From the bestselling author of Jurassic Park, Timeline, and Sphere comes a neurological thriller about the dangers of cutting-edge medical experimentation. Harry Benson suffers from violent seizures. So violent that he often blackouts when they take hold. Shortly after severely beating two men during an episode, the police escort Benson to a Los Angeles hospital for treatment. There, Dr. Roger … for treatment. There, Dr. Roger McPherson, head of the prestigious Neuropsychiatric Research Unit, is convinced he can cure Benson with an experimental procedure that would place electrodes deep in his brain’s pleasure centers, effectively short-circuiting Harry’s seizures with pulses of bliss. The surgery is successful, but while Benson is in recovery, he discovers how to trigger the pulses himself. To make matters worse his violent impulses have only grown, and he soon escapes the hospital with a deadly agenda. . .
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Definitely one of his firsts. I can’t fault him because he launched a mighty career from very humble beginnings. A good read just to see how he started on the well researched action novel.
Not his best work, but thought provoking in how computers could take over your mind.
Not his best. The book was OK.
Boring and predictable
Outdated.
Old, but good, classic Crichton!
Thought provoking
It’s not the author’s fault that this book became so dated so quickly. Technological advances make procedures that are considered radical in the book, become ordinary, then obsolete now. The ethical questions are still being asked, but not the same way.
Somewhat predictable.
Very technical, scientific medical novel about implanting parts of a robot brain inside the head of a man who has violent seizures. Pages after pages of medical and scientific jargon with not much of a plot besides that. The operation is not what they had hoped for, perhaps just a partial success, or a partial failure, and the Terminal Man continues to have violent seizures and winds up brutally killing and hurting others. And then he is killed in a confrontation with police. The End.
I have read several of Crichton’s books, and would rate this one at the low end of his body of work, some of which was brilliant.
Original plot well presented
Too dated for me
I love psychological thrillers and this ranks at the top. I’ve read all of his other books and somehow this slipped by me, so I was crazy glad to get it!
Fun to revisit the early 1970s as a group of doctors take on the controversial application of mind control. Crichton was a master of techno-suspence.
It was one of his first books, so keeping that in mind, it was pretty good. However, it certainly wasn’t one of his best.
Wonderful attention keeper. This book has everything I love medical side of life and a patient who keeps the medical personnel see the unimaginable that can happen.
It is surprising that this book was written over forty years ago. In the beginning I had not realised it at all. Of course, I saw that the story was set in the 70s, but I had not noticed it was actually written in that decade. This is significant because if you read such a dated technological thriller you expect, however, to perceive a certain naivety and a very different atmosphere from recent novels, because time changes in both the writing and the audience. The readers are now much better prepared and savvy than those of 1972, so the fact that a book of this type is able to astonish them is no doubt a sign that this is a great book.
However you can notice this is one of the first works of Crichton. Over time he has definitely improved in style, but even then, as I have seen in “Andromeda”, you could see his genius.
The plot has to do with the treatment of mental illnesses through advanced techniques of manipulation of the brain by means of its connection to a computer, making precisely the man nothing more than a terminal. As usual in books of this author the science becomes the main protagonist. The characters take a back seat, but no matter, because the reader is captivated by everything else, although in fact it is a decades-old science fiction. The wonder of reading, however, is intact, as well as the feeling at the end of the novel that it is able to teach us something and it was not just a pastime.
The ending is perhaps not unexpected, as well as the general development of the plot, but proves to be a match for other great novels of the same genre written much more recently.
As always, before Crichton, I can only bow.
Very typical Crichton. Heavy on science, suspense and action. Much better book than the movie.