Robert J. Sawyer’s newest novel begins with a fight between a conservative father and his rebellious son, and ends with a marriage and a birth (of a kind). In between there are androids with downloaded human consciousnesses and retirement homes on the far side of the moon, but all of this is hung on a narrative frame that sometimes feels surprisingly old-fashioned.

In 2045 Toronto (which doesn’t seem to have changed much, aside from getting bigger), 44-year-old Jacob Sullivan, heir to the Sullivan beer fortune, is living under a death sentence: he has inherited a very rare condition that could kill him at any second or leave him a vegetable like his father. It being the not-too-distant future, and Jacob being rich, he opts to undergo a new process, developed by the Immortex™ Corporation, wherein all the contents of his mind are copied and downloaded into a synthetic version of himself that will last forever. His doomed biological self gets to spend his remaining years on the moon.

In classic sci-fi style, a perfect future is offered, but problems – human, medical, technological, corporate, legal, and romantic – soon mess everything up. The novel flips back and forth between the original Jacob’s struggle to come to terms with obsolescence, and a court battle that turns on the very nature of being.

Mindscan is both a love story and a parable about the possibility of fixed beliefs in a world of constantly shifting morality and ethics. Sawyer keeps his very readable tale moving by rooting it all in characters who have just enough humanity to have conflicted and occasionally contradictory reactions to the new realities. In fact, he errs on the side of approachability, humanizing his story by adopting a tone that is too often awkwardly congenial and jocular; the jokes and pop-culture references that ease the reader into the story at the start serve to make the novel’s ending feel too glib. There’s a lot to chew on here, but Sawyer still could have gone a little easier on the ketchup.