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Genre: SciFi Main characters: Douglas Hall Time and place: 2034; I’m not sure about the location, let’s call it a city in the US First sentence: “From the outset, it was apparent that the evening’s activities weren’t going to detract a whit from Horace P. Siskin’s reputation as an extraordinary host.” Summary: Welcome to the future! A world where every commercial move is based on public opinion sampling. There is actually an organization of pollsters, laws supporting them and even fines for the ones refusing to answer. Enter Reaction, Inc (REIN for short), a company specialized in simulectronics that has built a perfect simulation of a city, “intended to forecast individual response as a means of assessing the marketability of commercial products” — a group of simulated people whose inner reactions to brands are monitored so the answers to any polls are obtained in a matter of seconds. But the professor leading the project is found dead. His assistant, Morton Lynch, wants to warn the one who took on the professor’s position next, Douglas Hall, that the death wasn’t as accidental as it seems — but he soon vanishes into thin air under Douglas’ disbelieving eyes. Something even stranger is about to happen to Hall though: in the next few days he discovers that no one remembers that Lynch has ever existed, and even the trophy he had won one year previously, proudly exposed in their favorite bar, now bears someone else’s name. |
The book is an example of what I call “light SciFi”: everything happens in the future and the technology is very advanced — there are many things that are taken for granted by people living in that time (and our narrator, Douglas Hall, among them), and yet it isn’t hard for the reader to “get” what the new things are and what do they do. Usually the names are very descriptive (such as “simulectronics”, a combination of simulation and electronics, “staticstrip”, a strip of normal, non-moving sidewalk, as opposed to the “pedistrips” that moved along, carrying people at various speeds), and sometimes there are explanations in a few words (such as when the way laser intensity affects people is explained). Because of this I could easily get into the book and the world it depicted, despite its differences from my own world — and, predictably enough, I loved that.
The characters are very few and quite underdeveloped (and none of them except the narrator gets enough “screen time” for the reader to get to know them and/or get to care for them) — and yet this doesn’t make the book less interesting. Once, because of the plot and the mystery surrounding Hall, but also because of the questions it makes arise in the mind of the reader. For example, the professor was very attached to what he called “his little people”, and we also get some insight into the mind of one of the simulated characters (a special one, cursed with the knowledge that he was nothing but bits of information and electric impulses). It makes the reader wonder — what actually makes a person real? Can a simulated person be called a person? Does a simulated person have a soul? Are their feelings any less important because they don’t actually exist? And more such questions, because all the people in the simulated environment do not realize (with very few exceptions) that they are not real people, that their reality is not a reality. It is perhaps a perfect example to illustrate the relativity of everything and its dependence on the observer: a simulated person is real in the eyes of another resident of the same reality; and it’s just a simulation, no more serious than a plaything in Hall’s and his colleagues’ eyes.
A simile that I liked:
[...] she seemed like a fragile Dresden that might crumble beneath the feathery assault of moonlight.
As a last thought — the book was written in 1964; I wonder what would the author (dead in ’76) think about The Sims (every bit the immaterial beings in the immaterial world that he has envisioned all these years ago; sure, they don’t have consciousness as of yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that time would also come).
What I liked most: A large part of the book consists of Hall’s ruminations as he tries to make sense of what is happening around him. I very much liked the fact that he was open to all possibilities, including the somewhat lesser plausible one, that is was his mind playing games with him and that he had just imagined Lynch and and all the rest. I am trying to decide whether I would have done the same in his stead — would I be certain I had seen something or would I trust the rest — but so far I have reached no conclusion. Nevertheless this detail added depth to the character (and interestingness to the book, because, after all, one couldn’t not ask himself now and then, what if it’s all in his head?)
What I liked least: I have yet to decide whether that’s a touch of genius on the part of the author or just sort of a slip (lately I tend towards the former): at one point Hall sees the daughter of the dead professor almost crying for her loss, and he wonders why, since in this day and age the technology has made it very easy for one to be certain that one person has really died so there’s no need for wakes and funerals. First of all, I don’t very much understand what is the connection (why should there be a connection) between mourning a loss and an actual funeral. I tried hard to understand what the author wanted to say by this paragraph and ended up with two possibilities: either he wanted to make crying for a lost father seem suspicious, and this was the best way he knew how (in which case, booo!!), or it was a very subtle hint at things to come show spoiler
(the touch of genius, more or less).Recommend it to? Anyone (but, of course, SciFi fans most of all). I am not particularly fond of SciFi but I have seen The Thirteenth Floor a while ago, and, as it’s inspired by this book, it made me curious about it too and I haven’t regretted it :)
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