DEATHKILLER (Mass Market Paperback)

In general I highly recommend Robinson's work, both his own and his collaborations with his wife Jeanne (_Stardance_, _Starseed_, and _Starmind_ -- the first two of which are now collected in the single volume _The Star Dancers_). Among other things, he's got excellent musical taste and I happen to share some of his SF-hippie sensibilities. But mainly, even when I disagree with him, I think he does a nice job of treating important themes.

His Callahan's Bar stories are not my personal favorites among his works, but they do a nice job of stating his single most important theme: shared pain is diminished, shared joy is increased. Basically, in Robinson's world (as in our own), you've got two choices: you can turn yourself into a human ingrown toenail, dying in your own emotional-spiritual toxins and poisoning everyone around you while you go -- or you can open up your window a crack and let in some light and air.

In one way or another, most of his books (from _Telempath_ onwards) explore this theme -- what would happen if we could get into each other's skulls and we didn't have to be so _alone_ all the time? And in contrast to his mentor Robert Heinlein, he doesn't treat the "group mind" as something to be avoided; in his tales, you don't lose individuality but fulfill it by becoming an integral part of an "oversoul." Optimistic without being naive about the unplumbable depths of human cruelty, his works are in large measure a study of the spirituality of conflict resuolution.

Oh, yes -- the present book. Well, _Mindkiller_ is a really cool story, bordering on cyberpunk, that treats a "future" (actually 1994 and 1999, which were "future" when he wrote it) in which junkies practice "wireheading" -- plugging themselves into sockets that directly stimulate their pleasure centers. I won't spoil the story by divulging details, but much of the plot concerns the crucially important difference between pleasure and joy and why the latter is preferable.

_Time Pressure_ is a prequel/sequel (which I didn't actually know when I originally read it in 1987, and you're not actually _supposed_ to know until well into the story, but the fact that it's in this volume sort of gives it away) in which the theme gets further developed and tied into the "group mind" stuff. Here again, I won't give away plot details. But I can tell you that Robinson draws heavily on his life in a Nova Scotia commune (for a couple years in the 1970s) and presents a marvelously warm and humane literary portrait of hippie life and ideals.

And that's about all I can tell you about the stories without ruining your pleasure in reading them for the first time. If you like them, also try _Lifehouse_, the third book in the series. Then get the _Stardance_ books, and grab _Telempath_ while it's in print again. Et cetera.

You might also want to check out his new one, _The Free Lunch_ -- but having not yet read it myself, I can't tell you anything about it.

Not so TIME PRESSURE. In this ill-advised sequel, Robinson's New Age hippie sensibilities take over; a, like, really trippy series of events (including graphic group bisexual sex) leads inevitably to a denouement in which we learn that, golly, if we humans could just merge our minds and know one another inside-out, we'd all forgive each other and be So Happy Together in one big group mind.

This didn't work at Woodstock, and it doesn't work here. Robinson has been gradually losing his hard scientific edge and tripping off into novels that look like late-period Robert Heinlein as interpreted by Dharma Finkelstein. And this groupmind/groupsex theme is one that Robinson has now devoted several novels to exploring; it was old when it was new, and it's getting older. (Plus there's all the "insider" stuff about SF fan conventions and so forth. LIFEHOUSE, the third installment in this nontrilogy, devolves even further into a series of in-jokes for SF fandom, even as it parodies the opening of TIME PRESSURE itself.)

Also: is anybody but me getting tired of this pseudo-techie cybernonsense (begun by Heinlein and carried on by his adoring disciple) according to which the contents of a mind can just be downloaded into somebody else's head without raising ANY philosophical problems about the continuity of personal identity, let alone about the reducibility of an ego and its memories to digital data? (By the way, James Blish raised a similar problem about Star Trek's "transporter" in his novel SPOCK MUST DIE!, probably now long out of print.)

And, if that weren't disturbing enough, they proceed to kill death- to join all of life, past and present, into one great consciousness. For the love of everything, have the words "eternal peace" no meaning? I have enough difficulty with my own mind without having some dead person's thoughts to deal with, too.

All in all, I would have been signifigantly more pleased if Spider had persued the Mindkiller as a villain, and left off the entire "telepathy will save our society" schtick. A man that wants to destroy individuality and individual identity is proposing heinous crimes against humanity, and perhaps the concept of a desperate battle against such a madman appeals to me far more than being told that the calvary that plans on saving me and the rest of the world wants to do it by destroying everything that makes me an individual- beginning with the privacy of my thoughts.