The Werewolf Principle

Clifford D Simak
Completed 3/21/2021, Reviewed 3/21/2021
4 stars

I really like Simak’s writing style.  It’s philosophical and pastoral, even when there’s a lot of futuristic visions of flying cars and robots, like in this book.  The title is a little misleading.  There are no horror movie werewolves in this book.  It’s based on the android that’s created to study alien life.  It’s human based, but very plastic.  It can transform into the shape of the alien race it discovers, live among them, study them, and return to its ship to download the data and return to human form.  It’s an interesting premise that leads to the question of what it means to be human.  I really enjoyed the book although some of the interactions between characters were a little hokey at times and there was an awful lot of exposition.  

Andrew Blake was discovered cryogenically frozen in space for 200 years and returned to Earth.  He has no memory of who he is, or his past.  In fact, he picked the name himself.   He has the face of a 30-year-old, but his body is pristine.  He has blackouts for hours and wakes up somewhere else.  Blake has three consciousnesses in his brain.  His, which is called Changer; Thinker, which is a biological computer alien; and Questor, which is a wolf like alien.  At first, he doesn’t realize this, but then it all comes crashing back.  Instead of changing back permanently to human form, he retains the ability to change into the aliens he’s studied.  Also, his mind never deleted the consciousnesses that he attained.  So, the experiment that created him has failed.  He runs, afraid of being held forever as a specimen to study and trying to figure out what to do now that he realizes he is not fully human.  

Blake is a really good character.  He struggles with his android-alien composite self, conversing and sometimes arguing with his three consciousnesses.  Some of the other characters are a little one-dimensional: the Senator who supports genetic manipulation to create humans that can survive on other planets, the Senator who thinks this is an abomination, and the attractive Elaine who helps him escape.  They are used to explain the science behind the Werewolf Principle, the experiment which created Blake. 

There’s one set of characters that I really found fun, the “brownies”.  They’re little mink-weasel-like aliens that have decided to live on Earth because they love the Nature.  Rarely seen, they take an interest in Blake and “keep an eye on him”, helping him out in tough situations.  They are the first to recognize that he has three consciousnesses in his head.  They’re a little Disney-esque, but offer some humor in this very heady novel.  And they provide a way for Simak to talk about Nature and eschew the modern technology of flying cars and hovering, robot driven houses.  

What makes this a heady novel is that Blake struggles with the idea of being human.  He was initially a genetically manipulated human, and now is a composite with two alien races.  So can Earth be home?  Can he relate to the other humans?  Can he fall in love?  Will his consciousnesses fuse into one, transforming into another being entirely?  These are all questions he ponders over the course of the novel.  

I give this book four stars out of five.  It’s exciting and philosophical, like many of the better science fiction novels of the golden era.  Like many of Simak’s novels, it’s short, and a relatively easy read.  It doesn’t cover any new ground, as the question of what it means to be human has been done many times.  But this novel gives it a little twist that’s sufficiently thought provoking.