Subject: Review: What Entropy Means To Me

From: [email-masked] (JIM HENRY)
Date: Tue, 21 May 1996 21:02:10 GMT

What Entropy Means To Me
		by George Alec Effinger
		Review Copyright 1996 Jim Henry

This has the honor of being one the weirdest books I've read in months.  The
narrator is Seyt, the official biographer of his eldest brother Dore, and a
member of an absurdly large family.  The story switches constantly between
Seyt's scrapes with family politics -- his elder brother and sister
respectively are leading schismatic factions of their family religion, based
on worship of their missing parents -- and his made-up story about what
happened to Dore after he set off in search of his Father.  The father and
mother apparently were the first, accidental colonists upon this planet, and
there they begat dozens of children and established themselves as the rulers
of all subsequent colonists.  The stories unfold on several levels at once;
all is very nicely handled.  It reminds me of _Tristram Shandy_, from which
the frontspiece quotation is taken.

%T What Entropy Means to Me
%A Effinger, George Alec
%I Signet
%D 1972
%G no ISBN
%P 188pp.
%K sf experimental