Observer
A Novel
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Observer, by Robert Lanza and Nancy Kress is a slick, modern, hard science fiction standalone medical thriller, combining classic Robin Cook with the hard edge of Black Mirror and Altered Carbon.
After neurosurgeon Caro Soames-Watkins’s career has gone down in flames, she receives a strange job offer from Nobel Prize-winning scientist Sam Watkins, a great uncle she barely knows, and desperation overcomes any suspicions.
Watkins’s mysterious medical facility conducts research into the nature of consciousness, reality, and life after death. Two obstacles stand in his way: an intel leak and his failing body may not last long enough for the tech to be ready.
As danger mounts, Caro finds more than she bargained for: murder, love, and a deep disturbing look into the nature of reality.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Entanglements—romantic, criminal, and quantum—shape this fanciful brainteaser from Lanza (The Grand Biocentric Design) and Kress (The Eleventh Gate). Nobel laureate Sam Watkins runs an outré research clinic in the Cayman Islands where reality-altering microchips are implanted into patients' brains so they can create new realities and (maybe) attain immortality. When the chief neurosurgeon dies in a diving accident, Watkins recruits his grandniece, doctor Caro Soames-Watkins, as a replacement. Caro, who's facing a misogynistic social media fire storm after accusing a prominent coworker of sexual harassment, seizes on the opportunity to escape. Rebuffing advances from Watkin's womanizing right-hand man, Caro befriends the project's mastermind, Weigert, a soft-spoken widower who educates her in quantum physics, particularly the idea that "probabilities turn into matter or energy only when they are observed." It's not long before Caro figures out Weigert wants the microchip so he can travel to the multiverse and reunite with his late wife and dogs; meanwhile her uncle, who is dying of pancreatic cancer, hopes the operation will make him immortal. When a staffer turns up murdered and the institute's research reaches the dark web, Caro must use all her wits to untangle the mystery. The fascinating science and fun interpersonal puzzle will appeal to fans of Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World and Silvia Moreno-Garcia's The Daughter of Dr. Moreau.
