Observer: A Novel

OBSERVER: A NOVEL

If we can alter the structure of reality, should we?

In OBSERVER, scientist Robert Lanza, one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People,” is joined by Nebula and Hugo Award-winning author Nancy Kress to confront the mysteries in the space between biology and consciousness, between the self and what we assume is reality. OBSERVER takes you on a mind-expanding journey to the very edges of science. It will thrill you, inspire you, and lead you to think about life and the power of the imagination in startling new ways.

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ORDER NOW

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Donated to Salk Institute

“Robert Lanza has taken the gigantic step of incorporating his ideas into a science fiction novel with Nancy Kress. This brilliant book will take you deep into quantum physics, where these often-complex concepts are illuminated through a riveting and moving story… It was when I was doing research for my latest book, The Greatest Secret, that I came across Lanza’s astounding book, Biocentrism. Here was the science that backed up everything I knew to be true on a spiritual level. Observer breaks down the materialistic model of ourselves and the world that we’ve come to believe as reality. It is the leading-edge scientists such as Dr. Robert Lanza who will help take humanity out of the dark ages and into a new world.”

―Rhonda Byrne, #1 New York Times bestselling author

* * *

Caro Soames-Watkins, a talented neurosurgeon whose career has been upended by controversy, is jobless, broke, and the sole supporter of her sister, a single mother with a severely disabled child.

When she receives a strange job offer from Nobel Prize-winning scientist Sam Watkins, a great uncle she barely knows, desperation forces her to take it in spite of serious suspicions.

Watkins has built a mysterious medical facility in the Caribbean to conduct research into the nature of consciousness, reality, and life after death. Helped in his mission by his old friend, eminent physicist George Weigert, and young tech entrepreneur Julian Dey, Sam has gone far beyond curing the body to develop a technology that could solve the riddle of mortality for the soul.

Two obstacles stand in their way: someone on the inside is leaking intel and Watkins’ failing body must last long enough for the technology to be ready.

As danger mounts, Caro finds more than she bargained for, including murder, love, and a deeper understanding into the nature of reality.

A mind-expanding journey to the very edges of science

Joining a fascinating and relatable cast of characters with a mind-expanding journey to the very edges of science, OBSERVER will thrill you, inspire you, and lead you to think about life and the power of the imagination in startling new ways.

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“Robert Lanza is one of the most exciting thinkers of our time, and his novel, OBSERVER, is a thrilling exploration of his most daring theories, a thought-provoking page-turner that asks the most profound question of our existence—what is our role in the true nature of reality?”

―Blake Crouch, New York Times bestselling author, and Executive Producer of the Apple TV series Dark Matter

“Nancy Kress is one of the greatest living science fiction writers, and her particular talent for telling stories about people on the cutting edge of science tipping into something new and marvelous is perfectly suited to the ideas that have come to Robert Lanza in the course of his groundbreaking scientific research. Together they’ve written a startling, fascinating novel.”

―Kim Stanley Robinson, New York Times bestselling author

“Real science and limitless imagination combine in a thrilling story you won’t soon forget.”

―Robin Cook, #1 New York Times bestselling author, Coma (and 37 other international bestsellers)

“Nancy Kress is a master storyteller, and her trademark empathy is on every page. Even as we venture into the heady territory of quantum physics and the nature of reality that Robert Lanza is known for, we never lose track of Caro, the brilliant surgeon who’ll do anything to save the people she loves. OBSERVER is the best of science and fiction—an intellectual adventure with real heart.”

―Daryl Gregory, award-winning author, Spoonbenders

“OBSERVER is an impressive story! . . . Lanza and Kress give us characters with science and spirit”

―David Brin, New York Times bestselling author, The Postman

“Lanza, a pioneer in the fields of stem-cell and cloning science, makes his mind-blowing theory of biocentrism the focus of this brilliant Crichtonesque thriller, coauthored with SF veteran Kress … The authors imagine what the implications of that would be, integrating them into a page-turning plot complete with betrayals, violent deaths, and difficult moral choices.”

―Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“The viewpoint character is a brilliant neurosurgeon unwillingly drawn into a secret scientific project designed to prove that the generally accepted view of reality is completely wrong… a compelling story filled with believable characters.”

―The Guardian

“Mind-bending… A novel full of life-affirming ideas that’s likely to make readers rethink concepts of time and space. A thought-provoking fictional examination of big ideas.”

―Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

“Fantastical… Do we each create our own reality? Debates about the fundamental nature of reality go back centuries, to Plato and his Allegory of the Cave, and to Immanuel Kant’s 18th-century philosophical musings about transcendental idealism. More recently, special relativity and quantum mechanics have provided solid grounding for the idea that the act of observation has an effect on external phenomena… Observer includes plot twists that are ripped from the headlines, including social-media shaming, drone technology and dark-web villainy. There’s even a romance between the neurosurgeon and a hunky doctor who’s brought in to assist with the brain surgery.”

―GeekWire/Alan Boyle, former NBC News & MSNBC Science Editor

“Observer is already one of my Best Books of 2022, and with January release will be one of the Best of 2023. Hopeful, inspirational; heartwrenching and heartwarming; infuriating and invigorating, Observer is the seamless collaboration of two excellent authors with a firm grasp of science and a flair for speculative science fiction. The quantum science is graspable, illuminating, inspiring. I read it in one session and had no situational awareness of my surroundings, as I was so deeply into the novel. I came away hopeful, excited, inspired, determined! This is a novel I expect to return to again and again and again.”

―NetGalley/Goodreads, Cobwebby Eldritch, “Top 100 reviewer all time in The United States”

Click Here to learn more about Salk’s research areas and to select how you would like to apply your donation. This offer is for a limited time only!

Plus! We will donate the full purchase price to the Salk Institute to help find cures and explore the very foundations of life. Fund a specific science area of your own choice, whether cancer, COVID research, or plant biology to fight climate change, among others. Share Jonas Salk’s mission to make dreams into reality.

Click Here to learn more about Salk’s research areas and to select how you would like to apply your donation. This offer is for a limited time only!

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Meet the Authors

Robert Lanza is the bestselling author of the nonfiction biocentrism trilogy (Biocentrism, Beyond Biocentrism, and The Grand Biocentric Design), the basis of OBSERVER. His blogs on The Huffington Post and Psychology Today have been viewed by 10’s of millions of people. TIME magazine recognized him as one of the “100 Most Influential People,” and Prospect magazine named him one of the “Top 50 World Thinkers.” In addition to his groundbreaking work in the field of stem cells and regenerative medicine, Dr. Lanza has worked with some of the greatest minds of our time, including Jonas Salk and Nobel laureates Gerald Edelman and Rodney Porter. He also worked closely (and published a series of papers) with influential Harvard psychologist BF Skinner. A U.S. News and World Report cover story called him “the living embodiment of the character played by Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting” and described him as a “genius,” a “renegade thinker,” and likened him to Einstein. He was part of the team that cloned the world’s first human embryo, the first endangered species, and published the first-ever reports of pluripotent stem cell use in humans. He has been featured in almost every media outlet in the world, including all the major TV networks, CNN, TIME, Newsweek, People magazine, as well as the front pages of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today, among others (his work has also been the cover story of US News & World Report, Wired magazine, and Scientific American).

Nancy Kress is the author of thirty-five books, including twenty-seven novels, four collections of short stories, and three books on writing. Hailed by bestselling author Kim Stanley Robinson as “one of the greatest living science fiction writers,” she has won multiple Nebula and Hugo awards for her fiction. She writes often about developments in science, particularly genetic engineering, as in her bestselling novel Beggars in Spain. Her work has been translated into over a dozen languages (including Klingon). She teaches writing and was the “Fiction” columnist for Writer’s Digest magazine for sixteen years.