And this is Singer’s famous work that kick-started the worldwide animal-rights movement:
Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. New York: HarperCollins, 1975.
Harvard professor Joshua Greene looks at the divisiveness in modern societies through a utilitarian lens in this excellent book, which also discusses the Trolley Problem at length:
Greene, Joshua. Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them. New York: Penguin Press, 2013.
Much of my novel deals with ethics and free will (for those it asserts have it). Good reading:
Cathcart, Thomas. The Trolley Problem: Or Would You Throw the Fat Guy Off the Bridge? New York: Workman Publishing Company, 2013.
Churchland, Patricia S. Brain Trust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Gazzaniga, Michael. Who’s in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain. New York: Ecco, 2011.
Harris, Sam. Free Will. New York: Free Press, 2012.
Part of my novel deals with confabulation—or, as one of the characters so succinctly puts it, “just making shit up.” In fact, much of what we believe to be real is simply stories we’ve told ourselves, a faculty that defines us as a species, as explored in these works:
Gottschall, Jonathan. The Storytelling Animaclass="underline" How Stories Make Us Human. New York: Mariner Books, 2012.
Niles, John D. Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
And in what must be a case of nominative determinism for the author:
Storey, Robert. Mimesis and the Human Animaclass="underline" On the Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representation. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996.
Finally, if you liked this novel, you might also particularly enjoy my other novels that deal with the nature of consciousness: The Terminal Experiment, FlashForward, Mindscan, Triggers, and the WWW trilogy of Wake, Watch, and Wonder.
Acknowledgments
The Canadian Light Source synchrotron, the University of Manitoba, and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights all really exist. However, except for certain public figures used satirically, all the characters in this novel are entirely the product of my imagination. They are not meant to bear any resemblance to actual people who hold or have held positions with these or any other institutions.
The real public figures who feature in this novel include Canadian politicians Naheed Nenshi (the current mayor of Calgary) and Justin Trudeau (the current prime minister), as well as Russian president Vladimir Putin. Given this is a story in part about quantum physics, if they don’t like the future portrayed here, they can rest assured that in some other quantum reality they have different fates.
Although my fictional characters refer to the work of many real academics, including philosopher David J. Chalmers, consciousness-studies expert Stuart Hameroff and his collaborator physicist Roger Penrose, and psychologists Bob Altemeyer, Angela Book, Robert D. Hare, Kent Kiehl, Philip Zimbardo, and the late Stanley Milgram, the extrapolations and sometimes contradictions of the findings of those academics presented by my characters are also products of my imagination.
Thanks to David J. Chalmers, PhD, Director, Centre for Consciousness, Australian National University; Kevin Dutton, PhD, author of The Wisdom of Psychopaths; John Gribbin, PhD, author of In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat; and Stuart R. Hameroff, MD, Director, Center for Consciousness Studies, The University of Arizona, Tucson.
Thanks also to Jeffrey Cutler, PhD, Lisa Van Loon, PhD, and M. Adam Webb, PhD, of the Canadian Light Source, Canada’s national synchrotron, in Saskatoon, and to Matthew Dalzell, who used to work there. Thanks as well to Jeremy Maron, PhD, Researcher-Curator, Canadian Museum for Human Rights.
Thanks to clinical psychologists Christopher Friesen, PhD, David Nussbaum, PhD, Jill Squyres, PhD, and Romeo Vitelli, PhD; clinical psychiatrist Norman Hoffman, MD; and neurologist Isaac Szpindel, MD.
Many thanks for stimulating conversations and wonderful feedback to Alisha Souillet, Elizabeth Cano, Nick DiChario, Vince Gerardis, Walter Hunt, James Kerwin, Kirstin Morrell, Sherry Peters, G.W. Renshaw, Don Thompson, and Matt Whitby.
Thanks, as well, to my wonderful beta readers: Robb Ainley, Ted Bleaney, Rev. James Christie, David Livingstone Clink, Shayla Elizabeth, Dan Falk, Paddy Forde, Marcel Gagné, Belle Jarniewski, Herb Kauderer, Rebecca Lovatt, Kayla Nielsen, Virginia O’Dine, Lynne Sargent, Hayden Trenholm, and Sally Tomasevic. Thanks for other assistance to Paul Bishop, Dan Brook, John Dahms, Fingers Delaurus, Matthew Pounsett, and Jamie Todd Rubin. Thanks also to copyeditor Robert L. Schwager, PhD.
Huge thanks, as always, to the Aurora Award–winning poet Carolyn Clink, who helped in countless ways; to Adrienne Kerr at Penguin Random House Canada’s Viking imprint in Toronto; to Helen Smith, also at Penguin Random House Canada; and to Jessica Wade at Penguin Random House USA’s Ace imprint in New York (and also to Ginjer Buchanan, who commissioned this book for Ace before retiring). And, of course, many thanks to my agents: the late Ralph Vicinanza, who negotiated the contracts for this book, and Chris Lotts, who saw it through to publication.
Finally, most of all, gigantic thanks to my wonderfully patient readers. I had a twenty-year run of averaging a novel a year, but leading up to and following the death from lung cancer of my younger brother, the Emmy Award–winning multimedia producer Alan Sawyer, I took time off. It’s been three years since my last novel, Red Planet Blues; I hope you’ll think this one was worth the wait.
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