HOW ARE YOU feeling today? Good, bad or indifferent, you're likely to be hit by a basic human emotion - envy - when you find out that a 26-year-old not long out of university was paid GBP130,000 (HK$1.5 million) for this, his first book.
A second must follow as part of the deal, but in the meantime Hector Macdonald can also enjoy the sweetener of seeing the American publication rights sold for US$400,000 (HK$3.1 million) and the knowledge that The Mind Game is to be translated from English into 14 other languages, including Japanese and Catalan. Oh, and the film rights have already been bought for an undisclosed sum, meaning that fame will certainly follow fortune.
That touch of green-eye you just felt may now be giving way to indignation; perhaps you're already mentally challenging Macdonald to prove he's worth the big bucks. It may be inadvertent, but that almost makes you part of this novel, which is ultimately a disconcerting assessment of the scientific manipulation of emotions - and what that could mean for the masses.
So Macdonald may have seen the future, and it may not be pretty - but is the book any good? Actually, it is . . . with qualifications. Emotions, it would have us believe, are the key to our existence, 'electrochemical impulses . . . that have led man to achieve his most sublime triumphs and commit his foulest acts'. We are what we feel, says Macdonald, so imagine the power on tap for a company or government that can make employees happily work themselves to death, or die cheerfully on the battlefield, on its behalf. Not much new there: this is territory visited in 1984 and Brave New World, where human drones do their masters' bidding.
But Macdonald gives the old thesis a glossy new twist by making his central character the subject of an exotic experiment that at first seems merely part of a dashing, arrogant professor's research into the brainwaves that produce love, anger, fear, loathing and the rest. It slowly dawns on the hapless hero - bewildered Ben the Oxford University student - that the 'game' he's in is but one move in a global strategy to develop an emotion sensor, attachable to the back of the head, which will dictate the wearer's feelings.
Behind all this stands the predictable god of commerce, the idea being that those not already enslaved will hand over cash for the gadget, which will give them the power to tweak their own impulses to generate a happy buzz whenever they feel like it.
'Packaged happiness, boxed amusement', Macdonald calls it, which is what we already have . . . labelled Philips, Toshiba and Sony. And, surprise surprise, his demon behind the mind manipulation is an evil Japanese corporation. Apparently.