Milgram, Stanley. Obedience to Authority. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.
And his life and work are explored in:
Blass, Thomas. The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram. New York: Basic Books, 2004.
And for a largely opposing viewpoint on Milgram’s work, see:
Perry, Gina. Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments. New York: The New Press, 2013.
Then there’s Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Guard experiment from 1971:
Zimbardo, Philip. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House, 2007.
Milgram was influenced by this famous analysis of the trial of one of the Nazi war criminals, who, in the taxonomy presented in this novel, was almost certainly a Q1:
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking, 1963.
Two more recent books on how Q2s could influence the masses of Q1s, the latter extensively citing Bob Altemeyer:
Rees, Laurence. Hitler’s Charisma: Leading Millions into the Abyss. New York: Pantheon, 2013.
Dean, John W. Conservatives Without Conscience. New York: Viking, 2006.
I’m often called an optimistic writer, and my visions of the future tend to shade toward the utopian. I like to think that’s not simple naïveté, and this novel is my attempt to grapple with the notion of human evil, a topic explored in fascinating depth in:
Baumeister, Roy F. Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty. New York: W.H. Freeman & Company, 1996.
A couple of more recent treatments, based in neuroscience:
Baron-Cohen, Simon. The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty. New York: Basic Books, 2011.
Bloom, Paul. Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil. New York: Crown, 2013.
My character of Jim Marchuk is a utilitarian philosopher. Peter Singer is the best-known living utilitarian. His classic text is:
Singer, Peter. Practical Ethics, Third Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
A good overview of his thought (including his famously controversial views on abortion, animal rights, infanticide, and euthanasia, some of which Jim Marchuk echoes in my novel) is:
Singer, Peter. Writings on an Ethical Life. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.
On the obligation Jim Marchuk discusses of utilitarians to support third-world charities, see:
Singer, Peter. The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty. New York: Random House, 2009.
And this is Singer’s famous work that kick-started the worldwide animal-rights movement:
Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. New York: HarperCollins, 1975.
Harvard professor Joshua Greene looks at the divisiveness in modern societies through a utilitarian lens in this excellent book, which also discusses the Trolley Problem at length:
Greene, Joshua. Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them. New York: Penguin Press, 2013.
Much of my novel deals with ethics and free will (for those it asserts have it). Good reading:
Cathcart, Thomas. The Trolley Problem: Or Would You Throw the Fat Guy Off the Bridge? New York: Workman Publishing Company, 2013.
Churchland, Patricia S. Brain Trust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Gazzaniga, Michael. Who’s in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain. New York: Ecco, 2011.
Harris, Sam. Free Will. New York: Free Press, 2012.
Part of my novel deals with confabulation—or, as one of the characters so succinctly puts it, “just making shit up.” In fact, much of what we believe to be real is simply stories we’ve told ourselves, a faculty that defines us as a species, as explored in these works:
Gottschall, Jonathan. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. New York: Mariner Books, 2012.
Niles, John D. Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
And in what must be a case of nominative determinism for the author:
Storey, Robert. Mimesis and the Human Animal: On the Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representation. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996.
Finally, if you liked this novel, you might also particularly enjoy my other novels that deal with the nature of consciousness: The Terminal Experiment, FlashForward, Mindscan, Triggers, and the WWW trilogy of Wake, Watch, and Wonder.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert J. Sawyer gave a keynote address at the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson in 2010, and he will speak again at that conference in 2016. He’s also lectured about the science of consciousness at the Googleplex, the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, and TEDxManitoba, and he has published in both of the world’s top scientific journals, Science (guest editorial) and Nature (short story).
Rob is one of only eight writers ever to win all three of the world’s top awards for best science-fiction novel of the year: the Hugo (which he won in 2003 for Hominids), the Nebula (which he won in 1996 for The Terminal Experiment), and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award (which he won in 2006 for Mindscan). According to The Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards, he has won more awards for his novels than anyone else in the history of the science-fiction and fantasy fields, and in 2013 he became the first author in thirty years, and the youngest author ever, to receive a Lifetime Achievement Aurora Award from the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association.
Rob holds honorary doctorates from the University of Winnipeg and Laurentian University, and in 2009 he served as the first-ever writer-in-residence at the Canadian Light Source, Canada’s national synchrotron, a position created especially for him. His novel FlashForward was the basis for the ABC TV series of the same name, and he was a scriptwriter for that program.
A resident of Mississauga, Ontario, his website and blog are at sfwriter.com, and on Twitter and Facebook he’s RobertJSawyer.
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