The Many, by Sylvain Neuvel
The Book
Synopsis:
The minds of five normal people merge in a beautiful, unnerving first contact story where the strangest thing humanity has to face is each other, from the critically acclaimed author of Sleeping Giants.
“I’m you now. We all are.”
When advertising executive Carole Veilleux loses it at Booker’s donut shop and bites Booker on the arm, it’s about the most interesting thing to happen in the small city of Marquette, Michigan, in years.
But that’s only the beginning of the story. Carole and Booker find their minds merging, in a collective that extends to include Carole’s husband Shivansh and local doctor Evelyn Schlapp. The four of them become the beginning of something larger and stranger than they could ever have imagined.
My Review
The Many is a weird science fiction novel written by Sylvain Neuvel, published by Solaris. A first-contact novel that is more humorous than I expected, playing with the idea of a hive mind and using it as a way to explore problems that affect our society, such as racism and sexism, while delivering a thought-provoking story.
A story that follows a wide cast of characters, all of them with serious issues in their lives, who, after a disastrous morning, end up being merged into a hive mind; something that starts just by four-five minds, and which will eventually grow into a thing that will not only comprise all the humans but other animal species in the Earth. A science fiction proposal which manages to keep all the POVs unique, while playing with the merged mind perspective, in a really well-executed way.
What really separates this novel from others is how Neuvel manages to create these separate characters, each one with their uniqueness, their problems, their own goals in life, and how they are slowly merged into this hive mind, how they lose a bit of their own to gain much more from the others. Interestingly, we can see the perfect example of the expression "getting into other's shoes", as this experience is like the best way to enact empathy over many individuals.
As you may have imagined with its length, this is quite a fast novel, but still full of details: for example, when you see how the hive mind starts having cat thoughts after absorbing that species, or even the first contact episode. While I think there are some rough edges that could have been focused in other ways, I found it to be a really enjoyable novel.
At the end, if you are looking for a great and different science fiction novel, with a focus on the characterization and how they progressively become one, I can heartily recommend The Many!
The Author/s
Sylvain Neuvel
Sylvain Neuvel dropped out of high school at age 15. Along the way, he has been a journalist, worked in soil decontamination, sold ice cream in California, and peddled furniture across Canada. He received a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Chicago. He taught linguistics in India, and worked as a software engineer in Montreal. He is also a certified translator, though he wishes he were an astronaut. He likes to tinker, dabbles in robotics and is somewhat obsessed with Halloween. He absolutely loves toys; his girlfriend would have him believe that he has too many, so he writes about aliens and giant robots as a blatant excuse to build action figures (for his son, of course).