Sure I've mentioned this before, but...

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

I'm sure I've told y'all about this book before, but I'm finally reading it, so I'm going to tell you what I think of it.

The book is "Blindsight" by Peter Watts. It's hard scifi.

Now... the blurb on Amazon may say that one of the characters has "surgically-induced Multiple Personality Disorder," but neither the book nor the book's jacket call it that. In fact, I haven't seen one mention of MPD in the book except for the letters "MPD" where the book said "they called it a disorder." It seems that the future society of the book abandoned the term Multiple Personality Disorder and now calls it Multiple Consciousness Complex, and one character in the book used surgery to *become* a multiple called the Gang of Four. It seems this gives her a lot of advantages in her field, including the ability to multitask on a large scale. Psychiatry and psychology seem to be dead sciences, as well, in an age of brain editing. In fact, they called the practitioners of those branches "hacks" and "barbarians." They referred to integration as a barbaric practice of picking one conciousness core and murdering the rest.

And it is not just all that which makes it an awesome read. We highly recommend it.

EDIT: Oh yeah, The Gang gets very upset when someone calls one of them an alter. They also go into this huge rant about it. At one point, the Gang of Four member named Melissa says, "You think when you're spending time with me you're really spending time with Mom?" (Not an exact quote.)

Second Edit: You're welcome, everyone!

Comments

[indigolands.livejournal.com]

Ooh, just bought it on Amazon. Publishers Weekly called it surgically induced multiple personality disorder, but the Booklist blurb called it multiple-personality syndrome, a little less offensive. It looks really interesting, thanks for the head up!

[overlord-mordax.livejournal.com]

Wow, that sounds awsome. I am going to pick that up. :D

-Massha

[thunder-weather.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a book I have to read. Thank you for the recommendation.

[rhymer-713.livejournal.com]

Oooooooo! This sounds like a great book. We can't wait to read it. See, we're physically blind so sometimes finding books is hard...But they actually had this one online! So yaaay! Finally we get to catch a good book about multiples too. And we live for sci fi.

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

It was mentioned in this thread:
http://community.livejournal.com/multiplicity/612502.html

Gabe finds the summaries of this book very familiar. He believes it is a takeoff (not a ripoff) on a story from back in the 1970s, possibly by Ursula LeGuin or James Tiptree. A survey team made up of men and women of different disciplines and personality types is exploring a planet. The most brilliant scientist on the team is also cold, emotionless and very exacting, an 'anal-retentive' type or what is stereotyped today as "Asperger's syndrome". They find out the planet is, for lack of a better word, haunted. Each person responds differently to the 'ghosts' depending on their psychological make-up, and the cold machinelike guy is the one most deeply affected. He wants to find a way to communicate with the ghosts. He ends up disappearing or perhaps choosing to stay on the planet. Nothing about being multiple in this one, it's just intriguing.

Thank you!

[brandon2431.livejournal.com]

We've got to get this book now.
Wow, this makes two 'positive multiplicity' books out there.
Cool!

We'd like to see how the writer pulls it off. Seeing as how it's not the conventional point of view, that's always interesting.....the writer can't fall back on the tired old cliches.

Re: Thank you!

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

Two? What's the other one?

Re:Other pos. mult. book

[brandon2431.livejournal.com]

Oops....to tell you the truth, we would have to go back through our Live Journal discussions and look it up!
But that is the second book that has been recommended to us, as putting a positive spin on multiplicity.
(Drop in the bucket, but at least it's a drop.)

Other book might very likely have been recommended to us via Pavilionhall.

Re:Other pos. mult. book

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

Good to know there's more than one, at least.

Re: Other book! (Remember now!)

[brandon2431.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah! Something about the Aristoi....that might have been the title.
It was *not* (or I don't think it was) suggested on Pavilionhall.

(There....so much for that thing about, repressed memory does not exist. Repressed memory, it might not be....but "Oh, I had forgotten, but now I remember!" sure exists....)
- Stefan.

Re: Other book! (Remember now!)

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

You could try whatwasthatbook or whatwasthatone, if you remember any of the plot described to you.