Factoring Humanity (book)

Robert Sawyer Factoring Humanity. (1998) SF. The premise is that the Alpha Centaurans have sent a message to Earth. Apart from the first four pages, it's indecipherable. Heather Davis, a psychologist working on it, figures out that the rest of the message represents a plan for tiles which are assembled into squares which are assembled into a 3D projection of a tesseract. She discovers that the chemicals specified in the early part of the message are piezoelectric, so that the unfolded hypercube is in effect made of circuit boards. The device transports her into 3D space, but the 4th dimension is in fact psycho-space, and human beings are 3D projections of parts of the Overmind, which is all of humanity, past and present. Cute ideas, and the science isn't too far out in left field.
     Heather's voyage through psycho- space enables her to determine that her husband Kyle is not guilty of the molestation his daughter accuses him of. The family is healed by each member being able to see the world as the others see it. There is also a Centauran Overmind, and when Humanity makes contact with it, it becomes capable of genuine empathy, which percolates into the psyches of actual humans, so that we get peace and loving kindness everywhere.
     The ideas in the book are interesting. There are obvious parallels with heaven as union with God, etc. Sawyer quotes geneticists' objections to Chomsky's theory of the language instinct, but seems unfamiliar with M Gopnik's work. The writing is generally workmanlike, and moves the story along, but the most alive bits are the everyday scenes, eg, of Kyle on his way to the office buying a hot dog. The exposition is sometimes well handled through dialogue, but on the whole the characterisation is not as well done as Sawyer apparently thinks it is. I read a review of his subsequent novel, Flash Forward, in last Saturday's (Aug. 14, 1998) Globe. It was unnecessarily snarky and petty. Sawyer is not a great novelist, but he writes decent SF. ** (1998)