The Heaven Virus | Clifford Pickover

The Heaven Virus | Clifford Pickover | A fantastic journey

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The Heaven Virus

	The Heaven Virus Clifford Pickover Lulu.com, 2007 - 388 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The New York Times writes, "Pickover contemplates realms beyond our known reality." From one of the most original voices in imaginative nonfiction comes a stunning novel of speculation on the afterlife, immortality, and the existence of the human soul. "The Heaven Virus" is inspired by virtual universes making headlines today and offers readers a glimpse of ultimate spiritual technologies for the 22nd century and a mystic encounter in an age of electronic gods. "The Heaven Virus" blends humor, psychedelia, and hope in a meditation on the outer limits of our culture, evolutionary destiny, and inner space. This novel will draw readers who have wondered about their own passage from this existence into the world to come. Cliff Pickover is the author of forty books on science, mathematics, art, religion. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University. His website, Pickover.com, has received several million visits.

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Kafkaesque

"The Heaven Virus" elevates the themes of "Sex, Drugs, Einstein & Elves" and "A Beginner's Guide to Immortality" -- two of Pickover's most recent non-fiction books -- to a level that perhaps only a work of fiction can achieve. He has been able to say things in this novel that he was never able to reveal in his non-fiction books.

All of the sex that was nonexistent in "SDE&E" is in this novel in spades. And I think that he explores the theme of immortality more deeply in this effort than in "A Beginner's Guide to Immortality."

"The Heaven Virus" reminds me of one of Franz Kafka's classics. Things are not quite what they seem. And events become more ominous as we move along. It is also comparable to Philip K. Dick's paranoid style, with shades of Aldous Huxley.

The writing style is quite elegant and readily accessible to almost any reader, albeit Pickover's vocabulary occasionally soars into the stratosphere of the "obscurity index." His technical understanding of science, mathematics, and technology is exceptional, and this gives the narrative a unique edge.

There is, of course, a fly in the ointment of "The Heaven Virus." And I hesitate to use an insectoid reference, as you shall see once you read the novel, for it is filled with insectoid references. In that sense, it is very Kafkaesque!

Pickover manages to probe the depths of theology in the neo-reality of cyberspace -- as if seeking the Godhead of meaning in the denatured universe of consciousness uploaded into matter. It takes the concept of engineered reality ("The Matrix") into the realm of the afterlife.

Perhaps artificial reality is really just nature after all. Though we may strive to create absolute perfection, our human nature invests our creations with our humanity, and all its imperfections. What could be more hellish than a "Heaven Virus?" It makes immortality on a computer chip downright undesirable!

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A fantastic journey

By constructing personality from scratch, Cliff Pickover's "The Heaven Virus" provides a fascinating look at what it really means to be human. At the same time, this is no turgid science text--it's an exciting story that weaves adventure seamlessly in with its scientific premise.

I'm always a fan of sardonic humor, and Dr. Pickover comes through beautifully. A typical example (page 95) is:

"Nick looked at a nearby table of people with pencils behind their ears. Two of the people manipulated a wet, multifaceted object.
'Who are they?' Nick whispered.
'The high-IQ dead people are having a four-dimensional meal, or at least attempting to.'"

That's my kind of humor!

I especially appreciated how Dr. Pickover started the novel out by providing easy-to-understand context about how the story connects with current scientific knowledge.

There were many profound take-away messages from this book. Perhaps the most important, to me, was that our consciousness of what surrounds us is very much determined by our biological underpinnings. There--I said it--but not nearly as well as Cliff Pickover did!

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A spiritual voyage into the unknown

The basic premise behind the book, that the soul can be transferred between various computational devices (brain, computer, other dimensions, heaven?) is a very powerful idea. We would all like to believe that our life is not in vain, that we could somehow transcend this reality and yet still be the same individual. His descriptions of the environment are very detailed and the interactions between the characters seem real. If you want to read a book that lets you question reality, that makes you ask 'what if', then this book is for you.

A great mathematical novel

The Heaven Virus joins The Parrot's Theorem and Iceberg Risk on the short list of first-rate novels with deep mathematical cores. While Pickover has a lot to say about reality, time, religon, language, brains and minds, these ideas whirl randomly around the one constant in the story, mathematical truth.

I undertand other reviewers' comparisons to books such as Slaughterhouse-Five, The Metamorphosis, Alice in Wonderland and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, those convey the some of the style. For my part,
The Black Cloud is closer to the mark: using up-to-the-minute science to explore what it really means to be human, and how that might change in the near future.

Read it for the story, or the speculations, or the science; but read it.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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