Audiobook (abridged)8 hours
The Consciousness Plague
Written by Paul Levinson
Narrated by Mark Shanahan
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
From of the author of The Silk Code, winner of the 1999 Locus Award for Best First Novel, comes another intriguing blend of science fiction and hard-boiled police-procedural mystery.
The Consciousness Plague is about memory, more particularly, how the loss of memory, in slivers of time deducted from a growing number of individuals, can subtly undermine and play havoc with everything from the investigation of serial stranglings to candlelight dinners. Dr. D'Amato, NYPD forensic detective, investigates a spate of unusual cases of memory loss and finds evidence of a bacteria-like organism that has lived in our brains since our origin as a species and may be responsible for our very consciousness.
There's evidence for this consciousness bug in the ancient Phoenician and Viking cultures and everywhere Phil looks in our world. A new antibiotic crosses the blood-brain barrier and inadvertently kills this essential bug. Phil himself becomes a victim of the memory drain, and must struggle to get the proper authorities to pay attention before everyone loses so much memory that they forget that they forgot in the first place.
The Consciousness Plague is about memory, more particularly, how the loss of memory, in slivers of time deducted from a growing number of individuals, can subtly undermine and play havoc with everything from the investigation of serial stranglings to candlelight dinners. Dr. D'Amato, NYPD forensic detective, investigates a spate of unusual cases of memory loss and finds evidence of a bacteria-like organism that has lived in our brains since our origin as a species and may be responsible for our very consciousness.
There's evidence for this consciousness bug in the ancient Phoenician and Viking cultures and everywhere Phil looks in our world. A new antibiotic crosses the blood-brain barrier and inadvertently kills this essential bug. Phil himself becomes a victim of the memory drain, and must struggle to get the proper authorities to pay attention before everyone loses so much memory that they forget that they forgot in the first place.
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Reviews for The Consciousness Plague
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
12 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This book reminded me of Dan Brown's novels, minus Brown's fascination with grotesque violence, and with the kooky religious history replaced with kooky scientific theories -- in this case, a theory that micro-organisms living in our brain give us consciousness. Except he doesn't really mean consciousness; he means memory, which is a different concept. The prose is better than Brown's, but it's still weighed down with exposition. Parts of the story -- for example, a shaggy-dog search for a mysterious traveler on a train -- seemed to take up space without advancing the story or revealing anything new about the characters involved. One nice aspect of the book was the healthy relationship between the forensic scientist narrator and his girlfriend.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Had a good start, intriguing but then towards the end it just didn't cut it. Bad ending.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I was intrigued by the premise and the book I was well written. I do however feel more time should have been spent on the conciousness plague elements. I would like to read more about such a subject and this book prodded me to look for similar story lines and subjects.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is the second Phil D'Amato mystery novel. It has all the virtues of the first one, and it's much better integrated--no weird diversions through other stories which happen to contain crucial information. In the wake of a flu epidemic, treated by a new antibiotic that is actually effective in shortening the length and lessening the severity of the disease, there's an epidemic of short-term amnesia. It moves from the level of annoying to the level of serious problem when it starts to interfere with the investigation of an apparent serial killer. D'Amato battles his own and others' unreliable memories, one or more killers, and city and federal bureacracy and politics in pursuit of the solution to both mysteries. Highly enjoyable.