[This is the first post in an irregular series of reviews and discussions of fiction and non-fiction books relating to bioethics or concepts in the field.] 

Robert J. Sawyer is a hugely creative sci-fi author (Hugo, Nebula multi-nominee and winner, slews of other awards) with a fascination for issues touching on human personhood and human nature. He has a widely-read series that posits a parallel universe in which H. neanderthalensis evolved to become the dominant species, with a distinctly different human nature from that of H. sapiens, and a number of similar books in which human nature and the science/religion conflict are examined from a perspective slightly removed - by the license granted to science fiction - from our own. His most recent book is Mindscan, an examination of the possibility of cognition “uploads” - the copying of memory and thought from the human mind into a permanently-rebuildable (hence immortal) synthetic substrate. The fact that the copying process does not destroy the original - that it creates two cognitively-identical minds housed one in its original organic body and the other in an indefinitely long-lived synthetic one, which then vie for recognition as the “real” person - gives the plot its tension.

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