Skip to main content

Noggin - book review

John Whaley is the author.  The book's premise as of its writing in 2014 constitutes sci fi.  Or is it?  Never know what the NSA is cooking.  But moving on to what mere mortals like us know, the idea that a dude whose body is dying of cancer has their head (which is functioning and healthy) chopped and frozen for few years in the hope of tying it to a healthy donor body in the future is a leap.

Think chop shop auto body except for humans.  A virtual junkyard where our body parts are available for all models aka races, colors, sexual preferences.  Lose a pancrea?  Hop into the 'Parts R Us' next to the McDonald's on 4th street and get one before lunch.  You don't want to semi digest something now do you?

The story revolves around a teenager who dies of cancer but just prior to this culminating event, the patient, his family and the doctor sign up for an experimental idea of cryo preserving his brain.  When five years later a healthy body (for a person that dies of brain cancer) comes along the two parts are married and Travis is re-born.  Fully operational but a few inches taller.  The new body is of a dude with a six pack and neck scar where he is sown back (and front).

Another movie (or many movies) recently called Self Less had a similar theme except here the brain or thinking portion of the new person was downloaded into someone with another (face and) body.  So now no one recognized him.

This book is about a person as people know him showing up after being missing / considered dead (and cremated) for five years.  With some hilarity that results from the protagonist getting accustomed to his new body parts to his interaction with folks that are weirded out, the rebirth for him is nothing more than a nap that he took and woke up.

To him the world is different from bigger, flatter or curved TV screens to people much older than he had left them.  Their are some romantic twists that while logical for a teenager growing up in middle America (story I think is based in some part of Kansas) make the plot lose muster.

Good pace in the first half the book becomes sort of boring toward the end simply due to lack of novelty.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

New England is gleaming in the fall

 This autumn the weather gods cooperated as we took a family trip in the northeast to see six states that qualify or makeup what is known colloquially in America as New England. Mass, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Rhode Island (tiniest state in the union). The outing helped tally up the states we either lived in, visited or have worked in to 47. Guess which three have eluded this intrepid traveling family. Any rate the drive was all in about 1,800 miles and included some memorable geographic wonders or points of interest.  Easternmost part of state of Massachusetts being one.  Furthest drivable road east in Mass being another. Visit to all Ivy League schools (term harkens to a collegiate athletics conference and generally regarded as elite academic institutes of some repute worldwide) is another random bucket list item of which this trip afforded the chance to knock two more of the list.  Dartmouth in Hanover, NH and Brown (and its sister institute the RISD  - school f

Searching for a lavish 'fill in the blank with other adjectives and gender' in bed

 Many of the readers of this blog have experienced this. Strange sounding messages popping up in your text or WA or emails all day long from some exotic sounding locale with an out of this world individual looking for love, sex, money or other paraphernalia to get a high. I mean granted that electronic spamming is a low cost enterprise and all but the sheer volumes and the variety in these exhortations is beyond imagination. Having a desire to engage you in some sort of sexual payola or invest in some arcane crypto scheme must be a profound algorithm that someone from Oklahoma to Odessa is cranking on through the night and watching one in a few million fall for. Otherwise this nonsense would not exist I suspect. It would be funny to watch the lifecycle of some such persona that creates said content and that of a prospect for this invite becoming an unwilling or willing participant. Then that whole thing could go on some social channel and earn likes and subscriptions for someone else a

Lakeside frivolities

 We moved to the Charlotte area not knowing where exactly our new home would be. Turns out it was by a popular lake formed by the damming of the Catawba river which flows north to south in the Carolinas. Local electricity generation utility built a series of dams along the waterway for hydro and couple nuclear plants as well to supply the state grid.  The lake our house butts into is Lake Wylie. While tract home build has picked up in the Carolinas the developer often carves out parcels that they can get their hands on leaving behind privately owned lots that the individual owner may not want to sell. Our house is part of a subdivision but backs into actual lake front yardage that has always been part of legacy family owned properties who chose to build a cabin or getaway and did not sell to a corporation wanting to build in the hundreds. As such we can see the water through the year but it does not afford actual water access.  That privilege is to our neighbors who still maintain thei