Like Calculating God and Illegal Alien, Mindscan is part philosophy novel, part courtroom drama, part thriller. This is a standard Sawyer trick, knitting together a variety of genres in the service of his yarn. An eager advocate for SF (including his recently established science-fiction imprint), Sawyer's books embrace the idea that genre is a way of framing a human story, rather than the whole story in itself.

Mindscan opens with the protagonist facing a fairly typical Sawyer-style crisis: Jake Sullivan is worried that the genetic defect that caused his father's massive, personality-destroying brain injury might strike him. To Jake, it's not a matter of if, but of when. His whole life has been haunted by the possibility that it could be brutally short, or, even worse, long but with him not really there to appreciate it. After all, that's how it's been for his father.

Enter the technological element, a new process that copies the pattern of everything in your brain, then transfers it into a mechanical body. It's you, but without mortality, without even the aches and pains of aging. And, as the technology improves, your dittoed brain can always be put into a faster, better, stronger case. Meanwhile, the original you is sent to a luxurious retirement home on the moon, leaving your simulacrum to take over in every capacity, while you laze away your remaining natural days.

From this premise, Sawyer takes us skimming across a sea of implications. Can you cede your rights to a simulated version of yourself? How does our mortality affect our actions? Who would choose this kind of procedure and why? How would people react to this emerging technology? And what would it be like for a person to leave their body for something far less vulnerable, still carrying the memories of how food tastes, the wind feels, a rose smells?

As you can imagine, both Jake Sullivans face surprises and complications, things they didn't foresee, but perhaps should have. The battles are internal and external, and Sawyer provides a real overview of what this feasible-sounding technology could do. In fact, even in the book, the technology is something that works, but is not quite understood, even by the scientists who developed the process.

What would it be like to be yourself, but in a different, non-biological body? One of the more interesting elements of this can be seen in the new Jake's experience of moods. Enraged by a bad day in an ongoing court battle, Jake discovers that none of his old destressors would work:

Everything that affects our feelings, at least in our biological instantiation, is a chemical stimulant: dopamine, acetycholine, serotonin, testosterone. But if you become an electrical machine instead of a chemical one, how do you mimic the effects of those substances? We were the first generation of transferred consciousnesses; there were still bugs to be worked out.

It's hard, in that moment, to imagine that the person is still the same if his own coping mechanisms are no longer valid. And how frustrating an experience that would be!

Sex, too, can be frustrating. It is inevitable that the "fully functional" question is asked, and answered, as Jake and a fellow mindscan pursue a relationship. The questions here are unstated: How would sex work between machine/human hybrids? What would be the purpose? How would the absence of literal chemistry affect sex drive? Sawyer includes these scenes in order to assert the humanity of the scanned characters, but I have to admit that it doesn't quite work for me, particularly the zero-g scene, which fades out on the line "Let's see if we can execute a docking maneuver..." (A real pot/kettle criticism from a woman who just used a Data reference, I know.)