Craig D. Paterson

This new stand-alone survival thriller thrusts the most dynamic city on Earth, New York, into darkness as North America is bludgeoned by the sun's ferocity. Scientists promised a beautiful aurora providing the city that never sleeps with magnificent hues of blue and green. For three days, New Yorkers took to the streets, parks, and rooftops to enjoy the awe-inspiring spectacle. As the power grid failed, the city of New York collapsed with remarkable speed. The thin veneer of civilization was laid bare as man fought one another for survival.

Fourteen-year-old Greg Dixon is living a nightmare. Attending boarding school outside of Boston, he is separated from his family when a pandemic strikes. His classmates and teachers are dead, rotting in a dormitory-turned-morgue steps from his room. The nights are getting colder, and his food has run out. The last message from his father is to get away from the city and to meet at his grandparents' town in remote New Hampshire.

Forty years ago Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original studies undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process. Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind erred systematically when forced to make judgments about uncertain situations. Their work created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionized Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made Michael Lewis' work possible.

Soul Machine takes us back to the origins of modernity, a time when a crisis in religious authority and the scientific revolution led to searching questions about the nature of human inner life. This is the story of how a new concept - the mind - emerged as a potential solution, one that was part soul and part machine but fully neither.