Multitude

by Peter Joseph Swanson

Thorn thinks he’s a cop keeping thoughts legal in his city. But when he messes up his elevator ride to heaven, which is actually supposed to kill him and recycle him as food, he finds out he’s just one clone out of millions in research labs in a prison in the asteroid belt. For revenge, he helps the elderly lab workers who want eternal life, as they think their scientist bosses have cloned it and their labor union has negotiated it for them. Thorn falls in love with a young hippie woman who is too often only a hologram when he wishes she was flesh, and adopts a son whose psycho killer father is a clone of himself. Many other problems erupt. Memory can be dubbed from clone to clone but is that all that makes us who we are? Mutated monsters created by rebels attack from lakes, caves and elevator shafts. Realizing their computers are going to be cannibalized, the cars go on a murderous offensive. Sabotage from the ideological anarchist children of the union workers put the asteroid and its worker’s city in danger of destruction. The entire planet Earth might already be doomed from subsequent contamination.

266 pages, Paperback

First published November 9, 2013

Reviews

[Sheila · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peter Joseph Swanson’s Multitude places the reader firmly in the confused and confusing mind of a cop on a strange new world, seeking out illegal thoughts and taking their thinkers to be healed. Soon he will rise on the elevator to heaven and all will be well. Maybe.

Clever dialog is coolly absorbing, revealingly humorous, and darkly enthralling as Thorn learns the truth of his world and of himself. But what is self, and where do memories and self-awareness fit in? Do computer-cars have souls? Do clones of clones of clones? And what makes a human worth more than a blobby red monster rising from the sea?

The follies of the foolish and wise collide in the history and future of mankind in this zany, scary, really-should-be-a-movie novel. Physical senses, hologrammed imagination, memories, dreams and radioed words in the mind from a multitude of others who might not be self… plus religion of course, plus the origin and need for religion… plus plenty for any reader to think about while enjoying the complex zany ride in the company of wise-cracking wonderfolk.

Disclosure: I couldn’t resist it!