Frameshift

This is a Robin Cookish type of thriller. It intertwines questions about healthcare insurance, patients with debilitating diseases, Nazi hunting, mind reading, DNA, and Neanderthals. Sawyer covers all these topics well and throws in some highly likeable characters too. Pierre Tardival is a geneticist who has to deal with Huntington's disease, which will disable him both physically and mentally until it kills him. He has other significant issues to deal with such as someone who is trying to murder him, a health insurance company that wants to invade his privacy and a daughter who is unlike any other child on Earth. Other characters include Tardival's wife Molly, a psychologist who is also able to read minds, Avi, a Nazi hunter, and the mysterious professor Bulian who Tardival works for. The story tackle many issues that are still prevalent today such as patient's privacy rights and the right to have health insurance. Sawyer is a multitalented writer that seems to never run out of ideas!

Robert J. Sawyer delivers a fast-paced medical thriller (reminiscent of Robin Cook) in FRAMESHIFT. Pierre Tardivel, a Canadian scientist working in Berkley on the Human Genome project, falls in love with Molly, a beautiful psychologist who can read thoughts. The two are caught up in an intricate web of genetics, corporate conspiracy and the hunt for a fugitive Nazi death camp soldier. Pierre has Huntington's disease and his feelings about his fate and his dignified fight against the disease make him the most three-dimensional Sawyer character I've encountered. An impossible-to-put-down page-turner. Don't miss it.

When you think of Robert J. Sawyer and Neanderthals, you think of his Hugo Award-winning HOMINIDS and its sequels, HUMANS and HYBRIDS. But it turns out that he was writing about Neanderthals and characters who were geneticists long before those books, as this earlier Hugo Award-finalist by Sawyer demonstrates. The settings are Montreal, Canada, and Berkeley, California, and the template is that of a Robin Cook-style medical thriller (but with richer characterization than Cook ever provides). Interestingly for a science-fiction book, it's not set at all in the future. Rather, the setting is the Human Genome Project in 1997, where all is not what it seems, and people have dark secrets in their pasts. Wonderful stuff, would make a great movie.

This is a terrific book about genetic destiny. The chapter in Treblinka is incredibly powerful stuff, some of the most moving and disturbing prose I have ever read. And the tale that grows out of that --- of a Nazi-hunter, a man who might have Huntington's disease, a mute child, and a telepathic (and very convincing, for a male author) woman --- is affecting, memorable and deeply moving. I recommend this book both to SF readers AND to mainstream readers.

It may not be the perfect story in its storytelling and plot but I found it very interesting and thought provoking, in which regard I would rate it a 2 thumbs or 5 stars. Makes me want to get into genetics as an intellectual pursuit. And if a book can do this much, Id say its excellent. And if as all the reviewers above say this is less than his best work, I cant wait to read the rest.