Soulminder by Timothy Zahn

Published by Open Road Media on September 23, 2014

Jessica Sands and Adrian Sommer are trying to trap the life forces (or souls) of people as they die. Preserving a soul, Sommer thinks, might allow its return to a body that is not beyond repair. When the technology finally works, they find they've created a resurrection machine -- or maybe the ticket to immortality -- but they fail to foresee all the ways in which their creation will be misused.

The technology here seems suspiciously shaky but I'm not a neuroscientist so I was willing to let that slide. The notion of a soul (or life force) that can be trapped seems equally shaky but that's the premise so I was willing to let that slide also. As long as I can swallow the story, my concern is whether the story is any good. Timothy Zahn has crafted an adequate story, although the novel suffers from being scattered.

A popular televangelist, confident that souls exist, is equally confident that mortals like Sommer and Sands should not be messing with them. Religious and ethical discussions about whether God objects to using technology to save lives follow paths charted by the stem cell debates. It eventually becomes apparent that souls can be returned not just to their own bodies, but to any soulless body, which raises all sorts of interesting ethical issues. The possibility of gaining immortality by repeatedly entering new bodies is an obvious one, but what will people give up in exchange for that opportunity? Other uses for the technology include allowing the soul from a murder victim to inhabit a living body long enough to testify against the murderer, allowing disabled people to occupy a living body temporarily or a soulless dead body permanently, and renting out a living body to other living people who want to use it to experience vicarious thrills without putting their own bodies at risk.

All of these (and a few others) are interesting ideas with ethical implications that Zahn explores in enough detail to provoke some serious thought. Like all technologies, the soulminder is capable of being abused, particularly to benefit the rich while exploiting the poor (the most likely to rent out their bodies), but this technology raises more concerns than most. Soulminder, for instance, allows the government to torture a suspect to death, to revive the corpse, and to cause death by torture again and again. If a government has that ability, you know it will eventually use it. Zahn deserves credit for thinking through the many ways his imagined technology might be used and misused.

My complaint about Soulminder, other than its slow start, is that it tends to bounce from one ethical issue to another, from character to character, in a disjointed plot that never permits the full development of any storyline. That makes Soulminder more intellectually than emotionally satisfying, although a satisfying resolution adds some cohesion to the story. Another novel that explores the separation of body and soul, Ian Watson's Deathhunter, is a better literary effort with stronger characters and equally intriguing discussions of philosophy. I nonetheless recommend Soulminder to science fiction fans who want to take a break from space opera and more conventional sf themes.

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