The Multiplex Man

by James P. Hogan

Book Overview

Richard Jarrow, a mild and unassuming teacher, wakes up in a hotel room in a strange city with no memory. Everyone he knows treats him as a stranger. The government and secret police think he knows the whereabouts of a missing scientist named Ashling who was planning to defect to the Offworld colonies. Finding Ashling will be the key to Jarrow finding out what happened to himself.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0553089994
• ISBN13: 9780553089998
• Release Date: November 1992
• Publisher: Spectra Books
• Length: 359 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

P.K. Dick, eat your heart out

I completely enjoyed this book. Its a story like Total Recall with strange twists of personality exchange, but gripping from start to finish. Its also an interesting future, where the US is a totalitarian state and eastern europe a libertarian utopia (hence the Prometheus award the book won, which honors best libertarian fantasy). The political elements are believable and don't hit you over the head. The plot does.

Good sci-fi book

This book is a good sci-fi read. It has a bleak vision of the future in where America has adopted an almost 1984 Orwell feel to it and freedoms are routinely violated all in the name of protecting resources and believe it or not, Asia and Russia are the the lands of opportunity. Throw in a dab of mystery and government intrigue and a man with amnesia and five months missing from his life and you have a great story. This is the first book I have read from this author and I am looking forward to reading more. I recommend this novel to anyone who likes mystery and sci-fi.

Multiplex Man is outstanding

As most of the other reviews have noted, James P. Hogan here presents a somewhat unevenly written story. However, that being said, there is a class of reader (such as I) that really appreciates clever sf and surprising plot twists.Multiplex Man does have its moments of annoying polemics so frequent in Hogan's work. However, the incredible entertainment of this book easily makes reading it well worth while. Towards the end I couldn't put it down; the adventure was so exciting, the explanations so satisfying.If you have difficulty finding this out-of-print book, a little Web searching can reward you with this gem.

An intellectual roller-coaster ride

What if you weren't . . . you? (What if you were a writer _telling the story_ of someone in that situation? How would you organize it?) If you're the protagonist in this fascinating SF novel, you're probably in for some interesting experiences. But will you get to keep them? (If you're James P. Hogan, you tell the story in chunks, cycling through the various nonoverlapping personalities and telling the parts of the tale for which each is "present," as it were.) Who do you turn out to be? Are you one person or several? Which hero saves the day, and which hero _gets_ saved? Are they the same person? Are you sure? Hogan is in fine narrative form here. I've seen his writing described as "textbook-dry," but that's not likely to dissuade those of us who regard, say, Kernighan and Ritchie's _The C Programming Language_ as the pinnacle of expository prose style. Hogan writes like a _good_ engineer; his prose does the job he wants it to do, and the meat is in the story. (You don't need mannered digressions about the splendid colors of the autumn leaves in a book whose theme is that the universe isn't what you think it is.) In fact this is a fun book, full of Hogan's trademark mind-blowing coolness. The underlying technology is rendered plausible and the story is interesting from beginning to end. Even if you know what must be going on -- and you will, by midway through the second chapter, even if you hadn't figured it out from the title -- you'll still be kept guessing until the very end about (a) how and why it happened, and (b) how it will ultimately turn out. Hogan is one of my two favorite living SF writers (the other is Spider Robinson, who doesn't write "hard" SF). If you like SF, you'll like him.

"Total Recall", only *much* better

Remember the old days, when a new gadget and its implications would be explored in a science-fiction novel which had more twists than a pretzel factory? Hogan has a ball with the idea of the electronic educator and just how far the technology might go. On this basis, he adds a truly satisfying thriller, throws in a quest, and garnishes this salad with some croutons by investigating just what constitutes "creator's responsibility for his invention." I had a ball reading the hardcover. Some of the politics in the book are a bit dated by events in Eastern Europe since the book was originally published, but this book was well worth my time in hardcover, and I plan on rereading it.