The Jonah Kit

Dense sci-fi from the lost age of Big Ideas. An astrophysicist named Hammond makes a disturbing discovery (or is it premature?) about the origin of the universe. The idea goes like this: Our universe is just a decaying echo of the Big Bang. The "real" universe (whatever this means, exactly) popped into existence in another, fundamentally inaccessible dimension that runs parallel to ours, but enjoys a more substantive existence, at least compared with the inescapably entropic nature of our own. Popularized by the media (after being pushed by the relentlessly self-promoting Hammond), this discovery causes political chaos worldwide. Meanwhile, the Soviets have been learning how to copy minds into machine codes using electromagnetic show more psychotronics. Unfortunately, this results in the original minds being erased. Their prime test subject is a cosmonaut, severely disabled after a harsh re-entry, and they've been experimenting (successfully) with injecting copies of the mind into various other subjects: a sperm whale named "Jonah" and a child. The whale is like a vehicle, whose navigations of the sea are now accompanied by echoes of the cosmonaut's broken mind. In fact, whales are sapient creatures (only toothed whales, however), with deeply alien minds and a fantastically abstruse language that takes shape as glyphic abstractions within the spermaceti. Ultimately, some in government decide to broadcast Hammond's theorem to the "whale computer" (a pod of whales with which Jonah has been interfacing) in order to falsify or validate it. Promptly, every toothed whale on the planet horrifyingly beaches itself in a collective act of mass suicide. Running through the novel, there dialogues between Hammond and a disillusioned Italian journalist (formerly a Marxist, now a eunuch), who militates against the inherent nihilism of Hammond's theorem and, instead, advocates for a somewhat ambivalent version of the many-worlds interpretation. Maybe from the whales' perspective, it's the humans who've all died, and now they swim undisturbed in an oceanic universe split off from ours. An especially striking image: Watson writes that toothed whales (sapient) have been "programming" baleen whales (non-sapient) to broadcast messages through their songs, which carry vast distances. Now the ocean echoes with Hammond's theorem, but no toothed whales remain to understand its import, or to change the channel. show less

One of my all time favourite SF novels. Its bold idea of a Universe discarded by God makes for fascinating reading. What truly makes this stand apart is the unusual narrative of a human mind blended onto that of a whale's. This is perhaps Watson's greatest triumph and pulls it off with rich imagination and originality, with much of what he has theorised about whale communication, being realised today.

To be honest this was a difficult novel for me to like. Perhaps this was because of the underlying current of negativity throughout the novel. To me Watson was projecting some of the more developments of the 1970s forward in a way that was similar to what Wilson Tucker did in [b:The Year of the Quiet Sun|845489|The Year of the Quiet Sun|Wilson Tucker|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1362179288s/845489.jpg|831015]. It's a helpful reminder of what that decade was like, when it seemed that societal institutions were crumbling before the pressure of youth and the onslaught of new ideas. The ecological subtext added to the sense of this as a novel of its time, as it had something of a [b:Jonathan Livingston Seagull|71728|Jonathan Livingston show more Seagull|Richard Bach|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1422401277s/71728.jpg|1743336] vibe in places. The negativity might not have been as off-putting had it been balanced out by interesting characters, but the unappealing nature of nearly all of them just added to the sense of pessimism that pervaded its pages. It's definitely worth reading, but it's not a book I would recommend for someone seeking to be entertained and distracted, as in the end there's little room for it between its covers. show less

Bleh. This book is 1/3 interesting Sci Fi, 1/3 political drama, 1/3 the author exploring the 'human condition.' All the characters are purposefully unlikable, and the plot gets lost in the soul searching. The only interesting part was the Sci Fi, and in the end, probably unsurprisingly, it only ended up servicing the other parts. This wasn't a sci fi book, it was a dull and dreary philosophical parable. Bleh.

This is a fascinating novel in many ways and deals with some large ideas but on a relatively small scale, which was refreshing. Too many times I have found myself overwhelmed by the scale of a hard-sf novel crumbling around my ears as the story suffers. Not so here as the chapters are short and the general progress of the book is interspersed with passages of Whale-speak, which are puzzling at first but seem to work quite well.

Unfortunately, the general prose is extremely 'hard-sf'-esque: there is never a moment when any of the characters talk or think about anything other than the topic at hand (except for the occasional bit of chauvinistic voyeurism or copulation). The characters themselves are nothing more than ideas attached to show more names either.

Despite this, and the succinct nature of The Jonah Kit, the threads of discovery that the author draws out of the story, although a little dated in places, are quite powerful. The ending in particular is a real triumph and one of the best that I have come across in SF recently. show less

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I'm sorry to say that I bounced off this 1977 BSFA Award winner pretty thoroughly. The basic scientific hook, imprinting a dead cosmonaut's mind onto the brain of a child, is interesting enough, but the general setting of decaying contemporary civilisation is depressing without being completely convincing; whereas the characters are convincingly nasty unpleasant people who it is difficult to get interested in. I bounced off The Miracle Visitors too. Well, I have two more Watsons on the shelf, so we'll see if they can pull me round.

I can't really give a summary of this one, because I never could figure out what the heckin' heck was going on. There was a whale with, I think?, a man's mind in it, and a runaway boy, and some deeply unlikable other characters doing other stuff that I couldn't manage to care about in the slightest.
So this one was a big NOPE for me.