A slightly surreal hospital provides the setting for Simmons’ comedic series entry about a robotic doctor.

Alan Rossum is a good-looking, sophisticated, and knowledgeable physician in his second week as an intern at Mt. Sinai Hospital in El Cemento, California.He is also a robot, a fact that’s known only to his creator, Dr. David Shamberg, and a few select others. In this second book of a series, Rossum continues his training at various obscure sections of the hospital as part of a trial to see if artificial physicians could cost-effectively replace human ones. Dr. Shamberg advises his high-tech protégé remotely while he does rounds, interacting with psychiatrist Dr.Demento, who has strange, hands-on theories on how to diagnose mental illness; a plastic surgeon at the Perfection Institute (“We’re pushing for a Constitutional amendment that gives everyone the right to look perfect”); and Dr. Rip Van Narcovitz at his Sleep Clinic. Rossum is a well-programmed machine and has a sly sense of humor, and he causes Shamberg no end of trouble with conspicuous stunts, such as challenging an olfactory expert who’s the National Smelling Bee champion. Meanwhile, the hospital is under serious threat from an anonymous organization enigmatically known as M.A.F., which has wreaked havoc by, among other things, canceling patients’ bills and increasing the catering budget. Rossum is randomly swept up into various situations, as when he’s summoned to tend to sick time travelers (“Sinai is a licensed rest area along a very specific temporal highway”). While these scenarios are used to good comic effect throughout, they also make the novel excessively episodic and lacking in momentum. The author has funneled a surfeit of creative energy into describing various gags and silly characters, rather than a well-structured caper. Rossum, for instance, solves the mystery of M.A.F. without warning or explanation. Those who appreciate humor that’s simultaneously deadpan and puerile may find themselves in stitches. Others, though, may find that the relentless, over-the-top zaniness eventually wears thin.

An aggressively absurd novel that embraces every opportunity for silly jokes and ridiculous gags.

This thought experiment–turned-manifesto delves into the possibilities of intelligent-design theory.

Simmons (To Glue or Not To Glue, 2009, etc.) brings his multifaceted interests and his background as a medical doctor to this sweeping discussion of macroevolution and intelligent-design theory. The ambitious scale of the book belies its relatively straightforward purpose: to make a case for intelligent design through examples of intricate complexity in nature and humans’ own innate interest in re-creating versions of themselves—from dolls to robots to clones. He discusses a wide range of topics, including the water cycle and the history of corrective lenses, to offer evidence of what he sees as the unlikelihood of evolutionary development. Along the way, the author uses colloquial language, such as “scare the bejesus out of us,” to create moments of humor in an otherwise sober manifesto. Some chapters provide intriguing intersections of ideas—for example, in one, he argues that the sense of hearing is so diverse and complex in nature that it must have been made by design, while also noting that we, as humans, have the capacity to create robots that can hear. The most enthralling sections, though, focus on the wonder and complexity of life on Earth; at times, the author’s refrain about intelligent design fades into the background as his sheer fascination regarding life’s breadth, and the intricacy of such processes as locomotion, takes center stage. The book also offers thought-provoking quotes between chapters from famous and nonfamous people, which adds to the meditative tone of some discussions, and a substantial portion of the text is dedicated to the concept of self-awareness and the question of how nonhuman life thinks. The conclusion offers an insightful look forward. 

A wide-ranging and often engaging discussion of the workings of the observable, living world. 

A robot doctor makes the rounds in this wacky medical fantasia.

Mount Sinai Hospital’s newest intern, Dr. Alan Rossum, is too good to be true–or at least human. He’s “fireproof, germ-retardant, buoyant, unstainable, extremely flexible and even shrink-resistant,” can diagnose most patients just by looking at them, and is already an expert in every specialty. His preternatural good looks and comforting bedside manner provoke all women to throw themselves at him, though his heart belongs to the elevator computer with the lilting loudspeaker. Best of all, in the eyes of the cost-conscious hospital management that bought him, he’s cheap, doesn’t mind odd hours and never goes on strike. But even when his leg is blown off and he must go hopping across the grounds to retrieve it, no one, aside from a ten-year-old boy in the psych ward, particularly notices that Rossum is an android. He hardly stands out at a place where the top surgeon is blind and dismembered corpses are spliced back together and reanimated. His presence does, however, arouse the wrath of the mysterious M.A.F.–either the Medical Anti-Defamation Foundation or the Mobsters Against Fysicians, according to a high-priced abbreviations consultant–a terrorist group that launches high-concept attacks on the hospital’s board. One director is permanently magnetized by an MRI machine while another is pushed into a giant photocopier and emerges with a compulsive urge to mimic everyone he encounters. Simmons, an internist and author of The Z-Papers (1976, etc.), orchestrates the hijinks with a healthy disregard for rhyme and reason. His surreal gags puts one in mind of Douglas Adams, had he written A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Medical Center. (A stint in Mount Sinai’s extraterrestrial’s ward makes for one of Dr. Rossum’s most hilarious adventures.) The result is a pixilated comedy that’s as light as a balloon filled with laughing-gas.

Raucous, imaginative entertainment.