Book Review

Book Review

The Altered Ego by Jerry Sohl

     The setting is Los Angeles in 2045 and scientists have discovered how to store a person’s memories and transfer them to another body after death. Jerry Sohl, author of The Altered Ego, was a prolific scriptwriter for The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and other tv shows of that era. So here we get a lean, plot driven novelette that can be entertaining when looked at through the proper lens.

Bradley Kempton is the genius leader of a corporation that produces optical systems for spaceships. Kempton gets murdered and brought back to life but his son Carl quickly realizes that his father is not the old self he used to be. Carl and his hot girlfriend Marilla start to investigate why and learn that a subordinate employee named John Hardesty had died a month earlier; the corporate scientists who record and preserve people’s memories had implanted Hardesty’s mind into Kempton’s body before resuscitating it.

     At first, The Altered Ego reads like a detective novel in a science-fiction setting. Carl seeks out hard data on John Hardesty while Marilla shadows the newly restored man. Both learn that Hardesty indulges in the seamy side of Los Angeles. Like Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, the story opens with a mystery that is solved almost immediately but the early solution leads to the uncovering of a conspiracy. Sohl’s conspiracy, however, is one of international and intergalactic proportions. It is the pursuit of the how and why of the plot that draws the protagonists along a path of quick and sharp plot twists.

     As Carl learns more about the conspiracy, he crosses the paths of the men responsible for it. He winds up in a psychiatric hospital, only to discover his father, the real Brandon Kempton, is imprisoned there too. However, his father’s memories had been implanted into the brain and body of a psychopathic killer. The big revelation is why Brandon Kepmton’s mind was preserved for the sake of the criminal cabal.

     That is where the best parts of the book end. The chase scene and the climactic confrontation are formulaic and cliched. The story ends the way you might expect a movie of the 1950s to end which should be no surprise considering who Jerry Sohl was in real life. The final chapter is especially bad; a detective explains everything that happened in a typical mystery story fashion. But all he really does is run through the events of the previous chapter; assuming you actually read that chapter before going on to the last chapter, you have to wonder why the author thought this was necessary. Maybe Sohl thought it was too fast paced for you to comprehend or you are horribly deficient in memory. Maybe he thought there was a need for closure. Maybe he was contracted to write a certain number of pages and used the final monologue as filler. Or maybe he just ended it that was because Sohl insisted on slavishly following the murder mystery formula, paint-by-numbers style. Even worse, the final lines of the story are especially cheesy. You might be left with a better impression in the end if you skip the last chapter entirely.

     The Altered Ego can be criticized for a number of other shortcomings. It is a plot driven book so character development is only taken to the point where the personality traits make each person fit the role they are meant to play in the story. It is thematically shallow. The switch between John Hardesty and Brandon Kempton could be an effective, if unoriginal, exploration of the doppelganger motif. Marilla could represent the strive for women’s equality in the world of fiction. John Hardesty’s attempt at seducing Marilla, his faux-son’s girlfriend, looks like a reversal of the Oedipal Complex. The conspiracy could be a useful metaphor for Cold War politics and the science of the sanitarium could be a reference to the CIA’s MK-Ultra mind control program. But these themes are only hinted at and never explored. Sohl’s novelette appears formulaic and cartoonish. But if you like cartoons, that is perfectly alright.

     The Altered Ego has its faults. Really, it is intended to be read for entertainment more than anything. If you read it that way it fulfills that purpose and is, honestly, fun to read if you do not take it too seriously.

Sohl, Jerry. The Altered Ego. Pennant Books, New York: 1954.