THE PRAYER MACHINE

Everybody's writing about black holes nowadays, except the people that are writing about DNA manipulation. Or schizophrenia. Or lasers, or immunology, or the deadly advance of thermoplastics, or. . . well, if you put them all together with a consciousness-altering drug and a nun kicking the habit, surely you should come up with something ten times as au courant as any one of them by itself? Such seems to be the assumption of this disjointed British import about a psychiatric research facility and the future shocks that it may be about to implement or prevent, depending on the outcome of Nell Prentice's lonely mental commando mission. A klutzy novel and a half-baked conglomeration of scientific catchwords.