How many psychopaths are there in the world? In Robert J. Sawyer’s mind-blowing new book “Quantum Night,” out today, the answer is more than a little disturbing.
Jim Marchuk is an experimental psychologist at the University of Manitoba who discovers, while being torn apart on the stand as an expert witness at the murder trial of a prison guard, that he is missing six months out of his memory.
While he’s trying to puzzle this out, Kayla Huron, a woman he dated during that time period — who is now a physicist using quantum physics to understand human consciousness — contacts him with questions on his work and he leaps at the chance to fill in the missing answers.
From here “Quantum Night” becomes two interlaced stories of murders and cover-ups. In a series of flashbacks we learn about Marchuk as a student who volunteered for an experiment designed to detect subvocal thoughts that goes horribly wrong. In the other, we follow Marchuk and Huron as they make terrifying discoveries about the human mind amid increasingly violent mobs and an approaching Armageddon.
What Sawyer does, possibly better than anyone else, is take a new scientific theory and extrapolate its real-world effects to their logical extremes. Then he tosses some Canadian, Star-Trek-quoting academics at it to see what happens.
In this case, Marchuk and Huron postulate that most people are aware and have consciences, empathy for those around them. Then you have a certain number of people who spend their lives on autopilot; passive, easily led, reacting to input in predictable manners proscribed by family, community, school, church and peers but not really “aware” at all. Then there are people — psychopaths — who are fully aware but have no conscience or empathy; charming predators who manipulate everyone around them to their own benefit because they have absolutely no reason not to. The current best estimate of the number of psychopaths is from 1 to 4% of the population, depending on which researcher you believe.
Only those percentages might be reversed. And there’s a way to jump people from one state to another…
To drive his point home Sawyer sets the story a few years in the future when xenophobia is on the rise, rage against foreigners is the new normal and “homicide” has been redefined legally as the killing of a U.S. resident, but that may not have been necessary. Anyone who’s watched mobs tear up city streets on the news, followed any political race, or even read a day’s worth of random Facebook posts will find this book unnerving as hell.
Sawyer writes about science and ethics, and he does so in a way that makes esoteric subjects like consciousness and quantum physics perfectly understandable. The characters were interesting, the plot is good even if there are a few too many contrivances moving it along, the title of the book is remarkably boring, but the ideas that run through his story and the relentless examination of how those ideas might affect the world keep me thinking about his books long after I’ve put them down.
“Quantum Night” by Robert J. Sawyer. 368 pages, Ace. Hardcover: $18.11. Ebook: $13.99. Audiobook: $17.47.