The Terminal Man
The Terminal Man is a novel by American writer Michael Crichton. It is his second novel under his own name and his twelfth overall, and is about the dangers of mind control. It was published in April 1972, and also serialized in Playboy in March, April, and May 1972. In 1974, it was made into a film of the same name. Plot summary The events in the novel take place between March 9 and March 13, 1971. Harold Franklin "Harry" Benson, a computer scientist in his mid-thirties, is described as suffering from "psychomotor epilepsy" following a car crash two years earlier. He often has seizures followed by blackouts, and then wakes up hours later with no knowledge of what he has done. During these seizures, he severely beats two people; the day before his admission, he was arrested after attacking a third. He is a prime candidate for an operation to implant an electronic "brain pacemaker" in the amygdala region of his brain in order to control the seizures, which will be performed in the Neuro-Psychiatric Service (NPS) of University Hospital. Two NPS surgeons, John Ellis and Robert Morris, are to perform the unprecedented surgery. The ramifications of the procedure