A book I wasn't sure I liked the first time I read it, but I came to appreciate the view of other intelligences in the universe. The main character wakes up after a car accident and can't remember who he is. However, he is convinced that the person everyone thinks he is, is not, in fact, him. As the character struggles to discover who he is and where he came from, he also struggles to survive hostile individuals who would use his special abilities for their own profit. He becomes attached to his "human" protectors and faces a difficult decision: should he remain in the "human " world, or go back to his own?

An imaginative story VERY different from Ms. Bradshaw's historical novels.

The Wrong Reflection
by Gillian Bradshaw

Going through my old paperback and reviewing before I recycle them, I found this gem. Some excellent descriptions from the main character told in a third person past tense narrative. Overall, better than I remembered.

A nice SF thriller with a twist I didn’t see coming (at least at the time). Some small amount of romance but mostly a mystery and a thriller with SF elements.

Sandra Murray chances upon a car accident one night and rescues a man with CPR.

When he wakes up in the hospital, they tells him that his name is Paul Anderson. He insists that it is not, but can’t actually remember who he is. Everyone keeps insisting that he is, his photo matches, people who know Paul Anderson insist that he is Paul Anderson.

The author does an excellent job of describing his visceral experiences from the time that he wakes up. Very well done. Also on re-reading, there are many clues. Besides his missing identity, he seems to not know many basics about life in general.

Sandra comes to see him when he is in the hospital and takes an interest in his mystery when he confesses to her that he strongly feels he isn’t Paul even though all the evidence indicates that he is. When he goes home, he hires Malcolm Brown to help care for him. Sylvia and Malcolm spend time with him and try to jog his memory.

As he meets with colleagues (who definitely think he is Anderson) he discovers more about the man who he was supposed to be and none of it feels right to him.

Together, they slowly unravel mysteries and conspiracies surrounding Anderson’s life and the company he worked for. Through it all he nearly remembers things but constantly pulls back from some sort of pain and trauma. There are hints that some at Stellar Research know exactly what is going on but they are not saying. The amnesiac surrounds himself with people who didn’t know him before and he feels he can trust.

About half way through they admit (several bad guys at Stellar Research) they know he isn’t Anderson and imprison him at the lab and in fact want to know what he did with the man. They quickly discover that he just doesn’t know. But it is at this point in the novel that it is very clear that ‘Not-Anderson’ as he is often called is not just someone else but some thing else. And we finally learn ‘his’ name is Wave Vector and whatever he is, Stellar Research has another of his kind (named Gravitational Constant) held prisoner.

While they torture Wave Vector, we learn that he communicated with them and gave them formula’s to build an energy source of some kind. They also debate if Paul is still alive (the body being Paul Anderson’s). While this is going on, “Anderson’s” friends desperately try to get to him, first ineffectively going to the police.

Most of the Stellar Research crowd want to get Paul back, while the lead bad guy Sir Phillip seems to enjoy torturing the creature in possession of his body. Anderson is definitively dead, but Wave Vector doesn’t want to admit that. Eventually, they assume it anyway and accuse it of killing Anderson to take his body.

With Sandra Murray and a reporter making noise to try to find her amnesiac, Sir Philip has no choice but to bring her in on the secret. He tells her everything starting with how the energy being contacted him and gave him a new theory with mathematical formulas that could solve the world’s energy needs. He put together a research team and built a prototype. Sir Philip then admits to building a trap for the creature because it had ‘turned on him’ but it escaped and killed Paul Anderson and took his body.

Sir Phillip hopes to win them over but the plan backfires and they are revolted by his torture of Wave Vector. They are unable to get to him and have to back off momentarily.

Wave Vector succeeds in escaping on his own and Sandra finds him and takes him into hiding. In hiding he tells his friends (Sandra, Malcolm and Rod) his version of the story including the details of Paul’s death and how he only took over after Sandra started resuscitating him.

After a day of rest and recuperating Wave Vector insists he must go back to rescue Gravitational Constant. They succeed but are captured by Sir Philip in the process. Paul Anderson’s body is killed and Wave Vector must flee before his death causes and explosion killing them all.

He does come back and say good bye via computer conversation before departing form Earth forever.

A man pulled from a car wreck and revived through CPR awakens in hospital to find he cannot remember anything about himself - or much of anything . . . except for the fact that he violently resists the fact that he is the person identified by the hospital through the papers on him and in the wreckage of the car, and that he is terribly afraid of the company he supposedly worked for, and the people with whom he supposedly worked. He looks like the person they claim he is, he has the same identifying marks, he even shares the same fingerprints, but he is absolutely certain that he is not this person. The only one who believes him at first is the woman who rescued him.

Gillian Bradshaw brings these characters, especially the main character, to life in a way that I haven't seen in a long time - I was fascinated and unable to put this book down until I reached the ending. At first it read like a mystery/thriller, but as the book progresses, it very gradually (and, in my opinion, in a realistic manner) enters the realm of science fiction. The more technical elements are explained in a manner that I found easy to understand and added to the story.

This was a wonderful book and I highly recommend it to anyone who can get their hands on it. I hope that it will be re-released at some point, if enough people discover it.