Inevitably, perhaps, there are no emotions in Coma, a brash, oddly fascinating and unintentionally hilarious fantasy about black market tissue-transplants. Its author is a scuba-diving medical instructor at Harvard who admits in an admonitory epilogue to having recently acquired 'a heightened regard for female physicians and female medical students'. And so, out of a formula of medical jargon and behaviourist psychology, he has created a female character of the purest plastic…. As a story, Coma has a fairly high rating on the hedonic calculus, often inducing that sudden tightening of the throat muscles which is a sure indication that the patient is about to laugh.