The novel “The Downloaded” by Robert J. Sawyer was published for the first time in 2023 as an audiobook and in 2024 as a book.
When Captain Letitia Garvey finds herself in her body after spending four subjective years in a virtual world produced by her mind in a quantum computer, she expects the spaceship Hokule’a to have reached the Proxima Centauri system. Instead, it soon becomes clear that she and the rest of the crew are on Earth, in the Quantum Cryonics Institute in Waterloo, Canada. Outside, there are only ruins.
The situation for the newly awakened astronauts becomes even more complicated when they realize that they are not the only humans present at the Institute. Another group of people has awakened and they are criminals who agreed to serve a sort of virtual sentence as part of a rehabilitation project. How can the astronauts trust them?
In this post-apocalyptic story, Robert J. Sawyer combines some ideas to show some possible futures for humanity. It all starts from the initial mystery of what was supposed to be an expedition aimed at starting a colony in the Proxima Centauri system that never began.
The idea of astronauts and criminals being placed in cryogenic stasis while their minds are uploaded to a quantum supercomputer is based on real neuroscientific hypotheses indicating that certain brain functions could be affected by quantum phenomena. Robert J. Sawyer imagines that the mind of a person placed in cryostasis suffers from quantum decoherence. The consequence is that it’s necessary to transfer a person’s mind into a quantum supercomputer to maintain its integrity.
The author uses these concepts in various ways with the plan of interstellar travel lasting centuries being only the first and most obvious. The uploaded minds can create their own virtual world or can be imprisoned in a virtual world created by others if they are the criminals included in an experiment. Roscoe Koudoulian, one of them, explicitly says that he was subjected to a “Ludwig van treatment” reminiscent of the one in the movie “A Clockwork Orange” which was intended to eliminate the kind of impulses that led him to kill a man.
Most of “The Downloaded” concerns the reactions of the downloaded to their new situation. The story follows the points of view of some of them in the form of interviews and only after a while we find out who is interviewing them. The statements, which include opinions, reflections, and more released by the characters show their attempts to handle an unprecedented situation in which a diverse group of people must work together to survive.
Robert J. Sawyer never wrote very long novels but “The Downloaded” is short even by his standards. For this reason, its development is essential with the interviews with the protagonists used to tell the significant parts of the story. In the end, the characters’ attitudes and behaviors are important to understand what their consequences and the possible future of humanity. From this point of view, the introspective parts are as important as the descriptions of the events.
Many things happen in “The Downloaded” but it can’t be considered an action-packed novel because the events are, so to speak, filtered by being told by the protagonists. This also means that not everything that happened around the expedition and the criminal rehabilitation experiment has an explanation. If that’s not a problem, I recommend reading this novel for the food for thought it offers regarding the choices possible for human beings and their consequences for the future. It’s available on Amazon USA, UK, and Canada.
