Don't let the title lead you down the primrose path of deceptive deduction. All is not what it seems. There are surprises around every corner. What I didn't âgetâ in high school relating to both of these novels, became abundantly clear when reading them as an adult. (The same thing happened to me with The Catcher in the Rye, but that's a story for another day.) For me, then, reading Clifford Simak's novels as an adult became something of a peak experience.
Far, far into the future, an experiment was carried out as a result of two scientific theories becoming reality: the capability to travel to distant stars and the capacity to manufacture android/human hybrids. Two were made and inserted into one of the capsules.
Many centuries into the future, one of the hybrids was found orbiting a distant star near Antares in the constellation of Scorpios. He was in suspended animation in one of the escape pods from his ship, was sent back to Earth in this state and revived in Washington DC. The only thing he remembered was his name, Andrew Blake, and general information about Earth, its people and customs.
Andrew Blake was something of a celebrity, a returning astronaut from the very distant past. He hooks up with a powerful Senator and eventually falls in love with his daughter. There is a catch in all this. There always is.
Before Blake was sent into the galaxy, he was genetically altered to adapt to alien surroundings. In this way, he could live on an alien world for a few years changing himself to look like them then return to his ship and download from his brain all the information he had absorbed. Any alien characteristics would be deleted. It sure looked good on paper.
Here's the catch.
He had visited two remarkable alien civilizations and downloaded all the information he was exposed to. But all did not go according to plan. Somehow, Blake ended up with two alien presences in his brain. One was an astonishingly powerful biological computer. The other one was a little more primitive both in thought and behavior, a kind of shape shifter whose favorite form looked like, but wasn't, a wolf.
Of course, Blake was there as well and sometimes all three consulted with one another in the silence of Blake's mind. Can you say, âTelephone call for Carl Jung.â
Blake wonders if there is any chance of living as a human when there are three beings living inside his body and he's not psychotic. Blake, himself, is living under a mild self-induced illusion that he is human, which he's not. He's only partially human. He is very uncomfortable living on Earth and interacting with full humans who can only think about 100,000 times slower that he does.
The Werewolf Principle is an ingenious, wildly inventive and creative treatise on the philosophy of being human. What makes a human? Are you any less human if you are missing an arm? What if your arm is artificial? What if you heart is artificial? How much of you has to be artificial for you not to be considered human anymore? 60%, 52%, 40%?
What if you start out artificial and gradually add biological parts? What if the only biological part of you is your brain? That will be a reality in a few hundred years. Chew on that one for a while.
Clifford Simak's, The Werewolf Principle, is a thought provoking story about where we are going as a race of people and by that I mean the human race. The plot drives forward like a speeding truck and you'll find yourself rooting for the characters. I had the best time reading it and I am sure you will too.
Far, far into the future, an experiment was carried out as a result of two scientific theories becoming reality: the capability to travel to distant stars and the capacity to manufacture android/human hybrids. Two were made and inserted into one of the capsules.
Many centuries into the future, one of the hybrids was found orbiting a distant star near Antares in the constellation of Scorpios. He was in suspended animation in one of the escape pods from his ship, was sent back to Earth in this state and revived in Washington DC. The only thing he remembered was his name, Andrew Blake, and general information about Earth, its people and customs.
Andrew Blake was something of a celebrity, a returning astronaut from the very distant past. He hooks up with a powerful Senator and eventually falls in love with his daughter. There is a catch in all this. There always is.
Before Blake was sent into the galaxy, he was genetically altered to adapt to alien surroundings. In this way, he could live on an alien world for a few years changing himself to look like them then return to his ship and download from his brain all the information he had absorbed. Any alien characteristics would be deleted. It sure looked good on paper.
Here's the catch.
He had visited two remarkable alien civilizations and downloaded all the information he was exposed to. But all did not go according to plan. Somehow, Blake ended up with two alien presences in his brain. One was an astonishingly powerful biological computer. The other one was a little more primitive both in thought and behavior, a kind of shape shifter whose favorite form looked like, but wasn't, a wolf.
Of course, Blake was there as well and sometimes all three consulted with one another in the silence of Blake's mind. Can you say, âTelephone call for Carl Jung.â
Blake wonders if there is any chance of living as a human when there are three beings living inside his body and he's not psychotic. Blake, himself, is living under a mild self-induced illusion that he is human, which he's not. He's only partially human. He is very uncomfortable living on Earth and interacting with full humans who can only think about 100,000 times slower that he does.
The Werewolf Principle is an ingenious, wildly inventive and creative treatise on the philosophy of being human. What makes a human? Are you any less human if you are missing an arm? What if your arm is artificial? What if you heart is artificial? How much of you has to be artificial for you not to be considered human anymore? 60%, 52%, 40%?
What if you start out artificial and gradually add biological parts? What if the only biological part of you is your brain? That will be a reality in a few hundred years. Chew on that one for a while.
Clifford Simak's, The Werewolf Principle, is a thought provoking story about where we are going as a race of people and by that I mean the human race. The plot drives forward like a speeding truck and you'll find yourself rooting for the characters. I had the best time reading it and I am sure you will too.
