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Mindkiller
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mindkiller is a 1982 novel by science fiction writer Spider Robinson. The novel, set in the late 1990s, explores the social implications of technologies to manipulate the brain, beginning with wireheading, the use of electrical current to stimulate the pleasure center of the brain in order to achieve a narcotic high. It incorporates as its second chapter a slightly modified version of his short story "God is an Iron," a social commentary on the nature of addiction and addictive personalities built on wireheading. {This short story appeared in the May 1979 issue of "Omni" magazine, which was an ultimately-unsuccessful offering from the publishers of Penthouse magazine.)
The novel is unusual in its use of point of view, in a fashion similar to that of Robinson's mentor Robert A. Heinlein's novel The Number of the Beast, though mentioning the specific details of this would constitute a spoiler.
An independent sequel, Time Pressure is set in 1974 and concerns the later discovery of a method of limited time travel by the protagonists of Mindkiller, though this connection may not be obvious to the casual reader until late in the novel. Baen Books has published these two novels in a combined edition as Deathkiller, and published as a third book in the series Lifehouse.
