathic killer. The big revelation is why Brandon Kepmton’s mind was preserved for the sake of the criminal cabal.
That is where the best parts of the book end. The chase scene and the climactic confrontation are formulaic and cliched. The story ends the way you might expect a movie of the 1950s to end which should be no surprise considering who Jerry Sohl was in real life. The final chapter is especially bad; a detective explains everything that happened in a typical mystery story fashion. But all he really does is run through the events of the previous chapter; assuming you actually read that chapter before going on to the last chapter, you have to wonder why the author thought this was necessary. Maybe Sohl thought it was too fast paced for you to comprehend or you are horribly deficient in memory. Maybe he thought there was a need for closure. Maybe he was contracted to write a certain number of pages and used the final monologue as filler. Or maybe he just ended it that was because Sohl insisted on slavishly following the murder mystery formula, paint-by-numbers style. Even worse, the final lines of the story are especially cheesy. You might be left with a better impression in the end if you skip the last chapter entirely.
The Altered Ego can be criticized for a number of other shortcomings. It is a plot driven book so character development is only taken to the point where the personality traits make each person fit the role they are meant to play in the story. It is thematically shallow. The switch between John Hardesty and Brandon Kempton could be an effective, if unoriginal, exploration of the doppelganger motif. Marilla could represent the strive for women’s equality in the world of fiction. John Hardesty’s attempt at seducing Marilla, his faux-son’s girlfriend, looks like a reversal of the Oedipal Complex. The conspiracy could be a useful metaphor for Cold War politics and the science of the sanitarium could be a reference to the CIA’s MK-Ultra mind control program. But these themes are only hinted at and never explored. Sohl’s novelette appears formulaic and cartoonish. But if you like cartoons, that is perfectly alright.
The Altered Ego has its faults. Really, it is intended to be read for entertainment more than anything. If you read it that way it fulfills that purpose and is, honestly, fun to read if you do not take it too seriously.
https://grimhistory.blogspot.com/
April 12, 2018
Quick read. Loved the idea of being restored, and some of the twists kept me interested throughout. Since it was so short, the characters weren't very evolved, and at times, felt like they were the same person by the way they talked. While it had a few interesting sci-fi tech concepts, they pretty much left the workings of such to the imagination. It also felt very dated, where it seemed women could not be restored and were not considered important. Seems the author's envisioning of 2045 left gender equality progress on the curb, which is not surprising considering it was written in the '50s. The only female in the story attempted to prove her worth even though she was more of an afterthought through the whole thing except for some old guy in another body wanting to get in her pants. It was still a fun read overall.
February 8, 2016
I originally read this as a SFBC selection back in the mid-fifties. It's pretty short, 115 pages or so (I read the ebook version). That classifies it as more of a novella than a novel, but many books were pretty short back then.
My opinion of the work is pretty much the same as it was back then, a good, fast read with some original ideas. While the ideas have since become almost a staple of SF and could possible be found in earlier works, it's still an entertaining read.
It's not heavy on characterization (what was back in the day?), but it's not heavy on the science, either. It was written in a period that seems to have been the halfway point between gee-whiz science and works with more characterization and more about people. I started reading SF during this period, so maybe I'm biased, but I like SF written during this period a lot and keep returning to it. Maybe it's like comfort food.
My opinion of the work is pretty much the same as it was back then, a good, fast read with some original ideas. While the ideas have since become almost a staple of SF and could possible be found in earlier works, it's still an entertaining read.
It's not heavy on characterization (what was back in the day?), but it's not heavy on the science, either. It was written in a period that seems to have been the halfway point between gee-whiz science and works with more characterization and more about people. I started reading SF during this period, so maybe I'm biased, but I like SF written during this period a lot and keep returning to it. Maybe it's like comfort food.
November 28, 2019
This is a story concerning a plan to take control of the world through a new technological process in the near future. The SF aspect wasn't very good and a lot of the peripheral gadgets an author puts in to establish a future feeling weren't done very well even for 1954. The main invention that drives the story is only dealt with as a specific plot element even though it would have been a pretty big idea on it's own. That leaves the espionage part and that wasn't all that good either. That just leaves the characters and they were fairly typical 1950's characters placed in a world 100 years in the future who acted just like typical 1950's characters.
I read "The Time Dissolver" about a year ago and gave it 3 stars. I probably enjoyed it more because there was less of a SF element and the detective story was better. I am a big fan of classic SF but this wasn't classic.
I read "The Time Dissolver" about a year ago and gave it 3 stars. I probably enjoyed it more because there was less of a SF element and the detective story was better. I am a big fan of classic SF but this wasn't classic.
November 19, 2019
Ein Science Fiction Krimi, damals in den Fünfzigern vielleicht innovativ, heute eher verstaubt.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews