Wealthy deceased people become short-stay ‘tourists’ in young, living bodies in this dystopic thought experiment
Jane Rogers has written some highly regarded literary fiction, not least her fine historical novel Mr Wroe’s Virgins in 1991. But she’s no stranger to science fiction, either: The Testament of Jessie Lamb, about a near future in which a virus is killing off pregnant women, won the 2012 Arthur C Clarke award. Her new novel is another sci-fi dystopia, set in a Britain in which the bulk of the population are stuck in mega “estates” (“81% of children born on estates have never been off them”, we’re told; “90% have never seen the sea or a live animal”), living hardscrabble lives, addicted to immersive virtual reality games and pornography.
Into this grimly plausible extrapolation from today, Rogers drops the novel’s main premise. A scientist called Luke Butler has come up with a way of uploading the consciousnesses of dead people into the bodies of the young. This technology has revolutionary potential, although Luke develops it both secretively and recklessly. He is, we’re told, “on the spectrum” personality-wise, which seems an odd explanation for his positively Frankensteinian disregard of consequences.
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