Supermind

About the book

When government operations begin going wrong in increasingly troublesome ways, FBI director Andrew Burris sends Kenneth Malone to investigate. Officials are eager to establish that the errors are not their own fault, but the pattern gives the agent more than wounded reputations to consider. Familiar explanations seem inadequate, and his knowledge of extraordinary mental powers points toward possibilities that are difficult even to formulate. Malone's exchanges with colleagues and witnesses make the inquiry a comedy of language and institutional habits as well as a speculative mystery. This is the book version of the Mark Phillips story also published as Occasion ... for Disaster. It follows the unsettling prospect that apparently independent mishaps may express an intelligence operating outside ordinary awareness.

• Mental powers
• Institutional failure
• Knowledge and control

Why read it

Read it for a humorous investigation that turns scattered mistakes into a question about unseen agency.

English book version published as Supermind