MAKE US HAPPY

by Arthur Herzog ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 1978

Herzog, author of several routine disaster scenarios (Heat, 1977; IQ 83, p. 388), works awfully hard at a future-shock romp of the sort blurb artists like to call ""wickedly funny."" Numbingly silly is more like it. Somewhere off in the sweet by and by, ""Amerca"" has handed over its wealth to the Third World and its remaining wits to the computers, snuggling into a cocoon of machine-governed isolation. Women are bigger than men, young people are brainwashed to lust after the wrinkled bodies of the old (""graypubes""), and everyone is reared with a computer-reinforced inferiority complex. Bil and Alce Kahn, weary of their blandly programmed existence in a 1,000-story New York ""skyscraper"" with such amenities as ""Murphy living rooms"" that periodically vanish into the neighboring apartment, set out to destroy the secret computer HQ. With them go their adultery partners, a former sex-Olympics champion and a descendant of the ""Ralp Nadir Prime"" who long ago sold the human sense of self-worth to the computers in return for eternal safety (his own). Herzog never pauses over any of these notions long enough to make any kind of satirical point; they remain a running collection of bad gags.

Pub Date: Nov. 22, 1978

ISBN: 0595268625

Page Count: -

Publisher: T. Y. Crowell

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1978

Categories: FICTION