"The Receiver

While it might be classified a science fiction novel, “The Receiver” is really more a literary critique of the practice of science and a satire of academia in general. The plot of the novel involves the classic situation of first contact with an Alien used so often in science fiction. Perhaps the most notable of this familiar devise was the 1985 best-selling novel “Contact” by Carl Sagan. However rather than being a paean to the glories of science like Sagan’s novel, “The Receiver” exposes the failures and contradictions of our technophilic culture and the religion of scientism. The form of the novel is an allegory of religious doctrines that serves both as a satire on the pretense of science as religion and a meditation on their meaning beyond doctrine. The setting of the novel is the near future where everything has been transformed by technology but nothing has changed. Race, sex, and money are still the main issues of the day. Into this world comes Denise, clandestinely transported to Earth in the form of information and transubstantiated into flesh by a machine whose specifications had previously been transmitted. Denise is received by Dr. John Watters, a very conventional, not very distinguished scientist who is director of an all but defunct SETI program. After 100 years of silence from space, SETI has degenerated to a training program for “majority” students in a second rate public university. Denise enrolls in the university to study Humanities while Watters and his Jamaican graduate Lab Assistant study her. The results of this intercourse are both comic and tragic as the layers of illusion surrounding them are gradually dissolved.