This novel feels like a big plan aborted. The authors set up a bunch of themes: redemption, humane-ness, reason and prejudice, the nature of change and time, American social classes, and more. And then this book drops all of them as it abruptly ends on the eve of the universal release of Bossy, the transcendent AI. The last third speeds up, but not in a “we want to accelerate the action to ramp up the tension” way, but rather in a “we’re both bored now” way. It speeds up and decreases tension. The main character takes long walks to explicate the novel, then rushes back to a situation already in development, based upon what he was just thinking. It’s a rough book that starts with promise.
He seemed determined to demonstrate the old truism again: that the only enemy man has is man. The universe does not care whether man unlocks its secrets or leaves them closed. Water does not care whether man bathes in it or drowns in it, whether it waters his fields or washes them away. If man masters its laws and utilizes his knowledge, water becomes a force in his favor. But, enemy or servant, water does not care. Of all the forces, only man seems determined that man shall not master the universe.
The main theme sees the heroes throwing aside their preconceptions and prejudices, embracing scientific facts and reason, with the hope of attaining corporeal immortality and transcendent telepathy, all through physiologically invasive psychology. While reading, this sounds a bit like some of the basic tenets of Scientology, and I discovered after the fact that some attributed this Hugo win to the popularity of that religion at the time the book released. But just taking the book as a book, it’s bad.
A human being is seldom bothered with insufficient data; often the less he has, the more willing he is to give a firm opinion, and man prefers some answer, even a wrong one, to the requirement that he dig deeper and find out the facts.
The characters are shells of ideas, and not complicated by anything. They would be fine as short story characters, and a couple even undergo major changes; but any conflicts are aborted through good telepathic vibes, and the changes are more to reveal the reality the novel sets up, and not to develop the character. What I mean is that it would be difficult to write a detailed analysis of any of the characters because they all act like secondary characters.
He had understood abstractly why it was they so often substituted measurement for meaning.
What they are trying to be secondary to are the ideas, which fall flat. The authors don’t spend enough time exploring the ideas, and the what exploration exists lacks depth that would interest a reader. The introduction of these ideas sets the novel up as a wonderful exploration, but the analysis within, and the resolution at the end, lacks staying power because the first is shallow, and the latter is short-circuited. The authors appear to have bored.
As he continued with the reassembly, Hoskins grew deeply troubled. At times he felt as if he were on the verge of some vast concept not quite grasped; as if he caught hazy glimpses of an outline of a totally unknown continent where, always before, all science had assumed there were only empty seas. He cursed the sterility, the rote memorization which passed for learning. He bitterly accused his own mind of being like a wasted muscle, long unused, now incapable of a task which should be accomplished with ease.
And that’s the problem with this story. Some interesting ideas are brought up, but they are dropped. The story shows promise, but progresses in fits and false starts so when the end finally comes, it is a relief. The idea that body and mind affect each other isn’t new, the take on that idea that the book comes to is certainly old; but instead of doing something with an old idea, the book isn’t written well enough to support any concise synthesis or fascinating exploration of it. It comes off like wish fulfillment of broadcasting telepathy for personal uses—which is problematic in all sorts of ways that are not even glanced at.
The human race was like a universe of material bodies, each with its own eccentric orbit, blindly crashing into one another, caroming off, senselessly changing direction as a consequence of random contact. The miracle was that even rudiments of order, on a few occasions of history, had somehow been achieved.
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