MOCKINGBIRD

by Walter Tevis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 18, 1979

A skillful but awfully grumpy doomsday novel, in which Tevis (The Hustler, The Man Who Fell to Earth) shows us what will happen if we persist in our present-day vices: stupefying TV, quick sex, zero population growth, drugs, me-ism, excessive privacy, and non-responsibility. What will happen? Well, in Tevis' future-world, robots rule--most of them moronic but some (""Make Eights"" and ""Make Nines"") devilishly clever and competent. Which is a good thing, since civilization has all but disintegrated: nothing works, humans walk around eating algae-burgers and popping sopors, transported by ""thought buses,"" sterile and servile. Spofforth is one of those clever robots, sexless and perfect-brained, with an ideal human consciousness trapped in metal (he'd like to commit suicide but can't); he's a dean at NYU who hires a human, Paul Bradley, to teach reading, a long-dead skill. (Bradley learned to read from old silent movies he happened upon.) But when Bradley encounters Mary Lou, a human woman whom Spofforth has also taken a shine to, Bradley is sent away on charges of ""Cohabitation, Reading, and the Teaching of Reading""--and Spofforth has Mary Lou (who happens to be, accidentally, the last fecund woman on earth) for himself. The story from there on is Bradley's trials in getting back to Mary Lou and starting an Eden all over again. . . . Half the book is better-than-average sci-fi, but it hasn't a chance finally against the allegory, Tevis' gall and disgust with contemporary mores. All of Tevis' peeves (which many readers will certainly share) are jack-hammered mercilessly, and the mythic parallels are laid on with distracting obviousness. (Bradley meets Mary Lou in the reptile house of the Bronx Zoo, among robot serpents and a plastic fruit.) Eminently solid by science-fiction parable standards, then, and moderately effective as an extended essay on today's social ills; but with a bit more imaginative fire and humanistic warmth, Tevis might have come up with something that crossed all the lines of genre to reach a broad, serious audience.

Pub Date: Jan. 18, 1979

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Categories: FICTION