Review: Coils by Fred Saberhagen and Roger Zelazny

Coils by Fred Saberhagen and Roger Zelazny

I love the idea behind this novel. A ruthless billionaire got his company ahead in the world by harnessing the abilities of cyberpath, a telepath, a telekinetic, and a guy who can heal or harm with his mind. The cyberpath got out when he found out that people were being murdered to advance the company’s interests—but there was a twist. He had to agree to be hypnotized so that he forgot everything he had been doing with the company. When the hypnotism begins to fail and his memories return, the billionaire grabs the cyberpath’s girlfriend and attempts to kill his former employee.

 

What follows is a rather straightforward, and I feel, very limited adventure story. Don, the cyberpath, appears to be quite intelligent, but acts as if all he has to do is find his girlfriend and he and she will be allowed to walk off into the sunset. All the while the billionaire is trying to kill him. The really obvious thing for Don to do is to fight back using his own abilities. He could, for example, start wiping out the hard drives on all of the billionaire’s computers. He could, for example, dump the billionaire’s secret files to the press, or other authorities. And I could go on. Instead, he drives across country and attempts to walk into a corporate facility and get his girlfriend.

 

I might also point out that the whole problem could have been avoided if the billionaire used the hypnosis to make Don want to continue working for him. That might actually have led to a better story where Don, on the job, began to recover his memories…

 

All told, there was great promise in this story, but the implementation was rather lacking.